Summary

• Assassin's Creed is unfairly criticized as 'basic' by snobbish gamers.
• The series offers unique stealth, agility, and rich historical worlds.
• For another hot take: Ezio isn't my favourite assassin. Bayek is.

There’s a real sense of snobbery surrounding 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed. It’s often described as ‘popcorn gaming’, 🐬‘slop’, or a ‘mindless’ experience. It’s seen as the big, gaudy mainstream series people with true taste wouldn’t dare acknowledge – the polar opposite of prestige games often touted as the medium’s, like Dark Souls or The Last of Us.

I love Assassin’s Creed, and I always have. So I’m a little fed up with the way people pinch their noses whenever they talk about it, because it’s rad as hell and, especially wit💎h everyone running around Sengoku-era Japan this week in Shadows, more than deserves its flower𝕴s.

Nothing Is True, Everyone Is Snobbish

Having planted my flag firmly in ♉favour of Assassin’s Creed, I always feel dismayed at the response from the wider gaming community whenever the series is mentioned or has a new release. Every conversation goes the same way: people who dropped 200 hours into the newest entry explain why they don’t actually like the series, or how it was better when Ezio was around over ten years ago now. It’s like Assassin’s Creed has become shorthand for the w🔯orst thing you could possibly ever be: basic.

The alternative is admitting Assassin’s Creed has always been, at the very least, a good time, and you can’t possibly have that. At first, it was complaints about the annual release schedule, and when that trend was old hat once Ubisoft took a year off before Origins, complaints then focused on their size instead. The games were too big, ꦑwere ‘open-world slop’ riddled with minimap icons, and people had more, very important adult responsibilities than they did in 2009.

I 100 percented Assassin’s Creed Va෴lhalla. I have no very important adult responsibilities.

This isn’t to say the series hasn’t had its down moments. It’d be foolish to call any of them the greatest games ever made, and, yes, it has repeatedly fallen into a bit of a formulaic funk. Liberation was pants. But I wish the criticis🐷ms about Assassin’s Creed were at least interesting, and not just the same, rotating set of bullet points that have been floating around for years.

I’ve Been Here Since The Third Crusade

The first Assassin’s Creed🎃 was one of the first games I got for my Xbox 360. Already a massive Prince of Persia fan, I’d vaguely heard of its spiritual successor, and had seen more than enough emo forum signatures of a white-hooded guy with a knife strapped to his arm.

If you don’t knꦡow what a forum signature is, ask your parents.

From that first trip into the Animus, I fell in love wi🅘th Assassin’s Creed. I’d spend hours simply running around Acre or Damascus, and took it upon myself to try and kill every single person in♑ Masyaf.

And then, emblazoned on the cover of 360 Gamer magazine (rest in piece), there he was: Ezio Auditore. He looked like Altair, but he had two blades! 14-year-old me lost his absolute mind at the idea of more Assassi🐻n’s Creed, and it was all I could think about in the run-up to launch. I finally got it for Christmas in 2009, and spent the whole week leading up to the new year kicking it up in the Renascence.

Since then, I’ve played every single Assassin’s Creed game. I was there for Unity being a disaster, and I was there when the series jumped over to RPGs with Origins. I ran through Macao as Shao Jun in Chronicles: China, and I’ve made myself seasick in Nexus VR. If there’s an Assassin’s Creed game, I’ve played it, and I’ve 🥃likely unabashedly loved it.

Assassin’s Creed Is Everything I Love In Games

It’s almost impossible for me to put my finger on any one thing I lov꧋e most about the series.

The stealth of the early games was something entirely new, as you used the crowds for cover instead of the darkness I’d become used to from Thief and Splinter Cell. Though the series moved away from stealth between Origins and Valhalla, Mirage and Shadows have both brought it back in big ways, and Naoe is easily the sneakiest as꧑sassin we’ve ever had.

Meanwhile, the agility of its leads is still a big draw for me. Assassin’s Creed isn’t a platforming game in the same vein as Prince of Persia, but it still has that coolness factor of flowing through an environment, taking to the rooftops to get a surprise kill. Over the years there have been improvements and setbacks – Unity’s parkour was incredibly fast and fluid, while Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla mostꩵly relegated it to scaling walls – but still, even after almost 20 years, the spectacle of performing a 🧸leap of faith as the eagles screech hasn’t gotten old.

But if I had a hidden blade to my throat, and I had to pick a single thing I adored most, it’d be the worlds. Every Assassin’s Creed is dense with passion for its settings, whether it be Ptolemaic Egypt or Victorian London. It’s never been entirely historically accurate, but each game feels like a mesmerising act of virtual tourism. I still regularly boot up ღolder games꧅ to revisit key areas, like the barges of the Thames in Syndicate or the Acropolis in Odyssey.

This is actually one of the reasons I was wary of Shadows during development. Feudal Japan felt too low a hanging fruit for a series that prided itself on not making the obvious choices – after all, the community had been begging for it since Altair first landed in a bale of ha🍰y. But, once again, the series has made me care about a point in history I had no interest in ꦚwith its detailed, accurate-enough worldbuilding.

Assassin’s Creed is one of my favourite things, let alone one of🌊 my favourite game series, and it never fails to make me happy. I love my yearly run around a historical setting, leaping off roofs and stabbing Templars in the neck, and, if that 🥂makes me basic or tasteless or whatever, then so be it. I may be cringe, but I am free.