Recent reviews by Firetiger

This is one of those games with such a brilliant concept that you kick yourself for not thinking of it first. I'll spare you the details as I assume you can read the store page for yourself. I played the first hour and got through about 75% of the main content. Most of the time you're at the mercy of whatever the physics feels like doing, and while that might seem like a knock against the game, the unpredictability is really the entire basis for the game and its "charm", right up to its title. Personally I found the early content to be ridiculously easy, and it's goofy and pretty fun at first. I think the right mindset is important here, and I wouldn't go into it with serious expectations and look for some ultra-hardcore challenge.

But my second hour consisted of increasing frustration, and not the "good" kind. Don't get me wrong, I tend to enjoy masochistic games that are impossibly hard, but when you fail in this game, it's more of the "that was unfair" kind of hard rather than the "I goofed up, let me try again!" hard. I really don't like the way this game handles. Let me outline the two major failings that I think hold this game back:

1) You have very limited control over your jumps. You can alter your direction and speed just slightly, but not enough to really react or course-correct. I get it, in a platform game you probably want players to make calculated jumps rather than flying by the seat of their pants. But isn't that what this game is all about? The chaotic nature of it kind of necessitates having more ability to control where you land and be able to respond when things go crazy. This starts to become a problem when the game has you making longer jumps where you're in the air for a while, only to have the truck beneath you suddenly swerve away at the last second. Sometimes you have to make blind jumps at odd angles and land on trucks in motion which are also prone to veering off or getting pushed off course. It's tough to get it right, and when you do it often feels like dumb luck more than anything.

2) There's some funny business with the truck friction. They're slippery. Most of the time you'll stay in place, but sometimes the truck you're on will get knocked and you'll slide off. Sometimes you'll be falling through the air lined up for a perfect landing and it doesn't stick. If you instinctively jump to try and stay with it, you'll usually get thrown at some odd angle and because you have no control in the air, it's over.

Ultimately in the more difficult levels you just feel cheated, and because I don't think this is the sort of game to take seriously, I just stopped. It doesn't feel rewarding when you push through it because the game doesn't really give you the tools to overcome the challenge. It's not a bad game by any means, but I think it's probably not worth the price.

Here ends my personal journey with Assassin's Creed, having completed the trilogy and now Brotherhood. And what a beast of a game, a series. Was it worth my time, you ask? Let's start at the beginning.

Space expanded rapidly. Particles gathered into hydrogen atoms, stars and planets were formed, and Assassin's Creed was made. I played that game and loved it. It was impressive technically and visually, on a level that only millions of dollars could produce, and perhaps more astonishing was the total commitment to their freerunning system. Ubisoft promised players could freely climb and scale virtually any solid object in the game, and I say they knocked it out-of-the-park on their first go. Not everyone agrees with me. A lot of folks complained that it was too repetitive (a peeve of mine, but that's another tale).

Cue the sequels and I'm utterly baffled. You see, freerunning is the CORE of Assassin's Creed, its bread and butter, its heart and soul. Almost everything you do somehow involves climbing on things. Taking the original game as a successful prototype, with the primary complaint being that people want more of it, the natural path is to focus on the one thing that defines the game and use it to springboard to something more. But every game in the series has taken bizarre 90-degree turns that don't add up to anything. Consider:

"There's a rad freerunning system and now you can construct a brothel in your villa!"
"There's a rad freerunning system and now there's a simulated economy!"
"There's a rad freerunning system and now you can play bocce ball with George Washington!"

...And the games are praised to high heavens. Is this what people really want? It's a crying shame that the core gameplay remains constant while getting buried under a mountain of crap. Are layered mechanics not more interesting than disconnected ones? Meanwhile, almost every activity can be reduced to "go to the waypoint marker and/or beat up some guys". The problem is the freerunning, and to some extent the combat, really carries the game. Your fun is absolutely dependent on whether these two things are compelling enough on their own.

And therein lies the crux of why I think the Assassin's Creed series as a whole, stinks, because they can boiled down to nothing. "Go here" involves holding two buttons and pointing the stick toward the waypoint. "Beating up guys" involves repeatedly pressing attack and occasionally pressing block as an enemy strikes. Following this strategy will get you through most of the game. Perhaps one could say the game is just too easy. I used the stock hidden blades throughout the whole game, and never felt the need to purchase any weapons, upgrades, or gadgets (except for DaVinci's climbing gloves, bless his heart).

Occassionally you will sense that Assassin's Creed wants to be a stealth game, and I think it could be an outstanding one, except it bungles this as well. The game falls into the very unforgiving trap of instant failure if you are detected at all, even if you stab a guy through the throat as he glimpses you upon his dying breath. More perplexing design decisions abound. Don't get caught freerunning or the Roman Rooftop Gestapo will get you! Why punish players for climbing and exploring?

Of course the story context is a monster in itself. Apparently Ubisoft was so wowed by their own material that they felt it acceptable to ram the story down players' throats. The sheer quantity and length of cutscenes is unreal. Now I ain't no literary scholar, but I think the writing throughout the Assassin's Creed series is abysmal. You spend so much time watching one-dimensional characters standing around yakking endlessly about some garbage you don't care about. Every other line of dialogue is contrived to get you to "go" and "kill", and there just isn't a story being told, which wouldn't be a problem if it didn't constantly interrupt the game. You can hardly pick your nose without it bookended by boring cinematics.

The main conflict feels equally contrived. Antagonists are either ridiculously villanous or guilty by association. Of course you hardly ever see any of the alleged wrongdoing -- you're just told that person X is "corrupt" for vague reasons and they have an unfriendly disposition when you meet them in person. I also can't get past the grand irony of the evil Templars condemned by the rightous "Assassins". They fight back by murdering hundreds of people. Other moments of brilliance are wasted. Fallen foes, in their dying moments, try to get you to understand their motivation, their ideology. But Ezio doesn't care. He doesn't reflect upon or question his choices. There's no personal growth; the story takes no risks. It's just... flat. The overarching sci-fi plot is actually quite interesting but so sparse that it hardly matters.

I probably ought to explain my beef with cutscenes. They never sit right with me, but they are the most obvious way to tell a story. The nature of authorship is such that it conflicts with input from the audience. The more input, the less control the author has. Thus, taking control away from players is the most direct approach. I'm fine with this, but I begin to take issue when cutscenes are used as a crutch for sloppy game design.

There's a depressing trend among modern games to take the mechanics and tease out narrow, compartmentalized segments of gameplay, which are then shuffled throughout the experience. The result is a game which is ultimately simpler, more predictable, and presumably easier to develop. The first example that comes to mind is the Tomb Raider reboot, and the game suffers for it. You are either climbing things or shooting things, but never both. However, Tomb Raider is somewhat forgiven because it smoothly transitions between gameplay segments with smart level design, pacing, context, etc. Assassin's Creed, on the other hand, glues together disjointed segments of gameplay with cutscenes, jerking you all over the place. Cutscene - CHASE - cutscene - KILL - cutscene - FOLLOW - cutscene - KILL... I hate this. It's like Warioware without the creativity (or fun). This is how you can tell a game's design is oversimplified.

If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game, it may be too late for you. There was a day when the freerunning was cutting-edge and the sci-fi story was a surprise. My advice is to play the original because it's the most "pure" experience and the medival setting really fits. Otherwise, ask yourself "can the freerunning carry my enjoyment for another 10-20 hours?". Gamers will always mentally strip away a game's fluff and reduce its moving parts to an abstract model, and at this point Assassin's Creed immediately goes stale. It just doesn't have enough complexity to last beyond the initial novelty. Sure, the game is punctuated by interesting moments in its enormous story, but these moments are mere hydrogen atoms in the vastness of space.

Not sure what the hubbub is about. For all the hyperbole about "OOOH IT'S SO MINDBENDING", Antichamber is actually pretty straightforward, and quite frankly, dull.

Early on, the game has nothing to offer but a handful of obvious tricks, which you'll see through immediately. At one point the game recreates the Lost Woods from Ocarina of Time (NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY GUYZ). I'm not sure why a puzzle game with absolutely no consistency is a good idea, because it ultimately boils down to futzing around until something new happens. I was expecting some kind of puzzle game where the laws of physics/reality are altered in some way, but Antichamber is really a set of disjointed illusions for the first hour, until you get the BLOCK GUN.

Upon finding the block gun, the "mindbending" aspects of the game vanish entirely and lead to an endless series of boring block puzzles. There's really nothing particularly clever, challenging, or interesting going on here. Some of the early block puzzles are alright, but it quickly gets out of hand. One "puzzle" literally has you soaking up zillions of blocks to build a giant staircase like some boring version of minecraft. It's just tedium.

Most of this is just mediocre, but Antichamber really becomes offensive when all the frustrating parts become apparent. The dangers of having a game centered on changing the rules and warping reality jump out at you when you realize you're missing crucial information. Here we have a game that challenges you to "accomplish the impossible", and ironically it's impossible to tell what IS possible. You'll spend 10 minutes on one puzzle only to discover that some puzzles are literally unsolvable without some new gadget. I get that the game is meant to be exploratory and somewhat confusing, but some things are explained upfront, and other things are never made clear.

There's very little consistency to the puzzle design. When a game's design depends on unintuitive logic, the challenge usually comes from discovery: observing cause-and-effect relationships so that you can extrapolate the mechanics. Antichamber fails because the puzzles are solved upon the first observation, and since there's no consistent puzzle design, the player just stumbles along without having learned anything. Unfortunately, the lack of direction is compounded by the winding and open-ended nature of the level design. There's really no obvious path to follow, so you spend a lot of time hitting dead-ends, never knowing whether you're missing something, too thick to figure out the solution, or need some new ability.

And the levels branch a LOT as you move along, especially early on when you're exploring everything for the first time. Things tend to close off behind you, so after you pass by a dozen points-of-interest/corridors, your mental "come-back-to-this" list is overloaded. It doesn't help that Antichamber is visually quite bland. Yes, the screenshots on the store page make it look very cool, as if the game were built in Matlab, but 90% of it consists of blank, white, square corridors. Rare splashes of color don't add much and don't distinguish different areas. Every door is identical. Wandering around and backtracking become doubly irritating when the "map" is inconsistent, sometimes showing you places you should explore, but not always. Thus you'll spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering around trying to figure out where to go next.

The irritations don't stop there. Traveling around almost always requires you to re-solve the same annoying puzzles again and again, many of which use the equally annoying block gun. Even worse, Antichamber has an irritating habit of warping you to some other part of the game without warning, often forcing you to teleport again to an earlier area and re-solve the same boring puzzles once more. Again, I get that the game is supposed to be confusing, but there comes a point where it's no longer for the sake of challenge.

On top of it all, there's really no ultimate goal or progression. There's no plot or any real sense of place. For a standard puzzle game, I normally wouldn't complain, but Antichamber is definitely reaching for something more. There's some real effort put into the sound design. The ambiance mostly involves odd nature soundscapes; sometimes it works but generally feels out-of-place for a game that is otherwise totally abstract. The game also loves to bask in its own stupidity with truly awful morsels of wisdom it feeds you constantly. In many ways, Antichamber feels like it's aiming for Portal a bit too much, including some blatant puzzle mechanics lifted directly.

In the end, I really can't recommend Antichamber. I think some folks are too easily impressed by a few, admittedly unusual, cheap tricks. Just play Portal. Or The Stanley Parable. Or Echochrome. Or anything else, really.