This is just a quickie after my 13-ish hours with Assassin's Creed I wanted to share, having beaten the game again after 15 years. A more fancy review will come later.

Damn, what a fine trip down memory lane this was. Gameplay-wise, it still holds up. The janky combat was fun. But I liked that stealth and not drawing attention to your actions were the core focus of the game. The series needs to go back to its root with the next entry. Leave the nonsensical combat and Spartan Kicks with insane "magical" abilities behind. Return that more grounded approach.

The presentation was good, and given this was made in 2008 (damn, I was 13 then… How time flies), the visuals still hold up pretty well. It's mindblowing how detailed each city is. Sure, it might not be amazing by today's standards, but even then, the game's city architecture is ripe with an abundance of extremely high detail little pieces that function as a ladder of sorts you use to scale the walls of each building.

Parkour was a big part of the traversal around the three cities and seeing where and how you can climb each wall, window or ledge, was part of the gameplay. Shame they went away from this approach with the new RPG stuff.

I did learn a few new things this time around. If you see "glitches" occur when an in-game cutscene plays, press any button and you'll get a cinematic look of your target. I also found out you could do 6 total investigations before each mission, but the minimum you had to do was 2 at first, then 3 before you could start each assassination attempt. You didn't really get much for doing these extra investigations, and I mostly opted to not do them given how repetitive they are. So, I stuck with the minimum amount needed. I think that's about it. Oh, and the horse galop is also funny. Isn't a new thing, but I thought I should mention it.

The game does cramp up at times, mainly because of the limitations of hardware available back then. LOD detail is quite poor (no shadows are cast by these objects), constant pop-ins, low-range high-quality shadows, pretty dead in-between zones connecting the city, a lot of copy-pasted faces, and so on.

Still, none of these aforementioned issues stopped me from raking in 2108 screenshots when all was said and done. Not all good, perhaps around 500 decent (need to do some cleanup). Look, the point I'm trying to make is that the game has plenty of beauty to offer despite some of these graphical limitations plaguing it.

So, there you have it. A rough, freshly baked take right after the credits rolled about the game that started this amazing franchise.

And now it's time to play the one that shattered expectations of what a sequel should do.

It's time to play the best entry in the series.

E’ tempo di visitare Ezio a Firenze🤌🤌