#423: assassin’s creed: bloodlines
how to do a portable assassin’s creed justice
assassin’s creed: bloodlines (2009, PSP, griptonite, inc.): after the platforming-and-touchscreen-gimmicks disaster that was assassin’s creed: altaïr’s chronicles, one would be forgiven in that assuming that a game as sprawling (by 2007 standards anyway) would be difficult to translate to a handheld format. the playstation portable spinoff bloodlines is here to prove you wrong… sort of.
the PSP was, pixel for pixel, a superior platform to the nintendo DS. more powerful, bigger games, no bullshit gimmicks. in terms of raw specs, it was on par with the playstation 2, which is probably why there’s so many PSP ports of PS2 games (or vice versa, as seen with grand theft auto’s PSP titles being ported to the PS2.) as the PS3 era came into full swing, the PSP continued to prove itself a reliable handheld alternative, not boasting the kind of graphics capabilities a PS3 did but still a beefy little system in its own right as it straddled the line between two generations.
assassin’s creed: bloodlines is emblematic of the PSP’s penchant for spin-offs. like its brethren, it offers a stripped-down version of the original game’s experience; while obviously it’s taken a tremendous graphical hit, it’s also lost a lot of features. but the bare bones of the game are still there; it’s still, at its heart, a “social stealth” game. your options for evading enemies have been reduced to hay stacks and rooftop gardens; the crowd of people has been reduced from “standing-room only at lollapalooza” down to “extras for the wii version of dead rising.” you’ll be visiting two cities with no travel between them, and they’re all split into separate zones that must be accessed via loading gates. the lack of a right thumbstick is, as always, a liability (the game tries to get around this by having the left shoulder button change the function of the face buttons, but it’s a hacky solution.)
but in spite of all this, it still manages to present a fairly decent facsimile of the assassin’s creed experience. you can still climb buildings and run around rooftops. you can still stab people in the face. you can, in fact, still throw guards off ledges. even the combat has remained more or less the same. the only real thing that’s changed is that the game positions itself as a sequel to the original, occurring one month later. relocating the action from the middle east to cyprus, the plot revolves around the templar occupation of the island and their sinister machinations surrounding a mysterious “archive” that promises all kinds of mysterious artifacts. along the way you’ll meet an ex-templar whose own path of revenge eventually has her taking your side, and a collection of spies, templars and general pieces of shit who’ll keep you on your toes. the story is surprisingly twisty at times, and, much like its bigger brother, ends kind of ambiguously.
all in all, assassin’s creed: bloodlines is a pretty fine game for what it is. it won’t challenge you much, as most of the game world is pretty small with fairly obvious parkour paths to take. but it manages to distill a lot of what made the original game great into a small package, and that in itself is pretty admirable.
