You can’t call a spider man video game spiderman if your players can’t websling across new york. Its surpising how much this analogy seems to fail game creators like the team behind assassin’s creed.
Once again enter Hitman a game series that always manages to be a breath of fresh air (albiet air that demands perfection for you to breath), reminding us just what makes a good game, absolution being the more flawed of the stock asside.
One of the Biggest draws that HitMan Absolution has (other than being the only assassin series set in near current day) is providing the players with a feeling akin to being a real assassin. While this comes with a very spiked difficulty increase it also Serves to remind me why I’ve stepped away from Ubisoft’s super hero assassin stock since AC2.
This doesn’t mean all games need to have you wear a suit to the deaths of your enemies, being spider man can some times simply be feeling like you’re the hero on the box.
With Assassins Creed Brother Hood we saw the full concept of the world building engine first hand. My best way of describing it is they slapped FarmVille into AC Bro.
The feature alone is not the problem, If not for the fact there was less emphasis on being an assassin, you might not even notice. But what we saw was the death of picking your own way to kill (albeit you only ever had stealth, stealth, or stealth), and much more simplified almost action oriented missions.
Not to say that striping the game down to just assassinations (like in HitMan Absolution), is the way you need to go.
For example hunting works really well in games Like S.T.A.L.K.E.R or FarCry3. As an extension of survival, having to hunt for certain things you need is part of the spiderman experience. Alternatively in AC3 it feels a bit more like a tacked on way of making money.
If the activity doesn’t match the play then why bother including it, Assassins Creed is about being a ninja of the ages, so why am I being forced to be a CEO / Mayor / Pirate (Even if the naval battles are amazing), when all I really want to do is be a wall crawling crusader of justice.
