Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles Nintendo DS

An ugly and mostly unpleasant experience

By David  Feb 16, 2008

Pros: Combat can be quite enjoyable (and there's a lot of it)

Cons: Ugly graphics, bad camera, minimal story, dodgy control input detection

The best elements of the original Assassin's Creed were the Spiderman-like wall crawling and the cinematic combat animations. In attempting to mimic it's big brother, Altair's Chronicles serves only to showcase the limitations of the DS h...ardware, with blocky and heavily pixellated 3D graphics. The frequent combat can at times be quite enjoyable, but the limited amount of animations gets dull. Multiple enemy crossbowmen can turn combat from fun to frustrating, particularly one boss fight. Mashed into this is a whole bunch of Prince of Persia-esque platforming, complete with swinging blades, flames and the like. Trouble is, the fixed camera tends to produce occasional 'leap of faith' moments, and extremely frequent depth judgement issues, leading to a lot of deaths. Thankfully checkpoints are liberally placed, though there are a few spots that could use more. All in all, this game just feels like it's going through the motions; it even has the obligatory "you lose your weapons and must rely on stealth" section. In a head-scratching moment, some ordinary guards demand your weapons, and rather than striking them down like the previous few hundred guards, Altair cheerfully hands over his hardware. No joke. It's this and many other "what were they thinking?" moments, combined with a ubiquitous problem of animation sequences having to finish before input is detected, that lead me to recommend giving this title a pass. Read more Less