Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that has achieved great popularity since its release, and despite not living up to expectations, this game was at times among the best selling games for several weeks. Ubisoft, enjoying the success of Assassin’s Creed II, decided to create a new adventure for Altaïr, titled Assassin’s Creed: Bloodline.

Much of the development for Bloodlines was produced by Griptonite Games, known for working primarily on game adaptations. However, despite its promise, the title has not reached the level of quality desired to become a “must-have” for PSP games.

Bloodlines is a direct continuation of the already known story, where Altaïr travels from the Holy Land to Cyprus with the help of the hostage “Mary”, killing the remaining Templars. If you’re already familiar with the previous titles you’ll enjoy the story, but if you’ve never gotten your hands on a game in the series, you probably don’t understand many aspects of the story, as we’re rarely given explanations of what we’re doing and why.

The gameplay is one of the points that disappoints us the most. We have offered various weapons such as a sword or the classic “Hidden Blade” and it is still possible to use melee fighting. However, the combat mechanics are very repetitive, becoming boring after a few hours of play. To eliminate an opponent, simply press the same action button to eliminate multiple times and no need to take a defensive strategy.

The fights, as in previous works, are not essential in most cases. Thus, we can remain unnoticed in the eyes of the guards. The way we do it is already known to everyone and involves, for example, praying. There are also chances scattered throughout the various stages, mainly for leaking guards, hay wagons (and you can jump to great heights from these) and also small roofed structures on top of some buildings. Keeping him hidden for a few seconds is enough for him to let us chase.

A major hurdle we encountered in the game was the camera, which doesn’t point where the action is taking place. During several moments we had difficulties to carry out the action completely blind, because the camera “decided” to keep the focus on the wall of a house. You can rotate the camera, but this action gets a bit confused when we have to perform other functions, such as fighting or climbing buildings, leaving us no space to do anything else.

The gameplay stays true to the spirit of the series and, barring a few hiccups, is fun. We can scale buildings, take big jumps from buildings and also go down the ledges present on the walls. These aspects are important when planning a death, making it quick without raising suspicions.

The graphic component is very well worked on in Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, especially with regard to the character models, which almost look like something out of a PS2 title. The textures are also of great quality, but it seems better if there is less repetition of the same texture, especially when it comes to buildings, because sometimes it seems that we already stayed in the place because of similarities with another place. The upward movement, as well as the rest of the characters, are quite well achieved, with a quality well above what is normal to see in Sony’s small laptop, which is very fluid.

Though the detailed maps of the game are quite small and therefore new sections need to be loaded in order to complete the objectives present in an area. While it can be a bit annoying, you can install a small part of the game console’s memory card to make these “load” days smaller.

Anyone who owns the PlayStation 3 version of Assassin’s Creed 2 can also unlock six new weapons, just connect the systems via a USB cable and unlock content in the “Extras” menu.

Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, despite the many interesting aspects, fails to deliver in several fields, such as the gameplay, which is not exactly problem-free and becomes quite repetitive and monotonous after a while. This is a title that will be especially appreciated by fans of the series who want to learn about the events between the two games.