There are certain standard-setting games in each genre, like the brilliant FPS action of Halo, or the incredible sound design of Bioshock, that you wish could be applied generally to every game you play. Assassin’s Creed has its particular perfection — you’ll wish that every game had this level of graphics and animation.

When Altair scales the highest points in each ancient city, the view from the top is absolutely breathtaking. Hawks slowly circle your “synchronize” points, where you can take stock of your surroundings and find nearby objectives. Telltale tufts of hay indicate a jumping-off point where you can perform a perfect dive into a haystack.

This climbing, synchronizing, and soaring moments are so strong that the entire game could have been reskinned as mountain-climbing/base-jumping simulation (think Tom Cruise at the beginning of Mission: Impossible 2). But there’s just a bit more to Assassin’s Creed, like the stealth, crowd, and combat situations.

These aspects of the game are clearly not as well-developed as the incredible climbing and moving mechanics. Instead, they’re watered-down versions of, respectively, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Prince of Persia.

The stealth mechanics in particular are incredibly limited for a game with such extraordinary detail in its visuals. There are only four ways to evade guards, short of beating them all in hand-to-hand combat. You can blend with a group of monks, roll into a haystack, crash someone’s rooftop garden, or sit on a bench. That’s all. There should be so many more ways to blend or evade capture, and that would have cured much of the game’s unfortunate repetition.

Metal Gear Solid 2, which came out six years ago, offers far more ways to avoid detection. You can hide in lockers, disguise yourself as a box, and crouch in the shadows. Later Metal Gear Solid games offered new camouflage options, but Assassin’s Creed falls far short of the bar set by Snake years ago.

The crowd mechanics should offer better blending and hiding mechanics, but for the most part Altair sticks out like a sore thumb. Why a group of guards would ignore the one monk wearing a ton of knives all over his back is one of the game’s many leaps of logic. The fact that guards would ignore the conspicuously-dressed guy sitting on a bench, who looks just like the one that slit one of their fellow guards’ throats, makes me wonder if I’m not playing A Hard Day’s Night: The Game.

George, Paul, Ringo, and Altair run from adoring fans and guards

Besides the running and hiding, the crowds in Assassin’s Creed are generally uninteresting, but do give me a great deal of hope for Grand Theft Auto 4. Like the GTA or Hitman series, citizens will run and freak out if you start a bloody fight in their midst, and you can commit some random criminal acts like pushing beggars or pickpocketing knives from hooded thieves.

But like the stealth mechanics, the crowd interactions are barely passable on the surface. You should have more characters to interact with than just beggars, thieves, and drunks. Your investigation missions along the main storyline will take you across several interesting conversations, but these seem unnatural.

They are extremely forced, and never feel fluid or lifelike. Instead of triggering a cutscene, couldn’t there have been some way to make the crowds feel less robotic? Even when you save a citizen, they only offer the same few lines of thanks, and the end result is always that either a group of monks or a group of vigilantes appear to offer you help should you need it.

The citizen saving side missions take me to the game’s disappointing, but beautifully animated swashbuckling combat system. Instead of succeeding with combat like the Prince of Persia or God of War games, Assassin’s Creed has a button-mashing, timing-based combat system that looks great but feels cheap.

Guards hardly put up any resistance, letting you take the lead in this dance of death. The result looks like something out of a bad kung-fu movie. Guards will surround you in swarms of 10-20, then attack one at a time until they’re all dead. Chalk the combat system up to one more missed opportunity for this game.

So the stealth, crowd, and combat range from laughably silly to completely awful. But there’s a saving grace here, which I touched on earlier in this review–it looks astounding. There are hardly any glitches at all in the scenery or animations. Every time you dive into a haystack, shove a beggar, or drive three feet of steel into a guard, it looks flawless. It’s almost enough to make you forget that the actual game lacks a lot of challenge or depth.

It’s hard to understate how far the game’s looks go in making up for these fundamental flaws. You can actually forgive the lack of side missions or repetitive nature of the investigations, because at any given time it looks unlike any other game out there. Also, a compelling story makes the flaws a bit more palatable.

Scores for this game have generally ranged from perfect to slightly above average. The key to understanding this breadth of critical opinion is simply due to the weight that each individual will grant to graphics over substance. Assassin’s Creed is not a substantive game beyond its incredibly detailed graphics and animation. It is, at times, as simplistic as Pac Man once you start to stray from the main storyline. It does not even offer a ton of replayability, but the graphics and an intriguing story make up for these problems significantly.

Since Assassin’s Creed has been referred to as the start of a new series, we can expect a sequel that hopefully will deliver on the promises of the original. Like Heavenly Sword, this is a game that looks astonishing on the surface but reveals only a shallow experience underneath. Still, considering how completely original the setting and animation is in this game, it’s a solid recommendation.

What does this score mean? Check out our review scoring breakdown.