In my quest to play through as many Assassin's Creed games as possible, I got a Nintendo 3DS last year (well, I've been wanting one for a while and this was just a good excuse), and hit eBay for cheap (used) copies of the game.  There have been 2 Assassin's Creed games for the DS, one taking place in Altair's time, and one in Ezio's time.  I chose to play Ezio first, and go with the other one after.

I had actually tried both of these games back in the brief time when I had jailbroken my iPhone 3GS with iOS 4 and I found the games extremely frustrating on touch controls. I think that since that Apple has removed both from the AppStore.  Luckily with DS game cards, it's easy to go back and play these.

The story of this game takes place somewhere in the Assassin's Creed 2 trilogy (probably between the first and the second one).  Ezio goes to Spain, after being summoned by one of his friends, to protect Christopher Columbus who's got some bullying problems (to put it lightly).  Once that's taken care of we find that the Assassin's guild is Spain is in trouble due to the inquisition.  It seems that grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada might be a Templar given his connections with Rodrigo Borgia (it turns out that he is not a Templar - just naive).

game on iOS

The game takes place within the animus. We do get a little "animus loading screen" type of environment in the beginning when you are being trained to move about the environment, but that's basically it. You don't really get anything else happening in the modern era with Desmond. The entire story is done in the past.  It's too bad, because it would have been interesting to advance the modern day story a bit in these games.


The gameplay of this game is a pretty standard side-scrolling game.  If you think back to the old Prince of Persia games (which is where this game traces its lineage to) you get a pretty good sense of what the game is like. The only difference (that I remember) between the DS version and the iPhone version is that the DS uses the bottom screen as a kind of in-game radar to let you know where hiding points and enemies are located.

All things considered the game wasn't bad.  With actual controls (a D-Pad and buttons) the game is actually quite playable, something that I got really frustrated with on the iPhone version. It's probably a good idea that they retired that version of the game.  The one thing that's really missing (that I didn't see much of anyway) in this game is the depth of characters that one finds in the television console games. You are told about Torquemada and columbus, but you don't really get profile sheets on them, like you do on the xbox and PS games. I think getting real history as part of a fictional game is really one of the series' strong points and it seems to be missing from this game.

The DS platform has no trophies (boooo!), so nothing to report on that front ;-)

Here is a bit of the gameplay, courtesy of YouTube:




Have you played this game? What do you think?