Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles

It’s been over two years since Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles first arrived on the iPhone, so this Xperia Play version of Gameloft’s side-scrolling 3D platform adventure isn’t exactly the most attractive of the system’s launch games.

But while its age may be starting to bear down on this old fighter, the strong gameplay means it’s still worth plugging into your portable Animus.

Slight return

Playing as the original assassin Altair from the best-selling home console series, your task is to leap around Middle Eastern towns collecting orbs (to upgrade weapons), fighting off Templars (because they’re evil), and following a big green arrow (because Gameloft titles have this inherent fear of the player getting lost despite the levels essentially being one long corridor).

Controls are mapped out intelligently to the Xperia Play’s D-pad and buttons, with Square and Triangle handling combat (light and heavy attacks), X producing leaps, L blocking / dodging attacks, and Circle performing contextual actions.

In fact, it’s quite hard to see how Gameloft was able to squeeze all these various controls onto the touchscreen-only devices in the first place, given that there’s hardly a button on the machine that isn’t used for some kind of action.

The stages you’ll encounter are decidedly linear and bereft of the stealthy, crowd-pushing of the series’s roots, so if your favourite part of the Assassin’s Creed series was hiding in groups of giggling courtesans or mumbling monks - tough cookie.

Instead, the game focuses on the freerunning / parkour elements of the original, with familiar abilities like wall-running and counter-attacking gradually unlocked as you progress through the story.

Occasionally, you’ll be invited to pickpocket or interrogate a target, which activates a short and sweet mini-game. They’re simple (too simple in the case of the interrogations), but they do help break up the platforming.

The animation and fluidity of movement from the original is there to a certain degree. As mentioned in the intro, though, the presentation of the game is starting to look long in the tooth next to newer, fresher Gameloft titles.

Blocky characters and muddied textures will annoy some folk, but the chugging (and not to mention dull) cutscenes are particularly disappointing for this fan of Assassin’s Creed lore.

If you’re not here for the story, however, and don’t mind the game looking a little historic in itself, Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles should prove to be a tough yet fair action-platformer.