One of the major things Ubisoft did when making this game was to decide to take a new approach to the controls, and how you interact with your environment. I will do my best to explain to you all how this works.

Basically, the Y button controls head actions, looking around and such. The X and B buttons control the right and left hands respectively. The A button covers things the feet will do. It's laid out so you hit the button for the area you wish to control.

This may sound a little confusing, or almost too simple, but it works great. There are also two main modes you operate in, high and low profile. By default you will be in low profile.

In low profile, hitting B to control your right hand will gently push members of a crowd aside, allowing you to move through it without drawing attention to yourself. If you need to disappear, hold down A to blend in and draw next to no attention to yourself.

Sometimes, however, subtlety is not always the best choice. Sometimes you'll need to fight or run, or even pull off a high profile assassination. To enter high profile mode just hold the right trigger down.

When in high profile, blending becomes running, a gentle push becomes tackling people out of your way, and attacking with weapons becomes and option. To select weapons hit a direction on the d-pad.

When in combat, hit left trigger to lock onto enemies. Once you get far enough into the game, you will gain counter attacks, allowing you to turn an enemies attack or throw back on them, gaining you the advantage.

A lot of time in this game will be spent exploring the cities, and not just on the ground, either. You'll spend quite a bit of time climbing, and even hopping from rooftop to rooftop. It's pretty easy to pick up though, the controls work great.

Climbing onto rooftops won't just help you move faster, but there's also points where you'll see an eagle perched up high. If you climb up to there, you can get a great view of the city, and even add many things in the area to your map.

Afterwards you'll take the leap of faith down. When doing a leap of faith, it is a blind jump, and if done right you will land in a pile of hay waiting below. Amazingly no matter how high you jump from, the hay always breaks the fall, what luck for you.

If your health is currently at full, you may use Eagle Vision. When using Eagle Vision, the different types of characters will appear as different colors to you, the most notable being enemies in red. This can come in useful when trying to pick someone out of a crowd.

As you move throughout the game, you will gain new weapons and abilities. As you go even further, these will be expanded upon, and even upgraded in some cases. Every assassination seems to yield something you gain in your favor.

You'll travel between three main cities when carrying out your missions. Each of these is unique in its own way, although they start to look rather similar after a few trips into each city. You'll do more than one assassination in each location as well, so expect to return to these cities more than once.

Along the way you'll learn many tricks of the trade, increasing your skills as an assassin. Side missions and other assassinations will add to what you do. The game itself is very fun, although don't do it all in a bunch of long sittings, or it can start to feel repetitive. A few hours a day, however, and this game will keep you interested for quite a while, if for nothing else than the compelling storyline.