Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China Review

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, the opening chapter in a planned trilogy of games, opens a new chapter in the Assassin's Creed story showing that the centuries-long struggle between the orders of the Assassins and the Templars is also a worldwide one. A branch of the Templars known as the Tigers has virtually wiped out the Assassins in China, but not all of them. Assassin Shao Jun, who was away training with Assassin Ezio Auditore of Assassin's Creed II fame at the time of the massacre, returns to China to exact revenge on the Templar leaders behind the Tigers. From an Assassin's Creed standpoint this is a pretty simple revenge story and it's told simply as well, utilizing static hand-drawn images with a voiceover narrative shown between levels to drive the relatively shallow tale along. While that's not all that out of the ordinary for a download-only arcade title, fans of the series may be a little disappointed that the game provides no more than a small footnote to the overall Assassins' legend.

While the story is a bit bland the game's graphics are anything but that. The ink and watercolor graphics are beautiful, and the manner in which the ink outlines fade to nothing in the backdrop gives the side-scroller an interesting illusion of depth. The art style and palette strongly convey a Chinese atmosphere to the game, giving you a sense of place and the game its own unique feel in the heretofore Euro-focused series.

But it's not just the setting of Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China that's a departure for the series. The open-world freedom of the other games in the series has been replaced by the tightly controlled constraints that come with the move to side-scrolling, checkpoint-based gameplay. You'll sometimes have a small degree of freedom in selecting between alternate pathways or in finding side passages that lead to hidden collectible objects, but overall the game is a relentless push from left to right.

This being an Assassin's Creed game, an emphasis is put on stealth over open assault and this is where some of the '.5' in the 2.5D gameplay comes in. You'll need to keep out of sight of the guards who patrol the levels and to do that you'll often need to make use of the darkened alcoves that dominate the architecture of the period or Assassin's Creed's ubiquitous hay carts. A quick flick of the stick up and Jun will disappear in the shadows as guards pass by unawares. You can make quick one-hit kill strikes as these enemies pass by your hiding place, but if you want your presence to remain undetected you'll need to drag the body back into the shadows with you or other guards will raise the alarm when they see the corpse. Other stealthy moves allow you to quickly flit from one hiding place to the next or to move along ledges below the sight of guards.

As an aid to staying out of sight, guards walk around with vision cones emanating from their faces so you'll always know where they are looking and how far they can see. Personally I'd rather that the game had left that to your own reckoning as the cones take some of the challenge away from the exercise and they tend to ruin the whole aesthetic feel of the levels. Since you also have access to the "Eagle Vision" ability which allows you to scan around the level a bit and to see the guards' patrol patterns, the cones would probably have been better off being a part of the Eagle Vision screen rather than the primary gameplay one.

Should you be sighted you'll find yourself in a fight. Chronicles takes the timing-based combat of the regular Assassin's Creed games and implements it in two dimensions. The fights are far more challenging in Chronicles, though, partially because of the restricted space in which you fight, but more so because your timing needs to be more precise and the visual cues are far more subtle here especially when it comes to blocking enemy attacks. One attacker is a challenge and more than that will frequently lead to death, but the penalty for failure isn't too harsh. You'll find yourself back at the last checkpoint as if nothing that just transpired ever happened. In fact, since you're rated at each checkpoint in terms of your successful traversal of the previous segment of the level, if you slip up and are sighted then suicide by guard is a good way to "reset" the level and give yourself another shot at a "gold" rating.

There is also a puzzle component to the game as you'll need to figure out ways to distract guards or change their patrol routes and to overcome obstacles to your rightward progress. You'll have a few tools at your disposal to accomplish all that, such as firecrackers to distract guards or throwing knives to slice through ropes, and each time you come across a situation where one of them is needed it will be pretty obvious which tool is the right one for the job. There's no real room for improvisation here, which makes things feel very constrained in comparison to a typical Assassin's Creed game and the freedom that it affords you. I'm not going to knock a downloadable side-scroller for not matching the gameplay of a AAA 3D game - you should expect that going in - but it would have been nice to see some support for multiple possible solutions or more challenging, even multi-staged, puzzles to overcome.

You can have some fun with Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, executing a section perfectly, assassinating every guard without ever being noticed can certainly be satisfying. However, the combat feels more frustrating than fluid and the simplicity of the puzzles and overall lack of challenge make for a game that you may not feel all that motivated to return to, or even to finish in the first place.