It's been a while since I've played a game on my PSP! A few months back I noticed that the price of Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines had dropped on Amazon, and I thought it would be a good idea to get it, as well as a few other games for the PSP I wanted to play (such as God of War) before these things start getting rare and more expensive on eBay.  I've been on the fence about getting, and playing, this game since the reviews hinted at really poor camera controls.  That said, since I am not getting an xbox One anytime soon, I thought that I would try out the game despite the camera controls.

The game brings us back to take on the role of Altaïr from the original Assassin's Creed.  The game takes place only in the Animus, so you don't get to see what's happening in the real world.  For all we know this game's real-world story could be taking place before or after Desmond dies - or IS he dead? Who knows! I choose to believe that he is not.  Altaïr, after the events of Assassin's Creed takes to Cyprus with a captured Templar, Maria.  She ends up escaping and Altaïr tries to re-capture her, while at the same time trying to eliminate the templar influence on Cyprus.  The game takes place in two cities: Limasol and Kyrenia. We find out that the templars have a secret archive there with ancient artifacts, but by the time Altaïr gets there they've removed them all.  Maria seems to see the truth about templars and we are getting hints that she defects to the Assassins.  I do wonder if this is the woman that we see in Assassin's creed II when we see Altaïr's memories with a woman.

At the end, once the templars are taken care of, Altaïr and Maria will head on east (maybe this is who the China, India, and Russian assassins get on-board).  From a story perspective the story isn't bad, and it actually does provide some interesting hints about humanity and human behavior when taken together with Assassins' Creed: Rogue.  The final templar boss tells Altaïr thatthe assassins and the templars are more alike than he thinks.  That when the templars first started finding articts they thought that they would use them for the good of mankind, but their power was absolutely corrupting.  This connects with Al-Mualim, and his eventual madness in Assassin's Creed, and it connects with the "gangs" that we see in Assassin's Creed: Rogue (maybe).  I am wondering if the Assassins and the Templars are really like a yin and a yang, balancing each other out and taking turns being "the bad guy".

The game play was not as bad as I expected (I expected way, way, worse).  That said, the camera controls were pretty bad, which really detracted from the game play at times.  There were silver and gold templar coins to collect, similar to the flags in Assassin's Creed, however seeing as there are no achievements or trophies in PSP games I really saw no point to go out of my way to try to collect all of them.  They were used to improve Altaïr's abilities, but I got through the game by upgrading his abilities with the coins I happened upon.

The cinematics and QTEs were not bad in this game. Most bosses ended up being easy, with the exception of the Witch and Armand Bouchard.  They were somewhat difficult to beat and I had to run laps around the stage in order to let my health regenerate before I could go ahead and and re-engage in the battle with them.  The environments were pretty good, and they reminded me a lot of the simplicity of the original Assassin's Creed. The one thing that was notably limited were the bystanders.  Even in the original AC there seemed to be many more civilians around in the cities, but in this game there were only a few. It's as if everyone was out working the fields and the people who were around were just some random merchant or monk who didn't have anything else to do other than being contemplative.

All things considered, this wasn't a bad game. I would give it a 3.5 out of 5.  If the camera controls were better, if it had better replayability, and if there were some way for me to earn achievements this would definitely be a 4 our of 5.

The IGN Review of the game, for another perspective: