Assassin's Creed - Mobile Edition

European Comics
Assassin's Creed
By Patrick Bérubé
April 17, 2010 - 09:05

Les deux royaumes
Writer(s): Corbeyran
Penciller(s): Djillali Defali
Inker(s): Djillali Defali
Colourist(s): Raphael Hedon
$23.95 CAD

Desmond Miles meets a girl in a bar, brings her back home and wakes up the next morning as a guinea pig for an experimental machine. But what does the girl and the organization she works for, an ancient order of Templars, want from him? Well, it looks like Desmond is the direct descendant of an Assassin lineage that could threaten the Templars in their search for mysterious artifacts. With the machine, they can have access to his ancestors' memory and thus collect information about the whereabouts of precious objects. However, nobody had planned that the machine might reawaken Desmond's inner instinct of an Assassin...

I have to admit that I was a bit taken off my guard by the story here. I had not played the video game yet when I first read the comic book and I was not expecting the story to take place in a modern day setting. Now that I have played it, I can say that the plot of the comic book is similar to its pixelised counterpart. The thing is, when I read a comic book based on a video game franchise, I expect it to remain true to the source material and at the same time offer me something the game can't. I'm looking for a new approach, I want to be entertained in a way the video game can't, otherwise what would be the point of adapting the franchise to new media if it's to rehash the same thing?

I have the same mitigated feeling for the art. The video game has state of the art graphics, rich with texture and background elements. This is what I was expecting from this comic book and this not exactly what I got. Even if the flashback sequences are better executed and more richly detailed, most of the art throughout the book misses a little something to be truly engaging. This feeling is reinforced by the colors and the lettering, which lack even more than a little something.

These criticisms seems harsh but I believe my dissatisfaction comes from the treatment of the franchise, the seemingly lack of freedom the authors had and my expectations. What leads me to believe that is that two weeks prior to reading Assassin's Creed, I had read another comic book by the very same creative team of Corbeyran and Defali and enjoyed it a lot more.

If this comic book ever comes out in English and in a cheaper format, purchasing it might be a good idea. However at 23,95 $CAD for the French hardcover, unless you are a hardcore fan of the game, this might not be the best buy.

Rating: 6.5/10