This blog is written for the assignment of the GSND 5111 course. We are required to play a RPG game and write thoughts about it.
The genre for this week is Action Adventure games (although I prefer to call them APRG), and I chose Assassin's Creed.
Well, as we all know, Assassin's Creed is not a single game, it's a franchise; so there was a question of which to choose. I wanted to experience the "most original" one. According to Wikipedia, the most original one of the franchise comes with no suffix, just "Assassin's Creed". Unfortunately, that version is not present in Steam, so I chose the one that I knew is original enough: Brotherhood.
Soon as the game started, my first thought was: Wow, this game's control schemes are so weird! It's interactons are different with most of the current games, probably due to its early publishing time. Also, the UI for indicating the interactions are lousy. I'm always having trouble passing my ideas onto the character. Also, when climbing on the wall, it is so hard to precisely control the inertial movement of the character. When I was trying to jump from a stick to another, I had to make sure to have enough space for accellerating, and the direction of the character must be exactly correct. This is not very good for a fast-pace parkoor game, is it?
The cons of its motion system is even exposed in battles. So when the player encounters a battle, it is not possible for them to move freely. So what when the player is surrounded by enemies, it's practically impossible for them to focus on attacking on while prevent being attacked by others. What's even worse is that there is a focus thing in the battle system, so it's not even possible to (freely) move away from one enemy and switch to another, so I was constantly failing on battles in narrow spaces.
What I like about the game is its splendid job on portraying the environment of the cities in the Renaissance era. Look at these two pictures, they are presenting two very different vibes!
It is not difficult to see that most textures applied on architectures are pre-baked resources, so full of 2000's games' style. But they are finely put together; I find the final result very sucessful on rendering the desired aesthetics.