Assasins creed is a game where you are a person in the present day life time, and there is a machine, the animus, that allows you to relive thoughts of relatives from the past. The 'thoughts' are played by you as you relive the life of an assasin, playing through the massive world, conquering all that stands in your way with an amazing combat system, and also fleeing using the buildings and the climbing system. The 3 major cities, Damascus, Acre and Jeruselum are very well made and as you apprach them on horse back, or off horse back if you decideed foolishly to walk all the way, you can really see the work that has gone into the graphics of the game.
The combat is also very good. With many different slices that the character does, and with counters to the enemy attacking you and a counter to the opponent grabbing you, and obviously you can grab them and throw them, you can see that with all this that the combat is very good.
In the campaign the nine enimies that you have to assasinate, or just kill in an all out brawl, all died or disapeared around the time the game was set. This makes the game more accurate from the past, as do the cities. The cities, apart form the occasional anomilie, makes you have very little reason to believe that this wasn't really what happened in that time period.
However with the time period change and all the different things that can be done in the game, i believed it would be something special, but it just turned into an action game, although personally i think that this game is very, very good.