It's hard to put the sheer size and brilliance of Assassin's Creed into words. It is an epic game that you have to experience for yourself. I will caution that the game is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. While you can plow through the main storyline in under 20 hours, to truly get every single last shred of gaming goodness, you will probably have to put in twice that number.

With its riveting story, beautiful visuals and surprisingly lifelike world, Assassin's Creed is an incredibly deep, enjoyable game that kept us addicted from beginning to bizarre end.

A masterpiece; a true gem. It deserves a place in any serious gamers’ collection. Even though it’s strictly a single player experience, it is a fresh and much needed title in this over crowed sea of average next-gen games.

Its stunning visual style, high concept story, and wildly open level design are like nothing else, even if too much repetition begins to frustrate in the later hours. It’s a game people will still be talking about five years from now.

The first half of Assassin’s Creed is a truly clairvoyant experience. You’ve never played anything like it. The sagacious story, incalculable crowd interaction, and unprecedented freedom to traverse the environment how you choose are landmark moments. Over time, repetition rears its ugly head, combat becomes a necessary routine, and dimwitted foes snatch you out of the third crusade and remind you that you’re playing a game.

In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul.

Assassin’s Creed is remarkable in every aspect it performs. From the sprawling city life to the dual-vision storyline, everything blends together to offer one of the most complete and satisfying experiences so far this year.

This is a great game. The pace may be unexpected, and repetition can be a slight issue, but the excellent gameplay, story, presentation, and immersion turn them into minor details.

An astonishingly ambitious adventure that's, largely, beautifully executed. [Jan 2008, p.72]

A solid enough game to overcome its awkward plot device. It doesn't much matter why you're in the situation you're in. What matters are those wonderful moments when you're sitting on a tower overlooking one of the most gorgeous cities you've ever seen in a game, and you know it's all yours to play in.

A must-buy title for gamers interested in following an excellent story. The wonderful visuals play a major role in the experience and easy controls and open level design will suck you right in. This is not a game for everyone and misses a perfect rating due to pacing issues.

Questionable stealth elements and repetition prevent Assassin's from achieving greatness, but the free-running system and beautiful playgrounds mean Creed is still worth your attention.

As stunning as the game looks and as enthralled as I was by the story - which really is quite intriguing if you look for all the information - the game's flaws are too hard to ignore. They mostly boil down to how the game seemingly goes out of its way to make things less fun than they should be.

This Middle Eastern adventure is one of the most beautiful cinematic games ever devised, but not one of the most rewarding to play. It's also one of the most mature, thoughtful games of recent years, challenging you with ideas and concepts that are far from clear cut. But where is the freedom of choice? Unless you count the difference between the dagger or the sword, there really isn't any.

Assassin's Creed oozes potential from every pore, but Ubisoft has failed to capitalize on a lot of it. Honestly, it feels as though Ubisoft spent the bulk of the game's development cycle building the foundations upon which later games would stand - elements like the catch-all control-scheme and the graphics engine.

Assassin’s Creed is receiving a fair amount of criticism, despite some of its flaws I still believe the game to be very good, it just could have done with some more refining.

The in-game combat isn't bad either, if you can accept two things—there's not enough variety to the combat, and the extra effot to sneak around often isn't worth it. The guards can be real idiots, too. Past that, this Assassin cuts deep.

Assassin’s Creed has a rich spread of activities with hours of gameplay. Unfortunately, it gets extremely repetitive about midway through—and then it unsatisfyingly turns into a tedious, combat-heavy game.

If you play Assassin's Creed for an hour, you will probably think it's a fantastic game. But as Assassin's progresses, its dual storylines and repetitive quests begin to grow tiresome. There are so many great individual elements, but they are lost among the myriad of poor decisions from Ubisoft Montreal.

Assassin's Creed is fun, but it isn't the system seller that everyone was expecting it to be. Climbing around and exploring the city is initially a lot of fun, but there isn't much to do beyond that. The investigations and the side-quests are repetitive and quickly become tedious instead of entertaining.

Astonishingly accurate when it comes to historic characters, details, and setting, it's a shame that the repetitive, formulaic structure to the game diminishes any impulse that the intriguing storyline provides.

Instead of a true stealth engine, you have awkward "hide spots" to accommodate the free roaming. Combat is either too easy or too hard, lacking the brilliance of a dedicated action title. And the free-roaming, bound as it is to mission objectives that would be fine in a more linear game, is just unsatisfying. Each element of the game is individually interesting, but as a whole the package feels incomplete and patchwork more than innovative.

It's a fitting end to a game that starts off brightly, wriggling elusively as you try and grasp what's going on, delighting in the mechanics and beautiful visuals, before sinking into a pattern that, while fairly gratifying, never evolves and ultimately becomes a bit boring, and quite amazingly repetitive.

It attempts a lot of ambitious things and it almost succeeds at every one. But it's apparent that these grandiose ideas may have been a little too much to master the first go-round. But hey, at least the groundwork is laid for a killer sequel -- right, Ubisoft?

I felt like Ubisoft Montreal has made this game exclusively to be shown at gaming conventions. They have this great tech demo, this one looping level complete with cool graphics and gameplay mechanics, but they ultimately had no idea what to do with it. They just kept on going with these derivative missions until you become fed up with it.

After the first level I thought I had a winner on my hands for sure but as I played more I got more bored and the game became more repetitive. Even though it takes a lot of chances with innovative features and an entirely new fighting system it does not follow through where it matters.