PREVIEW: Assassin's Creed

So on to the crowds then. This is another aspect of Assassin's Creed that has got people all excited. It's up to you how you treat the crowds.

You can walk slowly and keep pace with everyone. Or speed things up a bit and barge people out of the way. Beggars will randomly come up to you and get in your face, refusing to move.

It's all fantastic fun at first. You'll be struggling to pick your jaw up off the floor following your first assassination. And it's not as easy as tracking your target and one-hit killing them either.

You'll need to do some old fashioned investigative work - stealing important documents like a ninja scrolls, eavesdropping from some lofty vantage point and interrogating maniac cop style - all so you get the right hit.

You never relinquish control of Altair, even during cut-scenes. So when scripted events kick in, you still move Altair about the crowd while the dialogue plays out.

At the very least, it makes gathering info a bit more interesting than simply sitting back and watching a five-minute CG clip roll.

Assassin's Creed is all about freedom. The freedom to go anywhere, climb anything, whatever. But it's also about the freedom to tackle the game's various objectives either stealthily like a proper assassin or full throttle like Arnie on speed.

Every time you kill a civilian you'll lose a third of your life. You'll even lose life when you run over people when on the horse, which you use to travel between the cities.

As the developers said during our hands on: "It's Assassin's Creed, not mass-murderer creed." No GTA-style murder mayhem then.

It's also all about the single-player experience. So much so in fact, that there won't be any online features whatsoever.

So the replay value has to come from the main campaign. Here it's shaping up nicely. The game has 100 side quests. There are special view points to unlock that can be found in the game world's most remote areas and you'll unlock achievements by killing the game's toughest enemies, the Templars.

We wonder though, if Assassin's Creed might turn out to be better to watch than actually play. Once we got over the initial wonderment at how cool everything was and how easy it was to look every part the ancient bad-ass assassin, we felt things started to get a little repetitive, especially the combat.

This has as much to do with not having a lot of the game to try out, but we're thinking AC might end up a bit like Gears of War - you're effectively doing the same thing over and over again, it's just you don't realise it because everything looks so shiny.

But then there is the big secret behind the story of the game. We know when and where it's set: 1191 in the three historical Middle Eastern cities of Acre, Jerusalem and Damascus.

We know the basic story behind Altair, too. He's a failed assassin who's been given the chance to redeem himself by bumping off nine historical targets linked to the escalation of the Third Crusade.

But what we don't know is why there's loads of sci-fi hexagonal stuff that keeps flashing on screen every now and then, and why the game will say things like "waiting for input", "desynchronised" and "retrieving information" when you die.

We think the story may be a futuristic simulation a la the Matrix. Whatever it is, it better be good.

Overall though, the game will be released in November and is shaping up wonderfully well. Having come away from a good few hours with Assassin's Creed, we were left feeling that Ubisoft Montreal has done a fantastic job realising its lofty ambitions with the game.

There's not long to go now - soon we'll all be kicking ourselves when it turns out that Altair is actually on a time travelling mission to abduct historical figures for his high-school history presentation. You heard it here first.