Altaïr’s Chronicles is a standalone title with its own story, so regardless whether you’ve played through the console game or not, nothing from its big brother finds its way to the handheld version—other than a few characters and acrobatic moves. The story itself is really inconsequential as there’s little development of what’s going on and who people are. Whereas the console game involves deep investment in the plot, all you get in the handheld game is a mission from Al Mualim to track down the Chalice and keep it from the hands of Templars.

To save the Chalice you’ll play through 13 memories broken up into various stages, and unfortunately, this won’t take very long. Even for the casual gamer—if they happen to pick this one up—Altaïr’s Chronicles is relatively short. In a side-scrolling, linear fashion, progressing through the levels involves reaching checkpoints and collecting a trail blue orbs, while fighting off bad guys and jumping all around.

The pure, uninhibited platforming sections of the game really stand out and make the experience fun. However, once fighting and mini-games are thrown into the equation, the reaction is a bit more skewed to ‘repetitive’ and ‘unpolished.’ Altaïr retains many of the moves from the console version which make for moments of excitement as you string together leaps, wall-jumps and balancing maneuvers. While there are sections that suffer from cases of Altaïr over-jumping to his death, the majority of rooftop exploits are fairly well designed.

The problems occur when elements of redundant fighting and curious mini-games interrupt jumping from ledge to ledge. Throughout the game you learn new fighting moves, counters and acrobatics, but such skills don’t translate well in their implementation. While blocking and countering moves make for varied exercises in combat, mashing a single combo results in a faster and more effective kill. By collecting blue orbs you can boost Altaïrs strength and health, but there’s really little change other then that single combo becoming stronger. A new assortment of weapons doesn’t add much to gameplay either as they require tapping the screen to select, making them almost impossible to use in the middle of a fight.

Also breaking up the enjoyable bits of platforming are a few of the mini-game focused tasks: pick-pocketing and interrogation. Of course it wouldn’t be a DS game without mini-games, and although they work relatively well and don’t overpopulate the game, their inclusion feels rather obligatory.

To make things worse, the two aforementioned elements meld together for boss segments of the game. Throughout your adventure to stop the Templars you’ll come across Lord Basilisk a number of times. In typical fashion, your initial meeting ends with him running from your battle, swearing to stop you later. Such a formula is really nothing new, and usually helps in the redemptive properties of character development.

However, where the tradition is to typically make such reoccurring battles harder with new elements, each fight involves a mini-game of three buttons to injure Basilisk. As it turns out, instead of stalling to figure out the best strategy to dispatch the enemy, walking right up the boss is the easiest way to win the battle. Such repetition and unimaginativeness really hurt the part of games that should involve the most ingenuity and novelty.

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