The original Assassin's Creed was released in holiday season of 2007, alongside some other big-name games such as Rock Band. It had been heavily hyped up to release, and in many people's minds, didn't live up to the standards that it was judged by. However, it is undeniable that the game established an intriguing and engrossing backdrop for its characters by fusing conspiracy theory, ancient history, and science fiction into a convoluted and mind-bending plot. It also brought together swordplay, parkour, and assassination into a simple and easy-to-learn control scheme.

Assassin's Creed starts out with you as a bartender kidnapped by a mysterious organization. You are subsequently strapped into a machine called the Animus. This allows you to view your genetic memories, otherwise known as the lives of your ancestors. The theory is that memories and knowledge are passed through genetic information just as hair or eye color are, and using the Animus can unlock those memories. As you progress through the game, you find information regarding the conflict between the Assassins and the Templar during the Third Crusade, with the figure of Altair being the focal point in the conflict. More and more memories are unlocked, until the end of the game reveals that the line between your genetic memory and reality has begun to blur.

Assassin's Creed's major plot point is the conflict between the Templar and Assassins during the Third Crusade. While the game is not historically accurate in a complete sense, it does have many historical references and locations. As Altair, you can travel between Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre as you go around killing off members of the Knights Templar. While these locations are hardly accurate in scale to their real life counterparts (you can go between then with about a two minute horse ride), they do have a sense of historicity behind them that makes the game that much more interesting. The Assassins are roughly based upon an Arabic organization from which we derive the word assassin itself. The Templar are roughly based on their historical counterparts, although in a much more exaggerated way.

One of the game's major features was the ability to assassinate anyone discreetly. In practice, though, you do very little assassination. The combat itself is rather simple, boiling down to attack and counter attack. You can sneak up on and kill most NPCs, either stealthily (knife through the ribs) or loudly (knife to the face). It's funny that the combat takes such a secondary role to the element of travel, although in certain places, such as at guard posts, it really becomes important to learn how to use stealth and direct combat to your advantage. In a way, Assassin's Creed is much like Hitman. You have a target and then there is collateral. The target needs to be taken down a certain way, while the collateral is just that.



The parkour element of the game received a fair amount of criticism due to its simplicity, but interestingly enough, this fits into with the parkour philosophy. The goal of parkour is to move as quickly over a landscape using all the tools at your disposal, and this sense of flow is conveyed very effectively in Assassin's Creed. You do not have to press buttons to jump or grab, you just have to find the quickest path, and that gameplay thread captures the heart of the parkour discipline more than anything else. The parkour, especially going to the top of the towers, is easily the best part of Assassin's Creed.

Assassin's Creed nominally follows an open-world gameplay scheme. You can go to any of the three cities, although sections of the city are locked until you complete story missions. The city also has side-missions, such as saving somebody from Templar, and these offer a good way to distract yourself. Ultimately, there's not much to do, even in this open-world scenario, and that is what separates Assassin's Creed from its contemporaries such as Grand Theft Auto. There's not much random exploration or fooling around, just directed murder, plain and simple.

It goes without saying that Assassin's Creed 2 will incorporate all of these elements and more into itself. Parkour, stealth, and melee combat are irrevocably intertwined with the Assassin's Creed franchise, and these elements will no doubt stay. Perhaps the biggest change, though, is of venue. It is now Italy during the Renaissance, and you play another of Altair's descendants as he seeks to revenge himself upon his enemies. It seeks to establish the same genre sense that Assassin's Creed did, which is the concept of historical fiction merged with science fiction.