Assassin's Creed Series Retrospective: Assassin's Creed

I've been considering doing a retrospective on many games I've played so I decided to do the first one on the Assassin's Creed series, because its a retrospective I will be talking about the story so SPOILER WARNING, now lets get started, obviously at the beginning;

The first thing to note about the story of Assassin's Creed is its not actually taking place in the time frame the main character you play as is in, it takes place in the present, well present of the games release,  where Desmond, the main character over the whole series, has been captured by a company called Abstergo using a device known as the animus to relive his ancestor's memory using his genetics where they are apparently stored(...go with it) to locate the location of temples containing powerful ancient artifacts called pieces of Eden. I'll go into this more in the rest of the games as this is all your told in this game, they give more of the overall story in the following games.

The Story:

As Desmond in the Animus you play Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad a member of a organization called the Assassin Brotherhood, a group made to help the common man and the sworn enemy of the Templars, a group who intends to take over the world and have world peace by enforcing their will on the world. Altaïr screws up a mission at the start of the game, essentially breaking all of the brotherhood's tenets, he is demoted to novice and then sent off on missions to sequentially kill a number of targets by the leader of the brotherhood Al Mualim, and in terms of story that's most of it, you go off investigating then killing your targets.

When you get to the end when you find out you were betrayed by Al Mualim, who had near the start of the game obtained an artifact which he has been studying since, it then corrupted him and caused him to start to think like a Templar, you then have to run to your home of Masyaf and face off against him, eventually killing him, then when you recover the artifact he used it displays a image of the world with specific locations marked, this is what Abstergo has been looking for and the game ends with Desmond unlocking an ability called Eagle sense, a special six sense allowing him to see unnoticed things as well as peoples intentions (the games mechanic used to identify enemies, allies and targets) and using it he sees the since cleaned up blood from the previous subject who had been driven mad by the animus and killed himself, this is where the game ends.

All in all the story is  rather light, very little information is provided on anything with this world. and it feels to serve very little except to give you a reason why your an assassin who goes around killing people. the modern day parts clearly are the setup of the overarching story. long story short it doesn't have a lot to offer but it does its job

The Gameplay:

Assassin's Creed is a sandbox game where you use free running mechanics to navigate the game's 3 cities,the sandbox part comes from Altaïr having to investigate his target, sadly the investigation is basically just the same for every target, as a result the parts of the game between targets feel like busy work.
The free running mechanic it is quite good, unlike later games I found it to intuitively interpreting my movements, for example when I'm being chased I run into a wall, Altaïr then runs up and jumps away from it flying over the guards chasing him, though for some it might be misinterpreting their attempts and do something they didn't want.
The combat of the game is rather simple, counter kill, basically all you need to know about it once you have the counter kill ability you've won most fights your in the game just waiting for  counter kill opportunities.
on the whole the gameplay is rather lackluster but if you keep in mind what it brings in the following games

The Graphics:

The graphics in the game looks ok for an old game performance wise it is pretty good on the PC, most PCs now a days can run it no problem but graphics arent too bad considering when it came out.

Overall:

The game overall is ok, if you plan to play the other games for the story its worth playing for the basic story it provides to get the whole overall story, gameplay wise its sadly boring
so its up to you if you want to play, its not a legendary must play game sadly.
if I were to give it a rating I'd rate it against the other games in the series, which means it gets a 1/5 (1 being worst, 5 being best) its not saying its bad as a game but it is probably the worst in the series.