Assassin's Creed (PC)

I have seen the hype for this game for several month’s now and after my Daughter’s rave review of the game on a friend’s PS3 I decided to take the plunge and buy it for my PC. I generally like playing fantasy RPG or strategy games, so this was a slight deviation from my normal game, but with the reviews I have read, and the screenshots and video I had seen it looked like it was an enjoyable game

Installation

Normally I would leave the ‘installation’ part of the review until the end, as it often isn’t a major factor in deciding whether the game is good, however, with my own experience of installation I felt it important to include this first.

In small print on the box you will notice ‘Video Card: 256MB Direct X 10.0 – compliant video card or Direct x 9.0 – compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 higher or equivalent. Now I bought my PC about 2 years ago – it was top of the range at the time, but the installed video card that came with the PC would not work with this game. Luckily I upgraded my PC with a 512MB ATI Radeon X1500 last year – while this is not listed as a supported card, it does run the game, so before you buy the game check out the video card specifications.

In a yellow box on the back of the case there’s also another notice “This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disc and virtual drives” – pretty innocuous I thought – how wrong could I be! I have dual DVD drives – one is a DVD writer, the other a standard DVD/CD reader. I first tried to install from my main DVD drive. After about ten minutes I suddenly receive an error – something about Newfeatures1, and the game essentially didn’t install. I tried it again after cleaning the DVD – no luck. AHA google – so I trundled over to Google, searched for the error message and started to cry. According to most ‘blogs’ and other sites, the only way to fix this was to get a replacement!

Ahhh but I am not that easily dissuaded, so I decided to read the documentation…hmmm nothing in there…the ubi support site is a mess and it took me ten minutes to find anything to do with this error…hmmm….replace……undeterred I then noticed the aforementioned little yellow box. EUREKA!!! I switched to my secondary DVD drive and the game installed…..

So be aware that in some cases you may not be able to install the game!

Tutorial

OK so most games have a tutorial that teaches the fundamentals of the game. Now I’ve been playing games for nearly 30 years so I decided to skip this….hmmm….OK how do I do that? Son of a beeswax…I couldn’t do it….I had to go through a couple of minutes introduction, then go through a ten minute tutorial….AHHHHH with the installation problems….and this…it actually took me about an hour to actually get into the real game!!!!!

I should note that the Tutorial was actually pretty good and did go through some important elements of the game such as sprinting and hiding, silent combat, getting noticed etc….so I begrudgingly accepted that the Tutorial was OK.

The Game

Ahhhhh finally. Well like most people I don’t normally read the manual – I had to skim through it to try and get the game installed, but generally the manual seemed very sparse. The tutorial went a long way to help me understand the concepts of the game, so I was fairly happy to dive right into the game. The first ‘memory’ as they are called involved following a couple of assassin buddies to retrieve treasure for my boss. Before doing anything I went into the options and changed the graphics setting to maximum….two minutes later I went back and changed the graphics settings back to what was first presented to me…..looks like my computer isn’t powerful enough for full graphics mode, despite meeting all requirements – looks like you’ll need dual graphics cards (cross fire) a high end processor and oodles of memory….well even at the lower graphics level the game still looked pretty awesome…

For full opinion click here.