Like any review, however, my perceptions are coloured by my personal preferences. That’s why I often spend a lot of time in my reviews explaining my likes and dislikes: someone else with different preferences would almost certainly have significantly different impressions.

I suspect that the design choices the developers made regarding how assassinations and combat work in the game probably came from playtesting more than political correctness or the like. The fact that they placed the game in the middle of a religious war suggests they aren’t exactly hiding from controversy. The main bad guys are the Templars (Christians), and part of the plot suggests that Christ and religion in general is basically a sham. But a game where you kill the “main” targets with a single dart or poisoned drink from perfect concealment (or better yet, while in a different city) probably wasn’t as much fun as having more direct melee than is probably realistic. I’d like it if they shifted the balance a bit more towards the “silent killer in the shadows” approach for the main targets, but I can understand that they also have to make the game appealing to a wider market than just me.

I got a good 18 hours or so of fun out of Creed, and am definitely looking forward to “Assassin’s Creed 2″ or whatever they call the next episode.

Oh, one thing I really enjoyed in Creed and forgot to mention… in several of the cities you will be assailed by beggars, drunks, and madmen. These people block your path, bump you around, and generally interfere with your objectives. I’m sure this places me firmly on the psychopath watch list, but after a while I started casually killing these irritating people whenever they got in my way. I would slip through a crowd, my concealed blade stealing the lives of pushy, irritating people without anyone noticing until they tripped over the bodies.

There was something humorous and faintly satisfying about some drunk bumping into my character, encountering my knife, and me continuing on slowly and quietly… to be followed a moment later by a guard saying “What happened here…a murder!” One location near a decorative fountain in a town had three or four beggars and an equal number of drunks wandering around. I walked around in a circle and killed them all, then quietly sat down on a bench nearby and watched the guards getting all excited

You were talking about “feeling more like an assassin”; well you can just imagine all the concerned parent groups, religious busy boodies and psychobabble do gooders complaints about a game that makes you feel like an assassin… especially one with middle eastern roots and trappings. “Turning our children into suicide bombers!”

That coupled with the strange general distaste among “hardcore” gamers for the use of stealth rather than slugfests, and I don’t think you will see a proper assassin game soon.