Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition

The information you gather still has no bearing on the assassinations themselves, where you simply run up to your target, slaughter them in plain sight and then run away and hide until everybody forgets about you rather than planning anything based on what you discover. This half-baked execution of the game's core theme was annoying on consoles, but on the PC where memories of the more flexible Thief and the original Hitman still linger, this shallow, rigid structure is left embarrassingly exposed. You have a stunning free-roaming world, but the only things you can actually do are the handful of tasks the game offers. It looks like a real place, but it never actually feels like it. It's a backdrop. A very pretty, animated backdrop, but it's not a place worthy of exploration.

Of course, those sorts of changes would require a fairly major rewrite, but even the easy-to-fix grumbles haven't been addressed, such as the tiny pool of voice samples which leave you grinding your teeth at every cry of "I'll have your hand for that!" Or the way the difficulty of the game is crudely and obviously ratcheted up by populating the streets with increasing numbers of tenacious beggars and belligerent lepers, who only ever harass you out of the dozens of people wandering around. And there's no escaping the fact that, apart from the investigation missions, the only other thing to do in these richly realised environments is to either save peasants by grinding through more counter-based combat, or sproing around looking for hidden flags and Templars. As there's no Achievement system in place for the PC version, these collection quests are revealed as the hollow chore they always were. With no incentive to find them, and no benefits for their discovery, they might as well not exist.

So Assassin's Creed on the PC proves to be dispiritingly similar to Assassin's Creed on the consoles, only six months late for a party most people have already grown tired of. This certainly leaves the unearned "director's cut" title looking a lot like a transparent marketing hook to make disgruntled PC owners feel like their half-year wait makes them favoured customers rather than a secondary concern. Sure, the game certainly looks lovely, and you'll ooh and aah at the way Altair glides seamlessly through a crowd, or climbs up a wall with his virtual hands visibly connecting with virtual outcrops. But the surface lustre soon wears off, and you're left with a game that goes to impressive lengths to make it fun to explore the environment, but still fails to give you any compelling reason to do so beyond empty eye candy.