Assassin's Creed

With the enormous success Assassin's Creed enjoyed on the Xbox360 and PS3 last year, it’s only logical that the game would make its way to the PC soon. Well, it’s finally here, but the question on everyone’s mind is: has Ubisoft developed a well-made port, or is it just another poor transition that one could live without? To be quite honest – after spending hours at stretch with the game, it seems like Ubisoft wants PC gamers to bend over so that they can shove another one of their half-assed ports where the sun don’t shine.

[Before going any further, let me point out that we won’t be reviewing the game all over again. We’ve already reviewed the Xbox360 version, and since the gameplay or storyline hasn’t really changed, we won’t be covering those parts again

I’m not saying that the game plays out terribly on the PC; it just isn’t nearly as good as it was on consoles. In fact, the DirectX9 version of the game looks so terrible that you’d gouge your eyes out and eat them up. This is totally unacceptable, considering that the minimum requirements of the game are REALLY steep, and the fact that the game ran using DX9 on the Xbox360/PS3 and looked a lot better there. Although the DirectX10 version looks much better than DX9, it still falls glaringly short of the game’s glory on its console counterpart.


Although the game supports all widely used 16:10 resolutions (most widescreen monitors use that aspect ratio) the game has black bands on the top and bottom of the screen when played in these resolutions. This means the game’s actually rendered in the 16:9 aspect ratio, and the black bands fill in the empty spaces. Ubisoft’s way of spitting the face of PC gamers who use widescreen monitors!

Fortunately the control scheme isn’t all that bad. On the Xbox360/PS3 the controls come quite naturally to you once you get the hang of the game; but while it’s a little more complicated with a mouse + keyboard (since the keys are kind of spread out), it isn’t too hard to get used to it. I tried playing the game via an Xbox360 controller after that, but I decided that it's easier to play using the previous control scheme, and reverted to it. My colleague Avinash, on the other hand, preferred the Xbox360 controller, so I guess it’s just a matter of preference. The bottomline is that although it isn’t as intuitive as the Xbox360/PS3, the control scheme isn’t too bad on the PC.

What I’m saying here is that, if you have the kind of system requirements (which includes a 2.8 GHz dual-core processor) needed to play it, this isn’t such a bad game to buy. Bear in mind that the substandard visuals in the DX9 version suck; the game's only playable in DX10. So if you don't have Windows Vista (which is needed for DX10), don't bother with this game.

If you own an Xbox360 or PS3 and can get your hands on the console version of the game at retail price, you’d rather do that since the game’s a whole lot better there. Unfortunately, the game's not available for those platforms in India, so even if you get your hands on them they'd be priced exorbitantly. This makes the Rs 999 price tag of the PC version a lot more appealing.