Danger Dance

From the makers of Prince of Persia, which I really liked, comes Assassin’s Creed, an “epic” action/adventure game, which I really didn’t.

Before a person would even be able to dive into the enchanting world of the 12th century, to shank the innocent and the evil alike, they get smacked in the face by one of the most contrived, completely pointless plots ever to grace a video game. If this game’s horrific story hasn’t been spoiled for you, please allow Danger Dance to do the honors. Technically, you don’t play the role of bad ass assassin Altair. Instead, you play his descendant, Desmond Miles, who through some “scientific” means relives the memories of Altair. So, rather than allow the gamer to escape reality into the fanciful world of Jerusalem, Ubisoft insists they plunge into the craptastic world of the present as a loser bartender who gets kidnapped by a creepy scientist and is forced to sit around on some weird memory machine for longer and longer intervals? Thanks, Ubisoft! You’ve managed to trap players in a reality worse and less fun than their own!

One might think that these brief, obnoxious interludes into the “Animus Lab” would be short-lived and only vaguely annoying, but they’re not. This game manages to break one of the most basic rules of video gaming: engage the player in the first 30 minutes. Instead of jumping right into really great assassin action, the player gets to complete some fairly boring objectives before getting the absolute privilege of stumbling around the lab some more. If you’re looking for balls-to-the-wall lab-walking action, brother, you’ve got it!

Needless to say, this game gets off on the wrong foot, but play more than 30 minutes, and it starts to unveil some of the impressive crap you’ve seen in all those commercials. Riding up on historic Jerusalem, for instance, produced sacrilegious events in this reviewer’s trousers. It was absolutely stunning. The visuals, the fluidity of gameplay makes this title a joy to play…. for a while.