GameSpot and other professional game reviewers who have no clue (read: all of them) make me angry.
WHY THE HELL DID THEY GIVE ASSASSIN'S CREED A 9.0 (8.5 on PC)?!
It's good, but its controls are way too finicky and buggy to deserve that high of a rating. Especially the PC version. That deserves to be a full mark below the 360/PS3 versions, not half of a mark. The controls on the PC port are worse than life itself. Imagine mapping a 360 controller onto a keyboard and mouse (since that's precisely what the developers did -- set the mouse to be the right analog stick and set everything else to keys/buttons). WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO HOLD THREE BUTTONS DOWN TO RUN?! That makes sense in the context of a control pad, but they did absolutely nothing to make the control scheme remotely tolerable for the platform. Seriously, the game HUD is laid out in the exact same way, as if there is any significance to the diamond formation that they give the various actions. It's just awful.
As far as the gameplay goes, the player tries way too hard to show off. There have been numerous times where I've simply tried to sprint and he'll get distracted. "OOOH, A BUILDING! LEMME CLIMB IT!" And next thing I know my health has been sliced down to half because I had trouble getting the insanely finicky fight mode to actually turn itself on when my character's shenanigans caused him to get stuck in the middle of a platoon of guards.
The AI is just...bad. For one, the enemies generally have a line of sight shorter than Verne Troyer. This makes it quite a bit easier for the player when it comes to taking out simple lackies. Fighting the enemies is a bit of a chore. It's not really that hard. All you do is pretty much hold down the block button and watch as the enemies swing their swords into yours a few times, grab you, throw you a few feet, then rinse and repeat. Sometimes they don't even bother with the foreplay, they just toss you around like a little ball. During one fight with a lone guard I literally took my hands off the keyboard and mouse and watched him walk up to me, throw me, walk up to me again, throw me again, and so on and so on. This happened literally twenty times before I started fighting back. I'm not even going to go into how the Templars fight. If I did, there'd be enough swearing to make you guys beg me to turn the FARFULGA filter back on in the interests of good taste.
The voice acting ranges from bad to decent. Some of the characters sound very appropriate for the time period but others (like the character you control in the past, unfortunately) sound very...Two Worlds-esque. Thankfully, the dialogue itself is pretty decent and can never match the forsooth-ness of Two Worlds (a game so awful in every way that makes Team Fortress 2 look like Game of the Millennium material in my eyes). All in all, not bad. Subtitles would be nice, though, there are some cases where it's quite hard to hear people.
All in all, not too bad. I would like to say again: IT DOES NOT DESERVE A BLOODY 9.0. If I were to rate it, I would rate the console versions 7.5 -- generally fun gameplay, marred by control and AI issues. The PC version would get a somewhat lousier 6.5 for having some of the most confusing controls that I've ever dealt with in an action/platformer. They spend absolutely no effort making this game PC-friendly in this sense. Just because porting from PC to console generally involves dumbing down the controls doesn't mean that going the opposite way doesn't require any work.
Halo is a perfect example of how controls should be ported when going from console to PC. They took a game that controlled exceedingly fluently on the Xbox and adapted it to play like a standard FPS on a PC should play. Even Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, a game that still retains some control decisions from the console version (like having to hold reload to attach silencers, turn on laser sights, etc) turned out to be considerably better than Assassin's Creed. At least with R6V2 the only broken features are ones that you'd use prior to battle. With Assassin's Creed, the main game controls are confusing as hell.
Another thing that just popped into my head -- WALKING GETS REALLY ANNOYING REALLY QUICK IN THIS GAME. LE SIGH.
But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this rant-turned-mini-review. Going to try to sleep now. ;_;
OH YEAH, SPORADIC SLEEPING PATTERNS PISSES ME OFF. FUCK YOU, BODY. YOU TOO, BRAIN. GOOD NIGHT.