Finally the Creed comes to the PSP, and still utilizes an open world environment, parkour and of course Assassins. Bloodlines is set between the first and second Assassin’s Creed games on PS3/360. So does Bloodlines give us any answers? Or does it leave us with more questions?

Set straight after the original Assassin’s Creed, Altair has chased the Templars out of the Holy Land. Whilst in pursuit, he follows them to Cyprus, where he learns that they’re in search of another strange artifact, the Archive. Driven only by his new inquisitive nature Altair begins to take down the remaining Templars, in the hope of discovering their true intentions with this new artifact. Along the way, Altair will meet with a Cyprus resistance group, who are resisting their new leaders (the Templars). This is where you come in, in a ‘you scratch our back and we’ll scratch yours’ scenario. If you do missions for them, they’ll help you get in to certain areas to take out whomever you need to take out.

Bloodlines follows the same gameplay of the Assassin’s Creed down to a tee, even having a few missions that repeat. Although the scenario is always slightly different e.g. follow a guy to interrogate him. In one mission you’ll just wait until he’s out of sight of guards, in another mission the guards may be escorting him and you’ll have to pick them off first, without alerting any of the other guards. Bloodlines is however, rather short, taking only 10 to 13 hours to complete (including all side missions). Speaking of side missions, there are only four variations; interrogation, delivering mail, collecting an item and saving a citizen, which repeat themselves, but like I mentioned earlier, sometimes the scenario is slightly altered. So in this way, at least the missions are slightly more bearable.

There are some new features to Bloodlines and some that have been taken away. There are no longer any pickpocket missions, but you can easily pick up more throwing knifes from the hideout. The second feature that has been removed is the ability to assassinate someone while you’re above them. I can see why these features would be removed from the PSP version of the game, as the memory allowance might have played a hand in it. The one feature that has been added however, is from Assassin’s Creed 2, and allows you to pull guards from ledges so that they fall to their death, a nice feature, especially as you will have to attack many castles.

Another thing that has been changed is the actual assassination part of Assassin's Creed. Now I don’t know about everyone else, but assassinating the target and then running like a mad man for safety in Assassin’s Creed was great fun. In Bloodlines on the other hand, these targets are changed to a traditional boss battle, which is the only place the difficulty comes into play. On normal difficulty the first two boss battles don’t even feel like a boss battle, with every attack that you throw, even if they block it, their health decreases. So just make sure to spam the attack button to win. Towards the last two bosses, you’ll have to start dodging and countering their attacks, even if it’s just to give you a chance to breathe and recoup some health.