Product Reviews

PC gamers might seem to survive on a diet of first person shoot-'em-ups and strategy titles, but every now and again a game developer is willing to try something different. Thank goodness the team at Ubisoft Montreal have finally brought Assassin's Creed to the PC.

The console version was criticised for its repetitive nature, so, for this Director's Cut edition the developers have gone back to the drawing board and added an extra four mission types. The story remains the same: the year is 2012, and bartender Desmond Miles is kidnapped without explanation. While held against his will, Desmond learns that he's not wanted for something he knows, but something one of his ancestors did. He finds himself strapped to the Animus machine, with which his captors trawl his DNA for memories of his ancestors. Clearly, those Ubisoft brainstorming sessions left inadequate time for genetics tutorials.

Darwin notwithstanding, Miles' genetic memory transports you to the Holy Land at the time of the Third Crusade. There you're introduced to Altair, a relative and member of the Assassin brotherhood. (Sadly, he doesn't provide

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any of the eponymous 1970s geometric colouring books.) Desmond's task is to tread in Altair's sandals as he travels around performing assassinations at the behest of his masters. As you do.

Completing these missions is a two-stage process. First, you locate your target in a variety of ways: eavesdropping, interrogation, pickpocketing, or doing tasks for Informers. Variety keeps things from getting boring, and although many of the objectives require little more than navigating to a marker on the map, the journey is the reward.

With one bound...

Altair is a latter-day free-runner, capable of bounding up buildings and leaping from roof to roof in a parkour stylee. The thrill of dashing across the skyline never wears thin, and the controls make it easy to do without worrying about complex keypresses. Nonetheless, it's all too easy to mistime a jump and plunge into the path of patrolling foes.

Luckily, Altair is pretty good at blending in when he needs to. Tap the spacebar and his head drops in prayer, a move that prevents him arousing the attention of suspicious guards. You'd think this would be a fairly well known trick in that neck of the woods, but apparently not.

When it comes to getting into a scrap, Altair's abilities and arsenal expand as the story unfolds. Successful assassinations bring new and deadly combos, helping you dispatch enemies with ease.

It really helps that Assassin's Creed looks and sounds so good. The huge, richly detailed environments have been lavished with care and attention. Clamber to a viewpoint and the sense of scale is staggering. Along with the movie-quality soundtrack, it makes for something really special.