Assassin's Creed HD

If there's one strength mobile games have over their peers on home consoles or high-powered PCs, it's their portability. It might sound like an obvious thing to point out, but the fact we can now play games on a device almost everyone has in their pockets is a fantastic advantage. Our mobiles can transport us to alien worlds, or turn us into a Formula 1 driver, and all without us having to shell out on expensive new hardware.

In Assassin's Creed HD's case (the 'rich' version of last year's Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles – Gameloft is currently putting 'HD' on the end of games where once it would have said '3D'), the mobile in our pockets represents a time machine, shoving a sword in our hands and transporting us back to the Middle East in the time of the Crusades. It's a journey that, perhaps surprisingly, proves that the canny mobile phone can serve up sword-slicing action with the best of them, with main character Altair's foray onto the rooftops serving up an adventure that's as deep as it is entertaining.

That's because Gameloft has not been limited by its format, with Assassin's Creed HD pushing mobile adventure yarns – both in terms of graphical quality and pure content – to a new level. Yes, it's almost insulting to refer to Assassin's Creed as a 'mobile game' – the term often painting a picture of simple puzzle titles or poorly realised film licences 'inspired' by their console-bound cousins.

While it's true Altair made a big splash on consoles late last year, Assassin's Creed HD is no doppelganger. This is an original 3D adventure that will see you leaping from roof to roof, flooring assailants with your sword and tapping sources for vital information to aid your progression. It's as rounded an affair as you could hope to come across, yet it manages to remain straightforward and accessible throughout.

That's mainly because Assassin's Creed HD introduces each facet of play step by step. Basic play is built upon Altair exploring each level, picking up blue orbs – which can be traded in to up health or sword skill – as he goes. Most levels run from left to right, although there's often more than one path available to you, with the game's 3D nature allowing for trails to appear both in the foreground and background.

All the routes, however, involve scrambling up to the city heights, climbing walls and leaping over alleys in the process. All such moves are fairly simple, with the various actions – jumping, creeping, and fighting with your sword, amongst others – assigned to number keys, while moving itself is handled by the soft-key. While sometimes doing two things at once requires the skills of a contortionist, on the whole the game's controls become second nature, with Gameloft carefully introducing each element (complete with instructions) one by one.

The developer has also broken play up a little by introducing the odd mini-game. Interrogating potential informants becomes a case of pushing certain pressure points on their body to inflict pain. There's nothing like twisting someone's arm to gain access to the truth, and Assassin's Creed HD packages up such violence in a little jaunt that requires a swift sense of timing, with the impetus being on hitting those pressure points at an precise moments.

If such asides were included to stem any feeling of repetition in the main game, then Gameloft need not have worried. While Assassin's Creed HD could be boiled down to three main exercises – running, jumping and fighting, with a few variants added into the mix – their implementation is suitably diverse, ensuring that neither boredom or complacency ever become a fixture.

That's not to say that Creed isn't without its faults. Slowdown appears to be a major factor when being tackled by more than one assailant, reaching an almost debilitating level during some end-of-level encounters.

It's also possible to lose your way at some points, as it can appear that some structures can be scaled, when in fact they are nothing but background. Altair can actually run up some short walls – though telling the walls that can be mounted apart from those that are merely decoration is a question of guesswork.

Thankfully, none of those flaws manage to halt Altair from achieving Assassin's Creed HD's main aim of being an entertaining and varied take on the mobile adventure game genre. Gameloft has developed one of the few mobile games that genuinely makes you forget what format you're playing it on, widening the scope for those that follow.

Assassin's Creed HD

Assassin's Creed HD isn't designed for short-trips or that spare five minutes in your lunch break. This is a fully fledged adventure title, and one that shows much invention and promises a whole bag of fun
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Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.