Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.

by Jamison DeLorenzo

You need forgive the embedded juvenile humor for the lead-in question of the week: how do you know when it is okay to play in the sandbox? Several reviewers have felt the need to pound Assassin’s Creed for reasons that flew over my head. It is true that I am nowhere near an established or astute reviewer that many paid professionals are, but sometimes it takes the wit of a strung out English major (they’re always useful for needlessly comparing totally unassociated ideas) to critique design choices in a game that have no direct impact on the overall quality of a game.

It was not all that difficult to find several scathing reviews of Assassin’s Creed and to create a set of flaws that people had with the game. The universal opinion of the game seems to be that while it was drawn out and somewhat laborious the game was a lot of fun. Many reviews are more polarized than that, but I feel that this was a fairly common sentiment amongst most reviewers. There all always exceptions (and no, they never “prove” the rule… by definition), and in this case the most glaring are the ones that stipulate that it was a horrible design choice to make Assassin’s Creed a sandbox game.

What is that exactly? Sandbox games refer to games where the player is given overall objectives to complete but is given free reign on how to do it. GTA is a popular example when describing this style of game for obvious reasons. You’re almost never told what route to take to a specific place, which weapons to bring, which car to drive, what steps to take once you get there, or anything like that. The order in which you complete several objectives isn’t necessarily important either. Metal Gear is another game like that, only exercising stealth is encouraged.

Consider the popularity of these two franchises for a moment. There are contributing factors like story and graphics that makes these games what they are, but giving players free roaming capability is the highlight of the game. Combining that with the dark side of what you can do in GTA is what makes that franchise the powerhouse that it is right now. A free roaming environment is one of the many major draws of the larger RPG’s for many people. Giving gamers the ability to do what they want when they want in a game is, in my opinion, the best way to make games. The short version of this reads as follows: constraints are bad.

Upon reading multiple articles talking about the recent rash of games attempting to emulate a sandbox environment I began to wonder which games were being talked about besides Assassin’s Creed. Have there been any? I sure haven’t played any, and I don’t recall any popular ones that people have been talking about. Saint’s Row is the only other franchise that comes to mind, and that’s much more of a GTA clone than just another sandbox game.

I submit to you that Assassin’s Creed, if you look at it as a GTA clone, it, for the most part, succeeds. Grabbing all of the flags is basically just like grabbing all the hidden packages. Doing all of the extra missions (saving the citizens) is a lot like completing all of the now defunct rampages. Completing all basic mission objectives gives you free reign to recklessly roam the city, causing as much havoc as you deem appropriate, before completing them is a direct parallel. Whether I’m performing acrobatic face plants into alleyways or crashing a sports car into a pawn shop I’m having fun. That’s they key to a good game isn’t it? Fun?

The flaws that exist in Assassin’s Creed are the battle system (which is mindlessly repetitive) and the later missions not offering anything that new. Those are very gaping flaws that prevent the game from being as epic as Ubisoft wanted it to be. The only thing that prevents the game from being a total rinse and repeat is the moving story, but any good reviewer sees past that when discussing the game as a whole. Any competent critic, or common sense enthusiast, also figures out that a lack of mission variety and rewards has nothing to do with a gameplay mechanism.

Yes, a lot of the extras you get by exploring the world don’t provide you with a whole lot. However, I liked climbing insanely tall buildings and swan diving in conveniently placed haystacks. I loved finding perches and gazing on the horizons. Did exploring the ends of the Earth net me anything interesting in terms of rewards, story, or abilities? No, but that’s a problem that can be easily resolved without nuking the environment. I did expect a fuller story by finding all those extra flags and saving all of those citizens. My DNA sequence was more complete as a result- why didn’t that amount to anything? The lack of reward was frustrating, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to hunt for everything.

It’s basic logic- if you don’t enjoy exploring areas or already know it’s going to be tedious then don’t complain after you do it. It was painfully obvious going in that the size of the world Ubisoft created for the game was gigantic (even though all of the major cities were remarkably close to each other) and I knew I was going to hate saving all the citizens, hunting down all the flags, and killing and endless amount of guards. I did it anyway knowing that is largely unnecessary, and if it weren’t for a free-roaming environment I would have been in those annoying areas where the places the game developers didn’t want me to go were blocked with invisible walls. I would also have been forced down a path instead of running across rooftops while dodging arrows in whatever direction I felt like.

Call me insane, but I know what I prefer.

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