YouGamers.com

Reviews

Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition

Assassinations with a PC

The PC version is branded "Director's Cut", indicating a "definite" version of the game. The main extra feature is the addition of a handful of new investigation missions. These are not full-blown extra "assasination" storylines - a "mission" in this context means a small side job you do in a city to advance the investigation towards your primary assasination target.

The new mission types are "Rooftop Race" - a run against the clock across the city to meet an informant, "Archer Stealth Assassination" - task to kill off a couple of archers on roofs without alerting anyone, "Assassin Escort" - a job to protect an informant walking from point A to point B, with some guards thrown in trying to stop you, and finally "Merchant Stand Destruction" - a mission to smash up the wares of some local merchants.

The new side mission types add some variety, and it takes considerably longer to get completely fed-up doing identical investigations. It's an improvement, but the fundamental flaw of repeating side-missions is still present, and nothing short of re-doing the whole storyline with unique mission chains for each city would have fixed that. Maybe in the inevitable sequel...

The PC version has also received some guard AI tweaks - mostly to ensure that if you poke your dagger into someone in plain sight, every guard in the area is far more likely to spot you, even if you immediately try to "blend". In practice, it's still a bit random, but at least you can't go wandering around praying in "blend" mode while making quick stabs at several guards in a row without alerting anyone. Apparently crowd density is now a factor - if you are the only person around, guards will see through your trick easier.

Another citizen in trouble, time to chop up some guards.

Collecting all the flags from each zone of the game is one of the optional things to do.

Beyond these changes, the rest of the side missions and optional objectives are identical to the console versions - you can spend time exploring and hunting flags and save citizens in order to get help from the locals to shake the guards when you are in a hurry. There is also the optional objective of hunting down and killing Templars who loiter around the play areas. Each of these optional objectives counts towards the full completion of the game, but sadly there are no XBox 360-style achievements to pad out your gamerscore as the game is not Live-enabled nor is it compatible with the Steam's score system. This takes away some of the reward for hunting down all of these elusive objectives.

Controls can be freely remapped, and the default ones work surprisingly well, considering the difficulties developers face when trying to convert a dual analog pad control to WSAD and the mouse. Playing with the default controls requires some finger acrobatics and practice, but overall Assassin's Creed succeeds very well in translating the controls to the PC. It's clear that a lot of thought has gone into the control scheme, and once you get used to it, it works great. You also have the option of plugging in the XBox 360 controller, if you prefer the original control layout. Personally I never had the urge to return to the gamepad as mouse is a far superior tool for controlling the camera.

Overall, while the game has improved from the consoles, it's still fundamentally same and offers nothing really new if you have already seen it all on PS3 or Xbox 360.

Minor Flaws

Sadly the conversion, while good, is not completely perfect. The initial reports are true in that you can only play in widescreen - either with a 16:9 or 16:10 widescreen monitor, or in a "letterbox" mode with black bars on a normal 4:3 display. This is obviously a design decision as the whole game has been designed around this aspect ratio on the consoles. I guess a full-blown support for both wide and normal aspect ratio displays would have been the perfect solution, but personally I didn't mind the black bars, and as almost every new PC display is wide, this is mostly a non-issue. If it really bothers you, go buy a widescreen monitor - you won't regret it as the extra effective screen estate is always good.

Then there is the age-old issue of cutscenes and the ability to skip them. Assassin's Creed decides not to allow you to skip anything, and having played the game already on the consoles, sitting through the long scenes of exposition gets annoying. Console versions had the exact same flaw, so this is nothing new to the PC. In a way I can understand the developers point of view - he wants you to see all the great stuff that the game offers. At the same time I don't want to watch the exact same bit of talking for the third or fourth time over. Best compromise might have been a specific "Allow skipping of cutscenes" option - first time players would probably watch through everything once anyway, and the rest would find the option quickly enough and be able to bypass bits that they have already seen.

The rest of the user interface is also quite faithful to the console version - to the point of being a bit unwieldy. It does it's job and properly displays PC-specific control aids, but such "extra features" as exiting the game to the desktop is hidden to the very top level of main menu. To get there you first have to exit from the city to the user interface of the Animus machine, then exit that and get up with your "real" self to open up the option to quit the game. Only then you are back to the main menu where you can exit to desktop. In practice just hitting ALT+F4 once you have passed a point where the game autosaves works fine, so this is mostly a cosmetic flaw.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: New features on the PCPage 4: Performance and VisualsPage 5: Conclusions and Scoring

Related Stuff

Tags