So lately I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed, well, trying to play Assassin’s Creed. No matter what I do, I simply can’t get into this game. Ostensibly, it’s an action-ey, platform-ey, exploration-based stealth game. All pluses for the way I game and what I’m looking for in a title. But ultimately, it’s one of the most superficial, shallow games I’ve played in a long time. It’s not the worst, but only particularly bad because of how much more I was expecting out of it.

Now not everything about AC is terrible. The setting and environment are incredible, the character animations look great, and it just looks beautiful.

Then you start playing it. And it’s disappointment, followed by frustration, followed by an “aww man,” followed by quitting with complete apathy toward advancing in the game any further.

The story is basically garbage from the first minute. Okay, somehow I’m in some VR world living the “memories” of my ancestor. Why can’t I just be that ancestor and not wade through a bunch of sci-fi nonsense to enjoy the setting? Five minutes into the game I was already completely ignoring the story and waiting to get my parkour on.

Then what should be the core gameplay element of the game, the climbing/freerunning stuff, turns out to be “hold these two buttons down and become a bad ass” mode. Totally unrewarding. I can bound between rooftops and ledges and cliffs with utter indiscretion and everything’s fine. There’s no danger anywhere. The whole alert/stealth system is silly, too. There’s absolutely zero nuance to Altair’s interaction with guards, it’s all binary: they’re either indifferent to you, or after you. So sometimes I can climb all around near them, jump off roofs and no one gives a damn. Other times, I ride by on a horse and all hell breaks loose, every guard in town chasing me. WTFs? Diffusing the situation simply entails running behind a building and diving in some hay. And this is supposed to be a smart, high-quality, “next-gen” game?

It’s frustrating to see so much potential squandered on such poor design. There are plenty of other issues with this game, but the bottom line is that with the very little time I get to play games, I don’t want to waste it on something like this.