New century, same creed. Our take on the PS3 version of Ubisoft Montreal’s ornate Renaissance action epic.

There’s a tension in every open-ended game (or even every game, period), a tension between avatar and surroundings, figure and backdrop, between the simplifications which allow players to interpret and act upon the world they’re given and the fertile, vital unpredictabilities of that world – in short, between gameplay and setting. Faced with so challenging a dichotomy, many developers lean one way or another. The randomly generated ASCI landscapes of cult hit Dwarf Fortress are famously more than a match for their colonists, for instance, while Jak II’s capaciously chunky steam-punk environs are quite passive, sterile, despite their graphical liveliness.
Ubisoft Montreal’s Assassin’s Creed series tackles this tension head on, and therein perhaps lies its claim to greatness. Where other third-person sandboxers cloak the enmity between order and chaos in make-believe, Assassin’s Creed transforms it into a component of the make-believe, a premise. Your character, Desmond Miles, springs from a long line of assassins, each engaged in a shadowy war with the Illuminati-like organisation known as the Templars. To penetrate the centuries-old mysteries of Abstergo, the vast military-pharmaceutical corporation the Templars have become, Desmond must tap into the “genetic memories” of his ancestors – 12th century Arabian backstabber Altair in the first game, Renaissance nobleman Ezio in this one – reliving their thoughts and deeds with the aid of a high-tech VR machine termed the “Animus”.
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