You are Altair, an assassin during the Crusades... <WARNING: PARTAIL SPOILERS AHEAD>
Story:
At first glance, Assassin's Creed may just look like a Prince of Persia type game set in the crusades. Well that's partially true. The plot in Assassin's Creed has a huge twist to it. You're Desmond Miles, a bartender who's ancestors were assassins. You find yourself kidnapped by a strange organization who has found a way to view your ancestor's memory through your DNA. This organization is trying to access a specific memory of your ancestor, but they can't access it directly, so they have to work their way there. They have you relive various parts of your ancestor's life as an assassin in order to get to the memory that they want.
Gameplay:
The gameplay in Assassin's Creed is divided up into two main parts: Stealth/Discreet Mode and Combat/Non-discreet Mode. Depending on which mode you're in, the people around you will react accordingly. For example: if you kill someone in the open and everyone sees you, they will panic, run away, and call the gaurds. The crowd itself is very alive in Assassin's Creed and react to even the slightest things such as bumping into someone or tripping. The actual combat is a very well though out turn-based system that is somewhat hard to explain. Here is a video of a combat scenario so you can see for yourself how its like: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hnj4RHFG038&feature=related.
To actually get to an assassination, you need to gather information about your target by interrogating people, pickpocketing, eavesdropping, and doing missions for friends in exchange for information. These four main gameplay aspects are very fun for the first 5 assassinations or so, but can get very repetitive after that, and thus resulting in the main flaw of this game: lack of a lot of variety.
Graphics:
The graphics in Assassin's Creed are amazing for an open-ended game like this. Textures are great and so is lighting. Blood also plentiful. The graphics can get slightly choppy at times, however.
Overall:
A great game, but it gets very repetitive after a while and it could have used some side quests for a more RPG-like feeling.
