The original four Assassin’s Creed games are held in high regard by devoted fans, but have they aged well? Or does nostalgia continue to blind gamers from the facts?
Assassin’s Creed is undoubtedly one of the most famous video-games franchises. Starting all the way back in 2007, the series has thirteen mainline entries, multiple spin-off games and one lazy live-action film adaptation.
Games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag have become famous and widely acclaimed for their innovative approaches to game play and their sprawling open-world maps to explore.
Interestingly, the series’ core game play and stories have mostly stayed the same for almost two decades. You play as some kind of Assassin, you are tasked with assassinating targets (most of the time without being seen) all in the name of the Creed, an ancient set of religious-adjacent rules set out centuries before the original game.
Assassin’s Creed 1: Where It All Started
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The first four games are split into one singular story and a trilogy. Assassin’s Creed 1 focuses on Altaïr, a young assassin that becomes jaded with his belief in the creed. Though the game is old and fairly clunky by modern gaming standards, theirs a level of polish to specifically the movement system that is unseen in modern entries.
As a player your options for movement are simple yet they can be as complicated as you want to make them. You can sprint, jump, climb and parkour over just about anything you can find. Stringing together leaps and climbs is exhilarating and it’s an effect many of the games up to Odyssey were known for.
As Altaïr you don’t have the flashy moves of characters like Arno from Assassin’s Creed Unity or Edward from Assassins’s Creed 4: Black Flag, but what you do have is a simple move-set and traversal kit that perfectly laid the foundations for the next set of games to come.
Assassin’s Creed 2: New Country, New Face
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The next set of games feature the series’ most well known protagonist, the suave, smooth talking assassin that’s as deadly as he is graceful. Of course, it’s Ezio Auditore. Ezio was such a beloved character when he debuted in 2009’s Assassin’s Creed 2 that to this day, he’s the only character in the franchise to have his own trilogy.
Ezio is iconic for a couple of reasons, his bright white assassin’s garb is instantly eye-catching and the little red trimmings and accompanying cape just makes his outfit the most recogniseable within the franchise. More than his design, it was the stories of Assassin’s Creed 2, Brotherhood and Revelations that made Ezio a beloved character.
Ezio’s journey begins in Assassin’s Creed 2. His story takes place centuries after Altaïr’s ended in a completely new location, Italy. The story follows Ezio from his birth to his thirties as he tracks down the men that slaughtered his Father and Brother’s. Whilst searching for these men, he learns of the Assassin’s order and his place within it.
The narrative isn’t revolutionary, but it’s an easy to digest revenge story that highlights certain moral conundrums Ezio will have to face in later games.
AC2 brought with it a couple changes to game play and traversal. Ezio is noticeably faster than Altaïr, he can scale buildings with relative ease and the small inclusions like Ezio being able to swim, makes the AC2 more immersive than the original.
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood: Innovation Over Originality
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Brotherhood continues the innovations present in AC2 but pushes the combat into a new format. Ezio is able to “Chain-Kill” enemies after performing a perfect parry, this allows the player to dance around enemies in a gorgeously gruesome display of violent finesse. Unfortunately, Brotherhood falls flat in many other areas, most specifically the story.
The game picks up after Ezio’s victory at the end of AC2, but after a fight with another member of the maniacal Borgia family, he finds himself stranded in Rome with one goal; Overthrow the Borgia rule of Italy. The story is immediately engaging but loses a lot of its momentum due to the seemingly never-ending stream of side-missions and bonus content.
However when comparing Brotherhood to the recent RPG-era games like Odyssey and Shadows, there’s far less content present within the former game. The RPG games overload the player with endless bombardments of side activities to the point where the main narrative stops being about the Assassin’s brotherhood and instead becomes a story of endless tailing missions.
Assassin’s Creed Revelations: A Perfect Ending
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Moving back to the final Ezio game, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, it’s clear that the seeds for the series’ infamous innovations had begun to make themselves known. Whilst AC1 to Brotherhood features very little differences outside of combat, Revelations makes adjustments to traversal, as well as introducing the games most infamous side-activity – “Den Defence”.
Revelations picks up with Ezio at fifty years old. He’s more experienced than ever but he needs an aid to keep up with the pace of the assassin’s around him, lucky for him the assassin’s of Constantenople have the tool for him, The Hook-Blade.
The Hook-Blade allows Ezio to make huge leaps and ledge grabs with ease. This tool makes traversal quicker than ever before and adds a couple new flashy finishers to the combat. All in all, it was a good addition to the series and kept the travesal of Revelations electric.
Ezio’s journey in Revelations wraps up beautifully as he renounces his oath to the creed and moves on with his life, vowing to live for himself for the first time in over three decades. It’s the best ending any of the playable assassin’s have ever received and wraps up the story of Altaïr and Ezio after four games.
New or Old?
After the success of the first four games, the series continued to innovate in Assassin’s Creed 3, moving the franchise to the American frontier. With the success of the games to follow, as everyone knows, the franchise became near unstoppable. Until the RPG games become the standard that is.
The RPG-era games are completely different from the original four games. Innovation and experimental ideas took AC from a standard action-adventure series, to an expansive globe-trotting series that explores real world history, more than the fictional story of the Assassin’s and Templars.
AC always explored real world history through the lens of its fictional narrative, however after Assassin’s Creed: Origins the series started to sharply deviate from the story of the assassin’s entirely. In the latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the assassin’s order is mentioned briefly in passing.
For the series to continue it was inevitable for it to change direction when it comes to game-play, it just remains unfortunate that the series’ core identity is nothing more than an afterthought.
Featured Image Credit: Ubisoft