It’s taken a lot of time for me to own Assassins Creed and between the times of its release and for me to pay any interest I was suffused with one e-mail declaring its poor quality and asking me to review it for their amusement. I was prepared to award Assassins Creed the award for Best Musical... this is a not so funny joke referring to Mondays National Movie Awards and my own, obviously, heavily flawed opinion. But hold your horses Duckmistro775! This game is not bad, it’s just not great.

I’m not sure what it has done to receive the odium from the gaming community. Maybe it’s because Ubisoft is French and they’re a bunch of... Oh, sorry: Assassins Creed was actually made by a ‘multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs’ as a rather mystifying title screen declares in what I assume is a pathetic effort to justify all the butchery of the various religious extremists who appear in the game.

Assassins Creed takes place in the Holy Land of the Crusades where we follow the adventures of Altair, a demoted assassin who harbours an anomalous American accent. But this is a lie! In actuality you’re playing some moron in the future kidnapped by an administration which forces him to relive the memories of Altair, which are stored in his genes. This imprudent plot devise means you never die, you just get desynchronised- an updated version of ‘Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’ where dieing was just the product of the Prince’s atrocious memory.

Besides them being made by the same company, Prince of Persia and Assassins Creed both feature an awful lot of gallivanting on rooftops of an ancient civilisation. Now, I’m a huge fan of the Prince of Persia trilogy because the running and jumping everywhere gave a sense of freedom, but the linearity somewhat diminished that. Assassins Creed has the added bonus of allowing you to go wherever you want: climbing, running, jumping, misjudging gaps and plummeting to your doom… it’s actually sort of fun, especially when your cover is blown and you have crusaders shoving beggars out of their way just to play tag with you.

Having said that, these guards are somewhat quick to mark you for death. This may be partly Altairs fault for having an armoury of killing gear up his sleeves, but someone explain how this makes any sense: If you ride your horse around the country side and pass some guards they will twig your brutal intentions to murder some one, but when holding down a button to make your horse walk slightly slower they don’t seem to give a monkeys. Maybe the ancient Holy Land has some sort of speed limit never mentioned in the Bible.

And the annoyances don’t end there. Although the actual assassinations are fun it takes way too long to get there! You start every mission in your secret base which is atop a huge mountain then make your way to the target city then do some errands which are the same missions repeated for each assassination victim. One of these includes eavesdropping, which involves sitting on a bench and listening to what they have to say…that’s it! Once you get to the assassinations they are bombarded with unskippable cut scenes of useless blabbing. Even after you’ve stabbed your prey they get about five minutes of soliloquising, which begs me to wonder how an assassin can’t insta-kill his opponents. Surely that’s a major flaw? And whilst the running and jumping is pretty neat the combat is atrocious and after the speed-kill system in ‘Prince of Persia: Two Thrones’ you would think Ubisoft would’ve learned their lesson.

Overall, it does the job alright. It passed the time between Richard and Judy and Coronation Street and at least it’s attempting to be different in an ocean of first person shooter clones, even if the ending is riddled with puke (because there is no ending). It’s also taught me a valuable lesson to not pay attention to people who e-mail me… not that I needed another excuse.