Godspeed with the Creed

Medieval Jerusalem was such a hectic place to live. One minute you’re enjoying a leisurely stroll through town while picking pockets, and the next, the whole damn place is on fire and the only way out is by leaping nimbly from roof to roof.

In Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles, a Nintendo DS prequel to the Assassin’s Creed game released last fall for PS3 and XBOX 360, you play as the title character, Altair, a white-robed assassin in all his badass glory. There’s a chalice that your boss wants, and you have to go find it ASAP before the Templars can beat you to the prize.

Who knew that fetching a cup would require so very much crate pushing and spike hurtling? Why the hell are there so many spike traps in the sewers, anyway?

As a player of many a platform title, I was initially repelled by the idea of lugging around all those crates. Has the game-design community really been stagnant so long that a few strategically placed crates are still the answer to 85 percent of our problems? The developers behind Chronicles say: “No, crates are the answer to 95 percent of our problems.”

Not only do you use them to hold down giant, improbable medieval buttons and to reach a handy bit of loose rope, but you can now use them to kill the deadly cobras that happen to be hanging out in damn near every environment! What’s more, they can be dropped on a guardsman from a rooftop for some ACME-style bad-guy disposal.

The controls for Chronicles are intuitive and easy to pick up. The combos are straightforward enough to memorize quickly and the choice of weapons is a nice touch that gives gamers a few tactical options. Do you go at it with a sword, or do you sneak up quietly on the unsuspecting guardsman and let him have it with a low-key “assassin’s claw?” Charge into the melee, or lob some bombs at them? Choices, choices, choices.

The sound effects lend flavor to the atmosphere of the cities, though people are not quite as responsive to your wacky assassin antics as they were in the first Assassin’s Creed. In the DS world, no one gives a damn if you can balance on a pole 12 feet off the ground. Instead, the villagers and citizens of Jerusalem walk on by, ignoring you, as if to say, “Just stop it now, you aren’t impressing anyone.”

Another deviation from the first game is the complete lack of sci-fi elements in the storyline. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your feelings about the first Assassin’s Creed title. While the sci-fi aesthetic is completely absent from the game’s storyline, designers chose, for some reason, to leave it in the game’s menu screen.

Players are treated to a futuristic-looking menu select screen, complete with surreal music and digital-ghost blue-toned images. This layout worked well with the first game, but here in Chronicles it is completely anachronistic and makes no sense. If anything, it just serves as a taunting reminder: Hey, remember that awesome game Assassin’s Creed that came out last year? This is so totally NOT that game!

And while the back of the box touts that this game was created “specifically” for the DS, the dual-screen features such as the pick-pocketing mini-game feel like they were tacked on almost as an afterthought.

Overall, Chronicles is a short game that delivers a satisfying amount of sneaking, rope swinging, box pushing and, of course, guard slaying. But if you’re looking for an interesting storyline, grab something else for your DS.