The sad truth is that Altair's Chronicles is a shallow handheld port that only serves to undermine a great gaming name
To be honest, the most fun anyone can have with this piece of "let's-see-if-we-can-make-money-off-the-name!" crap is burning it. Nothing went right for this game, not even the plot! In fact, the plot can be best summed up by what the back of the box has to say, that being a "Prequel to the original game". There's nothing else that can be said about the plot that would even be remotely interesting.
The horribly feeble story aside, the game plays like a lame version of Prince of Persia. The main goal in Altair's Chronicles is to avoid getting sliced, impaled, or drowned by the hazards that frequently pop up (and kill some bad guys in between). Sure, this concept sounds great on paper, but the developers could've done a much, much, much better job on how it played out. First off, the control system is so simplified that it can actually make the gameplay harder.
Example: When I was trying to fight off a couple templars while I was nearly stuck in a corner, I thought I'd move a bit closer to the wall to give myself some breathing room. The game then interpreted this move as trying to move up the wall and it wasted enough time to let the templars crack my skull open. This happened on more occasions than I care to keep track of.
Another big issue with the controls is how combat plays out against certain enemies. Some larger foes will need to be defeated with a quick time event that couldn't be harder to hit because of how specific the placement of your character in relation to where the enemy was. Not being able to find the right location resulted in flipping and hacking around the enemy for about 10 seconds until the enemy snapped out of whatever kept them still and resulted in a painful death.
The largest (and easily the most frustrating) issue with the gameplay is the way platforming works. Throughout the game, plenty of Prince of Persia-style traps will pop up and prompt you to get by them. Again, a concept that sounds good on paper but is ultimately destroyed by the developers. About 80% of all deaths come from dying in a trap because of the horrible camera that usually fails to show you where the hell you're jumping and forces the player to take a blind leap of faith to the next object. What's even worse is the fact that the camera can't be moved at all!
If anyone could look past the shallow story and awful controls, the "music" in this title is outright criminal. The same few tracks play over and over again until you think about ripping your ears off with the nearest pincer-like object available. Also, the sound effects are so muffled and out of place at times that I began to wonder why the developers didn't scrap all the sound they had and replaced it with cartoon noises.
While on the subject of cosmetics, the graphics are the only thing that don't go completely wrong...Only partially. The redeeming part of the graphics comes from the good environments and characters that look pretty above average for a 3D DS game. However, the animations for the characters are so few that the enemies as a whole had about seven or eight animations that I noticed. Altair isn't exempt from a lack of animations, either as he only needs to use about six or seven moves to get through any given level.
Speaking of only using a few moves to get through a level, the entire game is way too easy (when you're not dying from the horrible camera or controls). Most of the time, it only took about 1-5 minutes to get through a stage if it didn't suffer from poorly laid-out traps. The salt in the wound of the incredibly easy gameplay is the ability to upgrade Altair's sword or health once he collects a certain amount of blue orbs that are either scattered around the levels or inside the enemies themselves.
In all, Altair's Chronicles is something you should avoid like the plague. There's nothing redeeming enough about this game to even warrant a try if you picked it up off the street. Your precious time is worth more than a thousand copies of this piece of shovelware.
You'll thank me.