Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicle Review (DS)

Medieval assassin Altair takes his act on the road with the release of Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles for the Nintendo DS. After spending a few minutes with the game, you'll notice that it lacks the console game's complexity. If you manage to lower your expectations, however, you'll like what the game provides.

Altair's Chronicles acts as a prequel to the original Assassin's Creed game. You control the silent killer as he attempts to put a stop to the Third Crusade by seeking out an item known as "the chalice." By wielding it, you will stop a war dead in its tracks -- or so the legend goes. The game spans over numerous levels as Altair eliminates certain targets, navigates rooftops throughout each city, avoids traps and kills anyone that gets in his way.

Most of the gameplay resembles the previous Ubisoft Prince of Persia releases. You'll have no trouble grabbing onto ledges, hoisting yourself up ladders, jumping across chasms and avoiding spikes and other dastardly traps (until the later levels, perhaps – they get trickier). The combat system is made up of simple X and Y button-pressing attacks. You can chain together sword attacks to pull off specific combos, but it becomes repetitive. It's almost as if you never take direct control of Altair, just a portion of his actions. Furthermore, he doesn't use other attacks, like his crossbow, nearly as much as he should.

Gameloft makes up for this with the incorporation of two solid mini-games. The first, Interrogation, works in a similar manner to Nintendo's Elite Beat Agents -- but without the music. You hit certain pressure points on the body with an enclosing circle, using very specific timing. Mess up and the interrogation concludes with little to no result. Get it right, though, and the poor sap spills the beans. Another mini-game, Pick Pocketing, lets you search the contents of someone's pockets by rubbing across a dark touch screen. Once you find the item, you must carefully remove it from the pocket without touching anything else.

Altair's Chronicles features solid visuals and audio. Not great, mind you, but it gets the job done. Gameloft faithfully recreates Altair's world with a decent 3-D engine, similar to the one it built for last year's Brothers In Arms for DS game (but with a more medieval look). Animations run smoothly, the camera perspective is user-friendly and the frame rate stays consistent. However, the game occasionally fuzzies up, particularly with walls and ladders. At one point, we became so stuck in the game that we had to restart, just to avoid an inescapable pit. As for sound, the samples are good, but overused. The timing is also off, with spikes coming out of the ground and their sound playing through the speakers about a second later -- a deadly flaw.

Chronicles also has a couple of other flaws that are hard to overlook. While it's cool to go through the game with all of Altair's abilities, there's no reward for replaying the game a second time around. The lack of exploration is a huge problem here – it's strictly a point-A-to-point B world. Also, saving your game is more of a hassle than expected, due to problems within the menu system.

If you're expecting an Assassin's Creed portable game on the same level as the excellent console versions, you're not going to get it. Due to its lack of exploration options, presentation issues and poor replayability, Altair's Chronicles cannot compare to that version, If you can overlook those problems, however, Altair's Chronicles is a pretty acceptable adventure, at least worthy of a rental.

Related Links

Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles Game Guide

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