When I finally got my mum to **** off and stop ruining my life, I got to play some more AS.

First I was sent to assassinate somebody (surprise!), and it turned out there were six somebodies to chase after. And each one of them is inside a courtyard, with two guards and a crowd of people blocking my way. There’s no obvious way to climb in without attracting way too much attention. I did manage to go up to one of the guards and kill him with the hidden blade, and just about get to the other guy and kill him before he noticed. That dispersed the crowd so I could get through the doorway. But then, predictably, I was spotted and a complex, cramped battle ensued.

I tried my luck elsewhere. I actually found one guy standing out in the street. I was able to kill the lone guard and him just with the hidden blade alone. But then I got killed and… yeah, you have to start the entire mission from the beginning. **** that!!

So the next day, when I’d recovered from my rage-quit, I had another go at it. Turns out that you only have to kill one guy, it’s just that you can’t tell which one without visiting all six places. By luck I discovered that it’s the furthest one. You can’t tell until you attack; the target quickly runs away. I made the mistake of trying to fight the guards; the correct response is to chase after the target. So I’m running through the streets after this guy, and he gets slightly ahead of me, and suddenly the game is all like “desynchronising memory; target escaped”. What the ****?! He’s right there! I can see him!! He’s right in front of me, casually walking off because I’ve stopped chasing him!

So I restart the mission, and every time I reach the street where I lost him, the game ends. I have to actually quit the game and go back in to fix this — and that means I have to walk all the way back to the starting point, climb in without being killed, watch the cut-sequence, and then continue from where I left off.

It’s really quite infuriating how when you’re trying to escape, or to chase somebody, every single person in front of you stands directly in your path. They don’t trip the target up, only you. And hell, one of the vigilanties grabs the target and stops him getting away, so I try to attack him, but no matter how frantically I mash the controls, my character insists on attacking the guards chasing me. I’m sitting in my chair literally screaming at the top of my voice “Him! Kill him! That guy!!!” But no, my character refuses to attack the target, no matter what buttons I press. I die, and now I have to start all over again. >_<

So I start again. I kill one guard with the hidden blade, and the other guard spots me. The target runs off, and I chase him. I chase him and chase him and chase him. And we end up at a guard tower, so now there’s, like, 20 guards trying to mince me up. And I’m still desperately trying to make my character attack the target, not all the other guards. If I can just kill him, I get a checkpoint. But if he lives, I’ve lost everything and I’ll have to start all over again!

Eventually, by sheer fluke, I manage to kill this guy. (Who obviously insists that he only did it for the good of the people.) It takes me a few attempts, but I eventually kill all the guards. (Like I said, I get a checkpoint for killing the target.) Now I just need to return to the Bureua… hahaha. That’s getting to be harder than the actual assassinations! Seriously, I walk through an alley — the only route into the next district, and the guards on either side are like “Assassin! Your life ends now! I will cut you! Die, infidel!!”

So I run for it. And I run and I run and I run. I climb onto rooftops and make impossible jumps across empty space. Yet no matter what I do, I can’t get rid of these people chasing me. Sometimes I lose them for a moment, but every single ****ing time I get withint 2 feet of a hiding place, my status indicator instantly turns red again. It’s not ****ing fair!!! This is silly. I’ve run from one end of the city to the other. I’ve make jinks and turns, scrambled up vertical walls and dropped from huge heights, and nothing, nothing will get rid of these little ****ers chasing me!

I lost count of how many times I ran up to a haystack or a garden, and I’m slamming my fingers against the keys so hard I nearly broke my keyboard, but my character is in absolutely no hurry to actually, you know, hide! And just as he finally gets the message and hides, the damned status indicator turns red again. It almost makes me want to bawl my eyes out. IT’S NOT FAIR!

And best of all, I finally get rid of the little ****s. My status turns green. I see the guards get bored and wander off. Eventually they put their swords away. I check the map; I’m now even further away from the Bureau than when I started. Great. So I get out and start walking. I walk maybe half a street, and suddenly out of nowhere somebody screams “Assassin!” and we start all over again. There’s nobody even remotely near me; what the hell?!

So anyway, about half an hour after I finished the actual mission, I finally make it back to the Bureau alive. Fortunately, it seems that now when I complete a mission, I can just teleport from the Bureau back to my master, get the next name, walk to the city gates and teleport to the next city. Because travelling on horseback was just tediously intractible. Suffice it to say that my character varies from self-doubt to unshakable conviction as the various people he kills speak to him, and he argues with his master.

It’s becoming extremely annoying how the peasent women only pester me. An entire city full of people, and they only get in my way. They drive me up the wall! (And then they throw rocks at me to knock me off the wall!) Similarly, those mad people. They only seem to attack me. Nobody else, just me. It’s like the entire city wants to attract attention to me. And then there’s the throwing knives. Why oh why oh why can’t you throw them at people?! What’s that all about? I figured, you know, you’ve got seven guards harassing somebody, why not just chuck seven knives at them and be done with it?

Eventually I figured this out. You can only throw knives at somebody who’s more than three quarters of a mile away from you. You have to manually reselect your target after each kill (otherwise you just throw the knives at the empty space where the first guy was). And you can only throw knives if there’s nobody with a sword less than three quarters of a mile away from you. All of which is very, very tedious. But once or twice I did manage to find a bunch of guards and kill every single one of them without moving from the spot where I stood. It requires a good line of sight though. (And it requires those begger women to **** OFF and LEAVE ME ALONE!) Fortunately, throwing knives around usually gets rid of them.

Equally fortunately, I’ve now got the process of pickpocketting knives from thugs down to almost an artform. And if they do see me, I just beat them to death with my fists and get a knife anyway.

After one mission, I did actually go back to fight school. I’d tell you about it, but the Number One Rule of Fight School is that Nobody Talks About Fight School.

Oh wait, that’s Fight Club. Sorry about that…

Yes, the tutorial tells you to do things like “press button 0”, and you have to just guess what the **** that actually means. Anyway, I figured a few things out. I already knew that it’s LMB to attack and RMB to defend, and I discovered a while ago that if you hit LMB, then hit it again just as your blades meet, it seems to be far more damaging. This time I discovered that if you hold the RMB until your opponent starts an attack, and hit LMB as well just as the attack starts, then 6% of the time your character does an elaborate sequence of acrobatics and deals a crapload of damage.

It’s always amused me how all the characters use there swords basically to bash each other over the head like it’s a hammer not a blade. But with this new trick, I get to actually stab people and graphically dice them up. It almost looks gratuitously violent. Hell, I was fighting some soldiers and one of them actually said “aaagh! I yield! I yield!” and ran away from me! Now there’s something I’ve never seen bofore…

All of which is very fortunate, because in my last mission, I was supposed to kill the leader of the Templars. I went to the funeral, and the priest is like “As you know, this man was murdered. And the murderer is right here, amoung us now. Actually, that’s him, right there” and he points straight at my head.

Oh crap.

So the crowd run away screaming, and a dozen knights draw their swords and come at me. It took me about a dozen attempts to kill them all, not helped by the archers shooting me from somewhere. Along with mincing people up, I discovered that if instead of clicking the LMB, you just hold it down, your character does a very slow sword blow, which is almost always a one-hit kill. (God only knows why the person you’re targetting doesn’t try to defend themselves…)

I said before that only one person attacks at a time, and that’s not quite true; it seems only two attack at a time. And good luck guessing which two. I also love the way that the grab-break move doesn’t work. (Or rather, works only 3% of the time.) Very useful, that. Mind you, when you’re surrounded, sometimes being thrown around is the only way to move. For whatever reason, once you’re in a fight the game refuses to let you walk to a better location. You’re welded to the spot and have no real control over where you go, or who you attack. You just get to select what attack to do. Maybe.

Anyway, I kill everybody, and it turns out I’m attacking a decoy. I love the way he’s just killed, like, 15 soldiers, but because the decoy isn’t the man he was sent to kill, he just lets her go. (What, and she doesn’t try to stab him or anything?) It seems my target definitely knew I was coming, and is off arranging for our enemies to join forces against us. Groovy.

So now I return to the Bureau — oops, I mean “spend 45 minutes trying to return to the Bureau”. :p So apparently I have to ride to some other place that I haven’t visited before. Great, so I’m going by horse then? Oh, swell. Well, my first problem is getting out of the city alive. There’s a line of guards, and no scholars to get me through them. So I just ran. Sure, the guards chased me, but when the next portion of the level loads, there are no guards any more. And now I have a horse. Sweet!

I really, really can’t see where I’m going with chunks of my map missing, so I decide to scale a viewpoint. Unfortunately it’s so heavily guarded that I can’t. I get half way up, and the soldiers throw stones and knock me down. If only they would just **** OFF for TEN SECONDS then I could get this map chunk and leave, but noooooo. (And anyway, why can’t you grab a ledge as you fall? The computer voice keeps reminding you to do this, but why doesn’t it work?) It’s so so frustrating repeating the same 30 seconds of game again and again and again and again just because the soldiers won’t **** off and leave you alone!

Eventually I tried a new tactic. My original plan was just to gallop in there and climb the tower before they could stop me, but that is apparently impossible. So I walk up to the first line of guards and take out as many as I can with throwing knives. I haven’t got many, so then the rest of them charge at me. I kill all but one of them, and he runs away? Well anyway, I walk towards the tower, and the 30+ other soldiers who just blatently watched me kill their buddies completely ignore me and let me climb to the top of the tower. Christ that was stupidly hard!

Finally I make it to my destination, and here’s where the crazy starts. I’m on a path with cliffs on either side. Looks like some kind of battle happening down below. Hmm, well, whatever. I walk forward and a bunch of soldiers run at me. OK, I’ll just run away an— oh, there’s an invisible wall in the way? OK, I’m jump down the cliff — no, another invisible wall. OK, so I’ll run back the way I came — no, now there’s an invisible wall there too. So basically I’m trapped in a 30 foot square chunk of land with 6 soldiers. Cool.

Bloody good thing I went to fight school, eh? I cut these guys up, and the invisible wall goes away. I move forward a bit, and another wave of soldiers, and another set of invisible walls. I dispatch all of them and move a bit further forward. More walls, more soldiers. (There’s about 12 of them by now!) I’ve never fought that many enemies at once and lived, but this time I do manage to take them all out. This pattern repeats over and over again; each time I move forward, more invisible walls trap me, and larger and larger numbers of enemies attack me.

And I kill every last one of them without dying myself. I think I survived the entire passage first time. Not that it was easy; I think I just got lucky. I got pretty badly injured. But hey, stand in a corner for a minute or two and that’ll fix itself. Finally I find King Richard, and there’s another long cut-scene. He decides he doesn’t know whether to believe me or the Templar, so… hey, sword fight! (Oh really? Again?)

This did take quite a few attempts. It’s extremely frustrating the number of times I got down to just two knights, only to die and have to start all over again. But eventually I dispatched them all, and the Templar himself runs in. I killed him first time. And he tells me that — le gasp! — my master is one of the evil dudes. Really?

I have a chat with Richard, and then I wake up back at HQ. Uh, yeah, the entire city is filled with zombies. This can’t be good. I have a quick look at my map to see where I’m going, and the objective kinda gives the game away. Anyway, I walk up the hill, and the guards all attack me. Oh great, another 24-vs-1 sword fight, eh? So after a couple of attempts, I kill them all — and so another bunch jump down and attack me. *sigh* So I kill most of them, and suddenly they run off. Oh, right, my buddy has turned up with some archers. Thanks for dropping by.

I walk into HQ. There’s a whole bunch of villagers standing there. Watching me. Um. Hoookay then… So I walk into HQ (I was half expecting those guys to attack me). There’s nobody here. I walk outside into the useless garden area that’s never been used for anything. Suddenly an orange blade of light comes down and pins me to the spot.

What the hell?! Well I didn’t see that comming… And oh look, there’s my master, holding a spooky orange glowy thing. And yes, suddenly the wise old sage is quite obviously evil. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) And then… uh… the nine guys I killed are all here to kill me? That can’t be good. Still, I killed them once, I can do it again… and I did, yay me!

And then I’m pinned down again. “Fight me like a man! Or are you afraid?” “Afraid? What have I to fear? Look at the power I weald!” He walks towards me, sword drawn. And… there’s… wow, OK, now there’s 15 of him.

Oh ****.

Seriously, the image of this guy strolling towards me and splitting into 15 copies is really quite dramatic. Presumably this guy knows how to use a blade, so I’m in quite a bit of trouble here. This can’t be good.

Sure enough, it took about a dozen attempts to kill all but three of him… and then I’m pinned down again and there’s only one of him. And he tells me about his new world order. And then… wait, “page fault in non-paged area caused by nv4.dll”? Oh you have got to be ****ing kidding me! Oh **** you! No way, man!

I battle all the way to the end of the game, only to receive a Blue Screen of Death. Fantastic!

So I reboot my PC, wait for it to finish starting up, start AS, wait for that to start, navigate the 15 menues to go back into the game. And I start at the bottom of the hill with the zombies again. Great. So I walk back up the hill, kill the guards again, kill (most of) the second wave of guards again, talk to my buddy again, walk inside, kill the 9 victims again, kill (most of) the 15 masters again, and get back to the speach I was at before. (Did I mention that I had to replay many of these fights several times to survive them?)

Finally, I fight the master one on one, and win. Now the treasure can be destroyed… destroyed… destroyed? No, I can’t destroy it. But… what the heck? A map of the world?

“We’ve got it!” Oh, wait, I’m back in the real world? So I guess my ancester never destroyed it? Or…? OK, after some dialogue I’m left with more questions than answers. “Kill him!” “No, wait — we might still need him.” “Oh, OK then.”

They walk off, and I see glowy things. Wait, eagle vision works in the real world?? (Hmm, come to think of it, I never once used it until now. I wander what the point of it was?) Hoookay, there’s weird invisible writing everywhere. Even in my room…

…they’re rolling the credits? They’re rolling? Oh, well, I guess that was the whole game then? Hmm. I think there’s a sequeal.

Weirder, after the credits roll, I’m back in my room. And I can walk around and stuff, but, uh, the game’s over, so I can’t actually do anything. Hmm.

I wander what the price for AS2 is?