"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."














I've been meaning to replay the AC series for a good while, given that these games are some of the most influential pieces of media for me that I experienced during my youth.

Like many others I went through a pretty violent disconnect towards the franchise after Syndicate came out. Origins was announced and its sheer premise served as the final nail in the coffin when it comes to my interest on the series.

It's been almost 5 years now tho and I missed my good old flawed but introspective adventures with the hoodie boys. Now that we have Odyssey and Valhalla sinking the franchise's bar even lower I have warmed up to the idea of trying Origins now which will be interesting since I did not follow that game's development cycle, thus am completely unspoiled.

Before we get there tho we gotta start from the beginning, with the father of it all.

AC1 is an aged game. I don't think that's a shocking revelation. However it is considerably less aged than I remembered.

This game introduces the skeleton of the series but lacks the added meat that its sequels introduced gameplay wise. The combat is extremely simple and the social stealth mechanics are really shallow. The parkour is definitely the only area I'd say aged decently even if it's still somewhat clunky compared to the likes of Unity or even III.

Visually tho this game still looks quite good, the scenarios and the eerie ambience in particular hold up remarkably well.

The highlight and the heart of this game is definitely Altair. The story acts as a character study of the man and his journey towards redemption and philosophical enlightment, growing from a selfish cold asshole acting with no ideals behind his blade to a caring and perceptive leader, challenging the ideals he was taught and reaching their true meaning. I particularly really like how the gameplay cycle of this game reflects that narrative, making Altair go through an extremely repetitive hitlist with pretty much 0 emotional attachment to any of his victims. The way its final missions become more dynamic and less mechanical and cold serves as a pretty cool storytelling for Altair's development. It's quite a fascinating story and a great spin on the tale of the old man of the mountain. The main issue during the past storyline is a lack of interesting side characters since only Al Mualim and Malik get character work outside of Altair (it's pretty crazy Abbas shows up in this game for literally 10 seconds and has 0 bearing on the story considering his role in Revelations), leaving the templars especially quite one dimensional in this entry, even with most of them sporting really good confession scenes.

Meanwhile on present day we follow Mr. Desmond and tbh this is easily the worst part of the game. Desmond doesn't do anything in this one and we only get an extremely brief introduction to him before the game locks his importance to a cycle of worldbuilding exposition dumps with absolutely no payoff until the next game (this game's ending is quite awkward since it just kinda ends with no conclusion to either of the main characters, something that is thankfully fixed in the next games).

Basically this game is not quite up there as a favorite but it's still an extremely respectable and unique game even inside its own series, setting out to be its own beast and not giving a shit about anything else that was out in the industry at the time. Really can't appreciate it enough.

Reviewed on Oct 25, 2021


1 Comment


9 months ago

One of the few reviews on this site that truly understand the game, nice job.