Assassin's Creed Review

So I just beat Assassin's Creed for the XBox 360, and I have to admit that it has been a while since a game left me crying for sequel.  The core plot that the game play objectives revolves around, but the main plot is just getting set off when the game ends.

People told me that Assassin' Creed is marred by weird futuristic elements, but I disagree.  These thoughts are spawned from the misconception that Assassin's Creed is a Crusade game, and this is a misconception that I myself shared when I started the game.  By the time I was halfway through the game, all elements of "futurism" and the lack of interaction with historic Crusader figures and events were completely forgiven, because Assassin's Creed is actually more of a conspiracy theory game revolving around Holy Grail type artifacts and their influence in the game's modern and ancient time frames.  Due to this, I actually enjoyed the futuristic elements.

As for the game play, it kept me both satisfied until the plot fully hooked me and at the same time greatly enhanced the themes of the game all of the way through.  At its core Assassin's Creed is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, with many of the same game play elements reappearing in Assassin's Creed.  However, instead of having the elements of the environment set up like a puzzle  with only a few solutions, it is just covered with all of the banisters and ledges and scaleable walls so that running and leaping through the cities is very fluid.  Furthermore, the battles also require much more strategy than Prince of Persia and give the player more control.

In the end, I have decided that Ubisoft took their great game play they developed for Prince of Persia and turned it into something with a much deeper level of plot, character development, and freedom for the player; and what they came up with was Assassin's Creed.

Xbox 360 vs. Paper Games

I recently acquired an Xbox 360 and yesterday I went out and purchased Call of Duty 4 and Assassins Creed for it.  I started Call of Duty 4 and so far have been really impressed with the quality of single player in a game well known for its online play.  After I chew through those two I think I'll get Bioshock, which I heard a lot of discussion about at the 2008 Meaningful Play Conference that was hosted at Michigan State University.

However, there have been a lot more than just video games being played.  Thursday night I learned how to play the card game Citadels, which is essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering.  I have to admit I was really quite impressed with the game design of Citadels.  It puts strategy both in the place of role selection (from different cards that give you certain abilities and attributes for a round) and in the actual utilization of the cards in hand during the round.  Furthermore there are extra role cards that can be swapped in and out to increase replay value of the game.  I think it would even be feasible to make some DIY role cards just for fun.

It's a game that is similar Magic: The Gathering (and I would argue just as fun) that is contained in a single box.  The fact that it's not a Trading Card Game makes it a lot more accessible to people have never played before.  I definitely think I'll be playing it again sometime soon.