This was the first game that I have played for the AC franchise, and I have been playing it off and on for years, starting when I was a kid on my Dad's PC, and even then all I really did was free-run on buildings and do the parkour for the Assassin Tombs for my Dad because he hated it. I did get this game on my own account and have still played off and on, but never really progressed past early Venice. I hadn't beaten it before and decided last week to start a new save to experience the game as a whole.
- I collected all paintings, weapons, armor (including Altaïr's armor and sword), feathers and codex pages
- I discovered all treasure
- Completed side missions courier, beat-up, race and contracts
- Completed the main story
I was able to complete all of this in probably around 25 - 30 hours, but I used a map to obtain feathers and marked them as I went which certainly cut the time down. I highly recommend using a map if you are wanting to collect everything without losing your mind. I just screenshotted a map on my phone and crossed off the feather locations until I had everything in the area, but if you are narrowed down to a few missing feathers, you can track them by region in the DNA menu and then pull up a map for that region, still cuts the time down by a lot even if you forget to use a map at first.
Overall the game was very enjoyable. The characters were memorable, quests weren't as tailing heavy as I remember as a kid, (probably because my attention span is better). Music was beautiful and the graphics are very lovely despite this game being more than 15 years old. Closed-captioning is very nice and includes translation of Italian segments, which was very helpful.
My only real complaint with this game was the controls sometimes were slightly wonky (resulting in a rather embarrassing number of desyncs when trying to leap of faith from some viewpoints).
