Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles

The original Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was highly anticipated - for once, you could blend into crowds, scale walls and perform acrobatic stunts, just like an assassin. So it isn't much of a surprise that another game from the series would appear. Altair's Chronicles is not a sequel, but a prequel to the events in the original game. As the assassin Altair, you seek to recover a chalice that could end the Crusades for good. Being an assassin, you'll have to travel around cities via rooftops, dodging traps, hacking up guards when you're compromised, and finding out information about the chalice step-by-step. There's no huge, intricate plot like in the original - Altair's Chronicles focuses more on action than the storyline. Much of the game has you travelling from one point to another in well-designed levels, like a platformer. There are checkpoints littered after almost every major point in a map - it won't hurt as much when you die. Unless you are really careful, you can die a lot - you can even die just by runniing into a very obvious spike. But since you have infinite lives, you can just keep going and going until you get to the next checkpoint. Some enjoyable mini-games break up the pace - there's one where you have to pickpocket a person within a time limit, and an interrogation one that has you poking circles like the DS music game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles is a decent attempt to bring the series to the DS. Unfortunately, the enjoyable gameplay is somewhat marred by the lack of polish in its controls and visuals. Or, like me, you could just treat Altair's Chroniclesas a way to see how assassins get brutally slaughtered by the environment. Your character has far too many lives, anyway.