Finally, Assassin's Creed was playable at E3 for a few seconds, instead of just having to watch it from a distance. Mainly though, one of the Ubisoft employees played, so you could a get a glimpse at everything. Despite the nanny, we were thrilled: „GTA at the time of the crusades“ is a fitting, as well a completely wrong description of the game.

Fitting, due to the Crowd engine feature, bringing the city to live and enabling you at all time to take side quests (like stealing from people passing by). And also fitting because of the vast area of the Kingdom, which surrounds and connects Jerusalem and two other cities. Yet, at the same time, Assassin's Creed plays very smooth: There's sneaking, collecting information and getting to know the cities.

Since the Xbox 360 is the lead platform for Assassin's Creed, the controls are very much optimized for consoles. The PC controls won't differ much and will simply be ported to the keyboard. The main feature of the interface are the four colored buttons of the Xbox controller, which show up from time to time in the upper right corner of the screen, and change according to the situation you are in. During fights, this will be used as well. A defensive action (highlighted white) is followed by an aggressive action (highlighted black) and so on – making the controls very intuitive.

The main goal of the game is to find and eliminate 10 member of a secret brotherhood. By which your contractor wishes to end the war in the holy land. But you seem be one of a kind: From time to time, certain characters are surrounded by a halo, which, if you take a closer look, turns out to be some kind of unreadable scripture -- scenes from Terminator 2 come to mind. We're looking forward to the release in November, even though the PC and PS3 versions might be delayed for additional three month.