You may not be monitoring this thread any longer, but I created an account just to tell you I love Assassin's Creed. I avoided it for years because I thought it was going to be the same as Hitman, and I hated that game. Hitman is one of the only games I have purchased that I gave up on. In Hitman, you advance a step, pause, advance another, oh, someone heard you. Start over. Advance slowly, spotted. Damn. Try again, repeat ad nauseum. Try the Rambo approach. Get killed in 5 seconds.
Finally AC1 came up on Steam for 5 bucks, thought I would give it a try. It's a great game, one of my all-time favourites. The graphics are incredible for a game that came out in 2006. I actually really like the fighting in the game. Yes, you can use the counter move over and over if you like, but you are certainly not obligated to. You can counter the first guy, and then sword attack the second, switch off targeting, climb a building, and knife-throw your pursuers before jumping in a hideout. I find the side missions are nicely varied, you get the stall-destroy missions, stealth assasinations, archer kills, pickpockets, timed flag pickups, etc. There is a lot of variety. I also find the safe spots varied, some on benches, some in hideouts, some in hay carts. The climbing is not as literal as you make it out to be, early on, yes, the buildings are straight up, but very quickly you find buildings where you have to figure out your way up and certainly can not do so blindfolded. I also thought it was a great addition to include hay stacks at the base of each building so you didn't have to waste time climbing down. Eagles circling climbing points were a terrific idea.
I like the flag collection, finding flags hidden around the various cities, although it would be better to acquire some sort of power-up or weapon for collecting them all on a per-city basis. The missions in the game get steadily more difficult, but you can alter the difficulty by completing the "Save Citizen" side missions first. Then you get roving bands of vigilantes helping you when you are cornered. That is a great addition to a game, and one I see very rarely. Finally, you asked for one instance where someone thought "this is really fun", when I completed the Damascus 5-informer assassination challenge with exactly 1.12 seconds left, I was stoked. Also finding the last flag in Damascus, getting away from an army of pursuers, or completing a main story assissination mission and making it back to the HQ alive.
All in all, great game (and I was bored to death watching Twilight).
