It’s been on my to-play list for some time, and I stumbled across a mention of it on GOG, and upon remembering that it was one of a friends favourite game series thought I’d give it a try.

As a note, the GOG version is DRM free so I was able to play the game on my Linux box fine through WINE. The only issue I was was when the “ASSASSIN ALERT” bell was ringing which seemed to mess up with the sound playback a little. Other than that, it ran very smoothly which was a good start.

I had some real fun with this. After watching trailers I found it hard to believe that it would be a climb over anything and everything affair, but damn it was. I’m a big fan of sandbox elements in normal mission based games and I think Assassins managed to pull it off brilliantly.

Both the present day and crusades-era storylines had me fully enthralled from the start, so much so that I’ve started playing the sequel pretty much straight away. By only complaint here would be that more work could have put into the audio recording for minor characters. Hearing the same 3 phrases every time someone was rescued got old pretty fast.

The game took me about 33 hours to complete so I was pretty happy bang for buck wise, though on reflection it would have been nice to get a bit more variety in there. Almost all the missions were pretty formulaic in nature so each new section didn’t bring much in the way of innovation.

Overall some exciting gameplay ideas, but a bit too rough around the edges in other areas. For that reason I’m holding out for the sequel to have refined the premise a little.