It's amazing cinematic flight and fight sequences make it an excellent gaming experience, but it's longevity is lacking.
You'll love the graphics - the level design, the draw distance, the huge sprawling cities of the Crusade-period middle east, the fluid animations on the part of Altair and his opponents.
The story is like Lost in that it's intriguing yet mysterious, delving into the metaphysical while maintaining pseudo-scientific elements.
Your dagger sinking into an unknowing soldier's back sounds great, and the voiceovers - while cheesy and riddled with slightly pathetic attempts at middle eastern and british accents - get the job done.
The gameplay is fluid, allowing you to leap from building to building and quickly transition from climbing and platforming - which you'll be doing a LOT of - to full-blown scimitar-on-scimitar combat.However, the entirety of the control scheme is plotted to four or five buttons on the xbox 360 controller, which makes the game just a tad too easy and uninvolved.
Now here's the place in which Assassin's Creed falls from a 9.0 to an 8.0 in my book - it's over so damn soon! The main storyline will take you a little over 10 hours to complete, and there is side content, but those quests consist simply of assassinating generic templars and gathering flags in major cities, both of which don't offer much incentive besides a few dozen gamerpoints and a broader tour of the beautiful environments in the game.
Although Assassin's Creed is an awesome game, it's not worth $50. The game is over too soon and leaves you with a cliffhanger ending that answers none of the questions you're presented with. However, you should make it your priority as a gamer to go out and rent this game ASAP. It's an amazing feat of cinematic artistry that you can only experience firsthand.