Danger Dance

The assassination complete, the player must, for lack of a better term, run like hell. Interestingly enough, once out of sight of the murderous guards, hiding in a covered shack, diving into a hay bale, or even sitting on a bench is enough to evade them. If only this worked for those jackasses on Cops who hide under kiddie pools, this scenario would be slightly more believable.

Once you have evaded the multitudes of sentries, you’re required to journey back to the Assassin’s Bureau where the same prattling jackass tells you to return to Assassin headquarters to have Old Man Assassin Leader juggle your balls around a bit before giving you some presents, slapping you on the ass, and sending you on your way.

This entire, vicious cycle repeats itself again, and again, with really no end in sight and no variation of events. By the time you get through the third or fourth assassination, you’ll be going through the bare-minimum of the superfluous “intel” missions just to get to the blood-letting, which is hardly satisfying because, as previously mentioned, the douche bags never shut up. And while it’s clear Ubisoft tried to mix it up by painting a contrived script on top and slowly introducing some moronic conspiracy, the overall mechanics of the game don’t really make it all that fun or interesting to play. Frankly, there’s only so much prancing about on top of rooftops a man can do before he wants to participate in random, gory, beautiful acts of violence.

Mr. Gore completed the game, but it’s not going to be winning him any peace prizes.

Truth told, the reason this game is so prone to driving me into a screaming rage is because it could’ve been so awesome. Why did we need a plot that involved anything but some awesome assassin of the middle ages? Why did they make me wander around in some retarded lab for so many portions of this game? Whether or not any of this is satisfyingly answered at the very end, I don’t care. When a game goes from ridiculously easy to mind-numbingly confusing and difficult at what I can only assume is the last mission, there’s really no good reason to see it through to the end unless you also like to spend your weekends being tortured by a Mistress named Domique, which is to say, you’re a masochist.

At the end of it, Ubisoft went to some lengths to create a beautiful world in which there are 5 things to do, not including having some old man juggle your balls around. Add to that infuriating (albeit not too frequent) gameplay bugs, obnoxious story, and overall, apparent spite for the player in general, and we’ve got a game that if it doesn’t infuriate you within 10 hours of playing, Danger Dance will officially nominate you for sainthood.