Assassin's Creed Altaïr's Chronicles

Small packages...

I was only tempted to pick up the game, I must admit, because I was sucked in by the high profile TV commercials for the Xbox 360 version; our hooded assassin swaggering across the Arabian Nights in slow motion to Teardrop, which in my mind has forever fused with the character of Dr. House. I was going to be a Byronic hero, disillusioned with the world, trusting no one, yet effortlessly commanding fear and respect, a wry smile playing at the corner of his mouth as women swoon when he lands softly as a cat dismounting from a rooftop. Sadly, none of this translates onto the credit card sized display of the DS. What I got instead was a Prince of Persia-style platformer that progressed with the repetitive inevitability of Space Invaders.

The character is as two-dimensional as his graphic rendition (as opposed to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, where the character development was the most arresting part of the game) and the story held my attention as long as the first encounter after which I skipped through all the speaking parts. As far as I could understand the goal is to find a chalice in a sandy temple: to that end you have to climb through the rooftops of one town after another to talk to various contacts who can give you clues in exchange of you offing someone they don't like. The assassinations themselves are so much of an afterthought though - you just tiptoe up behind the mark and the cut sequence takes care of the rest - that the word hardly merits being in the title. What the game really is about is jumping to platforms, climbing walls, crawling across beams, swinging on ropes and increasingly intricate combinations of the above.

Now, I don't usually do jumping games, and it is to Assassins Creed's credit that my DS is not shattered to itty bitty pieces. I'm not very good with repetitive tasks either, and always watch with admiration mixed with pity how guys can spend hours doing the same level again and again. And yet, there is an obsessive quality about Assassin that steadied my hand from hurling the DS out of the train window after I died for the umpteenth time missing the same bloody beam. On the upside, it is very generous on save points, and you are helpfully loaded back to the beginning of the same hellish sequence. I was suddenly reminded of an episode in my technology deprived childhood on the darker side of Europe when I got a handheld Tetris console with 5 difficulty levels that held my whole family enthralled for months.

The controls are fairly basic, which suits my fighting style perfectly - indiscriminately pressing all the buttons at once, more than enough to dispense with the occasional guards you come across in way of light relief. There are also a few mini-games for added variety, in which you have to thieve a key from a pouch or hit someone's pressure points to squeeze information out of them using the touch screen. The rest of the time the lower screen displays a map that is largely superfluous, as a giant green arrow points the direction in which you're meant to be going anyway. The camera is not the player's friend, but then again, it so rarely is. More than once you'll find that the target you have to hit is outside the frame, with no option of scrolling sideways, and you have no idea if you're hurling yourself into a ditch full of spikes. The two-dimensionality also makes jumping backwards and forwards (screen up and down) more than tricky, as depth is impossible to judge on a DS screen. I have shamefully abandoned my quest at a Frogger-inspired stage, where you have to get across a sewage canal jumping from one sliding platform to another.

I still fail to see the point of translating a lavishly produced game to an inferior medium, but Assassin's Creed is a competently made and involving enough distraction. Although the motions are the same, the obstacles are sufficiently varied and the overall look is as pleasing as can be expected. Unless you are a gymnastic puzzles enthusiast with sharp reflexes it's hardly worth the bother, but it beats playing on your mobile whilst sitting in a waiting room.

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By Anna Patai