At the moment I think what doesn’t help my impetus to get through the 1st game is that my partner has played it and I can, at the end of the day, just ask for a run-down of what happens (that’s what I’ve done so far). I’m sure I will get round to it eventually but probably not this month or next.

I’m hoping I can get through it at least once by the end of March so that I can review it for BadRep; but if it takes longer then so be it! Looking forward to see how it’ll turn out :)

I played Brotherhood first, then 1, 2, Revelations. I’m definitely glad I played 1, though. It’s not nearly as bad as its reputation, in my opinion.

The biggest complaints I’ve heard have been: it’s repetitive, and combat is too easy/boring.

However, when you look at it, it’s not a lot longer than Shadow of the Colossus, and has much more variation in gameplay types. Most of that is skip-able as well, if you’re not a completionist, since you only need a few of the research missions to unlock each assassination mission.

The combat is definitely simplistic compared to the later games and other offerings, but I never really minded it – it’s akin to AC2’s combat when everything is going smoothly. Since I was just burning through to pick up the story, I wasn’t really looking for a challenge.

On top of that, the graphical quality is leagues ahead of any of the other games. When making AC2 they traded bigger and more interesting environments for the beautiful rendering and detail of AC, and it’s worth messing about a bit in AC1 just to see the levels.

Pretty much all of the relevant story comes at the end, and yeah, it’s recapped, but being walked through it gave me a deeper understanding than I think I’d have had with just the infoburst at the start of AC2.

The two things that hurt the game for me were the poor voice acting for Altaiir (they changed his voice actor for Revelations, and it’s a big improvement) and the superfluousness of the fetch quests – I was tempted to hunt down all the flags, but I checked and they don’t unlock any kind of reward; they’re just there to collect.