Features:

• Be an Assassin! Plan your attacks, strike without mercy, and fight your way to escape.
• Realistic and responsive environments - Every action has its consequences. Crowds react to your moves, and will either help or hinder you on your quests.
• Eliminate your targets wherever, whenever, and however. Do whatever it takes to achieve your objectives.
• Dedicated historical accuracy, from the models of the in-game cities to the weaponry to the portrayal of actual political figures who died or disappeared in the year 1191.
• Experience heavy action blended with fluid and precise animations. Use a wide range of medieval weapons, and face your enemies in realistic swordfight duels.

Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Jerusalem, 1191 AD - The Third Crusade is tearing the Holy Land apart. You are an elite Assassin sent to stop the hostilities by suppressing the powers on both the Crusader and Saracen sides. But as you carry out your missions, a conspiracy begins to unfold. You find yourself tangled up in a conflict that threatens not only the Holy Land, but the entire world. Experience the power of a feared Assassin. Your actions can throw your immediate environment into chaos, and your existence will shape the events of this pivotal moment in history. ESRB Rated M for Mature

Amazon.com:
Assassin’s Creed is the next-gen game developed by Ubisoft Montreal that will redefine the action genre. While other games claim to be next-gen with impressive graphics and physics, Assassin’s Creed merges technology, game design, theme, and emotions into a world where you instigate chaos and become a vulnerable, yet powerful, agent of change.

The setting is 1191 AD. The Third Crusade is tearing the Holy Land apart. You, Altair, intend to stop the hostilities by suppressing both sides of the conflict.

You are an Assassin, a warrior shrouded in secrecy and feared for your ruthlessness. Your actions can throw your immediate environment into chaos, and your existence will shape events during this pivotal moment in history.

Key Features

• Be an Assassin: Master the skills, tactics, and weapons of history’s deadliest and most secretive clan of warriors. Plan your attacks, strike without mercy, and fight your way to escape.
• Realistic and responsive environments: Crowds react to your moves and will either help or hinder you on your quests.
• Action with a new dimension - total freedom: Eliminate your targets wherever, whenever, and however. Stalk your prey through richly detailed, historically accurate, open-ended environments. Scale buildings, mount horses, blend in with crowds. Do whatever it takes to achieve your objectives.
• Relive the epic times of the Crusades: Assassin’s Creed immerses you in the realistic and historical Holy Land of the 12th century, featuring life-like graphics, ambience, and the subtle, yet detailed nuances of a living world.
• Intense action rooted in reality: Experience heavy action blended with fluid and precise animations. Use a wide range of medieval weapons, and face your enemies in realistic swordfight duels.
• Next-gen gameplay: The proprietary engine developed from the ground up for the next-gen console allows organic game design featuring open gameplay, intuitive control scheme, realistic interaction with environment, and a fluid, yet sharp, combat mechanic.

Rating : - Ambitious and fun with some big problems.
The good parts of assassins creed are good enough to cover up the fact that it's extremely repetitive.
It's beautiful and really fun to navigate, especially when you get a good hop scotch game going with posts and flagpoles and beams. Though you only have to push a button to initiate free running, it does take a little skill to know which path is best. The movement in general is really fluid maybe with the exception of jumping into a wall,pausing slo-mo dropping and recovering.
The fighting, though extremely simple, is really gratifying. Particularly nice is throwing knives and throwing soldiers off rooftops.
The game is generally pretty though some textures get glitchy, the architecture is awesome especially when you look at a distance. Climbing the church in Acre is particularly thrilling.
It's been said before but the missions get really repetitive and the assassinations feel clumsy, you kill a bunch of soldiers, chase down the target, kill them, and run. The reconnaissance and planning doesn't really amount to anything.
I could take or leave the story, Altair is hard to connect with because he is at the same time distrustful and complacent.
The worst part of the game is the extremely long ... everything. You climb a viewpoint and you have to sit through the same panoramic camera move for a couple seconds. You save a citizen and you have to listen to their boring drawn out gratitude. You Assassinate someone and you have to listen to them justify themselves. Then you have to listen to your master yammer on and you can never skip it, even when you beat the game already and go back for replay you have to watch everything and it's really boring.
All in all I think Assassins creed is fun and worth my money and it gets points for trying a couple of novel things. I hope the sequel fills out the missing gameplay elements.