The makers of AC1 went out of their way to point out that they weren’t trying to offend anyone in depicting the various faiths of the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades (they even put a big fat disclaimer screen at the start of the game).

However, not all faiths are treated equally within AC1.

The bad guys are, of course, Christians, specifically the Knights Templar, probably the most famous of the ancient militant arms of the Christian faith. In order to believe that the Templars were really all that bad, you have to know literally nothing about the history of the Crusades, which, in fairness, the average person doesn’t.

However, the anti-Christian bias in AC1 goes beyond mere slant and straight into the realm of caricature. Virtually every Templar is portrayed as deceitful, hateful, and evil, and yet, if memory serves, there isn’t a single major Islamic (or Jewish) target in the entire game.

The reason for this is very simple. When Christians are depicted in ways that are disagreeable and offensive to them, they tend to react with mild irritation; the best of them pray for the soul of the one causing the offence. At worst, they might issue a strongly worded call to boycott a particular game. And that’s it, job done.

However, when Muslims see something that they don’t like, they react by going on killing sprees and rioting in the streets. Like feminists, they simply want something to be angry about. Unlike feminists, they’re also perfectly willing to kill the objects of their anger.

It is not particularly surprising, then, to find that, like almost all mainstream movies and video games in recent years that have anything to do with the history of the Crusades, Ubisoft’s development team simply whitewashed the entire blood-soaked history of the so-called religion of “peace”, in favour of presenting Christians once again in the worst possible light.

Well, all right, fine, so AC1 was a little too PC. But surely that was made up for when Ubisoft created a believable environment to move around in with absorbing gameplay, right?

The gameplay within AC1 is not bad, not all of the time anyway, but it’s not very good either. One particularly off note, in a game chock full of them, is of course the infamous physics engine within this title.

As I’ve said in all of my previous writings here, a game absolutely has to be believable in order to be considered “good”. There is nothing remotely believable about the physics in AC1. I could go on about this at some length, but I’ll leave the Game Theorists to do the job instead:

By itself, a bad physics engine isn’t the end of the world. Some of the greatest games ever made have ridiculous in-game physics. Case in point: HALO: Combat Evolved, where giving any NPC even the lightest of knocks with a Warthog would instantly kill him. Yet those flaws were merely minor annoyances in otherwise legendary games, because playing them wasn’t an endless cycle of—