We maintain skepticism about Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles, for reasons entirely unrelated to the series. Even the release of this gameplay footage, coming as it does after the game is in stores, keeps to the super-stealthy strategy Ubisoft has employed in its "promotion." The game was never formally announced, existing as a Gamestop-supplied rumor until we finally saw the game on Nintendo's release list and the first screens on the boxart. So we continue to withhold our enthusiasm, even though our eyes tell us there could be something good here.
Ubisoft shouldn't have tried to go so far under the radar. They could have advertised this game and built anticipation with decent-looking visuals. For a 3D DS game, this looks really nice, keeping much of the same tone as the console version: stealth meets Prince of Persia. Climbing around and sneaking through a town on the way to a target looks like something we could really enjoy. In fact, it looks like a carefully scaled-down interpretation of the original right up until the pickpocketing minigame, at which point it looks like a DS game again.
