Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition

Archer Stealth Assassination asks you to bump off a set number of rooftop snipers without being seen. Again, if you played the console version then you've already done this - both as part of the main gameplay, and also in the missions where you must help a fellow assassin by stealthily killing a set number of ground-based targets. Assassin Escort is self-explanatory, and it'll be a cold day in Hell when I praise the addition of sodding escort missions as something to cheer about. That just leaves the Merchant Stand Destruction challenge in which you, well, destroy merchant stands. It's another simplistic and arbitrary task that hardly gets the blood pumping.

And that's the sum total of the new gameplay elements. They hardly justify the "director's cut" tag, nor do they seem like the sort of overhaul that needed six months to implement.

There are some minor technical improvements, of course. Most notably a couple of tweaks to the guard AI that makes it slightly less easy to murder dozens of soldiers by loitering near the scene of the crime with your head bowed but, again, this isn't a radical reinvention and many of the old exploits involving laughably illogical use of haystack hiding places still work. The undeniably gorgeous visuals look the business in the sort of resolutions that consoles can't manage, but for most people playing on an average home gaming rig the difference will be negligible at best, unattainable at worst. The game comes with some fairly daunting minimum specs, and if you don't have at least a 2.2GHz dual-core processor you can expect the game to chug like a traction engine as it struggles to render all those crowds.

DirectX 10 is supported, but generally seems to be more herky-jerky than a stable DirectX 9 system, so that's pretty much a big waste of time. Control, meanwhile, is decent but never particularly intuitive. Playing with a gamepad is the obvious choice, but as Windows can have trouble recognising the trigger buttons of a 360 pad then the game can become even more of a fiddle as you fight to overcome the instinctive forefinger reaction to tug on those triggers.

Keyboard and mouse control, on the other hand, also takes some getting used to. Running, climbing and basic fighting are easy enough to grasp but functions like the lock-on and modifying your actions from low to high visibility proves a bit of a fumble to begin with. It's nothing you won't get to grips with, but you're always aware that you're dealing with a control system originally designed specifically for a different input device. You can remap the controls on both gamepad and keyboard, and on-screen prompts remind you which buttons do what, but it still took me a while to find a setup that felt comfortable.

On the whole though, everything that's been added works well enough. What's depressing is what they haven't done. The new investigation missions make the bulk of the gameplay marginally less repetitive, but it's not a dramatic fix and these sections are still glaringly pointless, nothing more than a series of interchangeable chores that trigger the boss level once you've done enough donkey work.