Assassin's Creed: A forumite in Montreal!

The characters in the game are also particularly varied and great in their numbers, which is one of the game's unique selling points. Huge, bustling crowds exist throughout the game, every single individual of which can be interacted with in one way or another. I actually found myself chuckling as I continued to rudely barge into women NPCs carrying large water bottles and knocking them over. Ubisoft actually created its own procedural system to generate random and varied NPCs, and, in the aforementioned presentation, demonstrated just how easy it was to create hundreds of different characters by adjusting various variables. My wanton cruelty was soon brought to an end, however, as the city guards decided they'd had enough of my anti-social behaviour and issued me with an ASBO, medieval style, which involved sharp pointy objects and a lot of pain. The game employs, to great effect I might add, its own social behaviour system that determines whether or not your conduct is deemed acceptable. An indicator on the game's HUD highlights when you're being monitored by the guards - yellow meaning that you're being watched but are acting in an acceptable manner whereas red means the opposite. It's then up to you to lose the chasing guards by breaking their direct line of sight to you for a certain length of time, or by hiding un-noticed in one of the many rooftop huts positioned around the game's world. These huts act as safe houses and if you can hide behind their curtains without being spotted allow you to then carry on your business, whatever it may be, without fear of further repercussions.

The game's combat, while initially confusing, is eventually very satisfying. But button-mashers should beware as employing that strategy will get you nowhere. Altercations, in my experience, are best won by using counter-attacks which require very precise timing - pressing the X button just as an enemy is about to attack results in some fantastically brutal counters, with Altair viciously gutting opponents with his hidden blade. There's a definite rhythm to the combat with attacks and counters constantly flowing back and forth.

It's worth mentioning at this point, however, that I am slightly concerned that the combat will fast become repetitive - even during my short time with the game I found myself automatically resorting to repeatedly pushing X to counter and soon found this somewhat monotonous. But in fairness, there are various new moves and attacks to be learned as you progress through the game and each of the game's four weapons - long sword, hidden blade, throwing knives (which are wisely in limited supply and are ineffective against 'boss targets') and fist - all perform a wide variety of ferocious and ruthless attacks. It's too early to predict just how big a deal this will turn out to be, but this was one of the first concerns that came to my attention.

The game also features some brilliant AI - combatants will quickly learn your patterns if you insist on repeatedly attacking them in the same way. I even tested this claim for myself and quickly found myself being out-countered and definitely had to mix it up. The enemies also have a morale system in place which means that if one of the guards fighting you gets the upper hand, his compadres will shout words of encouragement and join in on the fight. Conversely, if you start to dominate proceedings, group morale will be low and your enemies will back off, become hesitant and even decide you're too tough an opponent before fleeing with their tails between their legs.

The controls were also a slight bone of contention for me during my preview. Mainly because it actually took me a good 30-45 minutes to become fully accustomed to them. Though in hindsight, I was thrown into the middle of the game without any instructions. The full game features various tutorials early on explaining all the game's nuances in much more detail, whereas I had to basically figure them out for myself.

The other criticisms I have of the game relate back to the point I made in my opening paragraphs about how Ubisoft strived to create as immersive an experience as is possible. While in the main it's clearly obvious that it has created a stunningly sumptuous adventure, there were one or two minor issues that unfortunately managed to break that immersion for me. While in the main the animation and collision detections are exemplary, I did notice an unfortunate ragdoll related incident where a downed enemy's legs ended up perpendicular to his head.

The second and probably most jarring incident I had with the game was when I was stalking a victim I was about to pick-pocket. After following for a short while and managing to evade the guards blocking the path to my intended target, I eventually managed to sneak up on him and was about to pick his pockets when he simply vanished into thin air before re-spawning at the start of his patrol path. Now normally, those two admittedly minor (in the grand scale of things) issues wouldn't have been that significant, especially as games exhibit this sort of behaviour regularly. However, vanishing and re-spawning NPCs completely spoiled that one specific moment substantially because at that point I was fully focused on stalking my prey and was very much engrossed in the moment and more importantly the game.

The thing that drove this point home even more so, though, was Ubisoft's opening insistence that it had strived to do everything possible to ramp up the levels of immersion. I mentioned this to one of the game's developers who pulled a face before adding that unfortunately I'd not managed to pick my target's pockets in time and thus had failed the side mission and it had to be restarted. Now, this "memory reset" might make sense in terms of the game's otherwise unexplained and mysterious plot, and might not have been quite so jarring had I been privy to the game's full narrative. So I am prepared to give the game some leeway as apart from this issue I was pretty much blown away by it.