“Assassin’s Creed” is more than meets the eye. Behind the roof-jumping, sword-swinging medieval gameplay is a bizarrely science fiction explanation. The modern day setting — where bartending assassin Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a mysterious corporation bent on tapping his genetic memories of medieval assassin Altair (got that?) — not only explains the Holy Land gameplay but also more conventional aspects of the game, aspects normally taken for granted.

[Spoiler Warning: This review covers many aspects of the game's plot, but does not reveal the ending or anything really significant.]

For example, when you die in “Assassin’s Creed,” you revert back to a checkpoint. Sounds normal, but it’s not. Rather than dying, the game says that Miles becomes desynchronized with his genetic memory of Altair. What appears to be a health bar is explained as a synchronization count, and going back to a checkpoint is explained as going back to a previous memory to ensure proper synchronization.

All this seems semantic, but it has the effect of turning player death, which should be a jarring aspect of a storyline, into a fully rational occurrence. (Imagine it in a book: All the main characters just died because you read the chapter wrong, and now you have to read it all over again.)

“Assassin’s Creed” draws from the storytelling technique of its predecessor, “Prince of Persia.” Both games were developed by Ubisoft Montreal, and “Assassin’s Creed” takes the platforming model of “Prince of Persia” and plunks it in an open world with a very much expanded fighting mechanic. When you die in “Prince of Persia,” the Prince tells the story speaks up and says, “That’s not how it happened.” If the Prince plummets to his death during the game, it’s a failure on the player’s part to stick to his plot, just as dying in “Assassin’s Creed” is a failure to adhere to the memories of Miles/Altair.

This “memory” theme of “Assassin’s Creed” lends itself to other aspects of gameplay. Selecting from old assassination missions to replay, while essentially just a level selector, is disguised as a menu of genetic memories. Teleporting from one town to another instantly is fast-forwarding through the memory of Altair’s travels.

Of course this all sounds very positive and immersive, but the title of this post is that “Assassin’s Creed” fails. While the memory system creates an entirely believable atmosphere conducive to storytelling, the storytelling itself is nonexistent.

The main story of “Assassin’s Creed” is that of the medieval Altair and the modern Desmond coming to understand what’s behind the shadowy organizations they face. This mystery is methodically — almost painfully so — unraveled over the course of the game, although not fully satisfied by the cliffhanger ending.

Most of the exposition is delivered in pre-death monologues by the assassination targets. These speeches are not skippable, in keeping with the realism, and real snorefests. All the speakers are completely unlikeable and really just whine and make ambiguous comments about how one day you’ll understand. It’s a huge waste of time and not an effective way to advance the plot.

The way you reach these targets is also totally stale. “Assassin’s Creed” presents you with huge, crowded and open cities for Altair to explore and learn more about his assassination targets. But each city is approached in the same way. Altair must find a high point and flesh out his map. Altair must pickpocket the bad guy or beat up the important figure or eavesdrop on a conversation or collect flags or kill 5 guys. And you do three of those things before each of the nine assassinations. It’s the same list of things in every city.

This repetitiveness really detracts from the immersive setting that the memory system achieves. Altair does the same thing in every city, whether its collecting flags or saving the same citizens or doing the same missions. Why bother preparing this world where metaphysical things (like dying and going back to a checkpoint or loading an old level) make reasonable sense and with beautiful open cities and a wonderful crowd mechanic when the only thing you can do in that world is unimaginative and lifeless? It’s like making Frankenstein but putting in the Abby Normal brain instead of a real one.

One of the chief things “Assassin’s Creed” is missing is real characters that the player can empathize with. The assassination targets are of course assholes (they’ve earned a death sentence, after all), but Altair is completely devoid of life.

He undergoes a change over the game from a swaggering cock to a humble servant of his order, but this change is not explained in any way. With each mission he just becomes less of an asshole until he’s nice at the end, but nobody ever says why. The challenge of the nine assassination missions was given to Altair by the leader of his assassin’s guild to humble him, but there’s no reason why he wouldn’t just do them to get it over with, kind of like what I was doing to get through the game.

The same is true of Desmond Miles. For what little time you interact with him, he is a smarmy little punk who submits immediately to his kidnappers. Neither of these main characters are good ones.

For all the human touches that make the gameplay in “Assassin’s Creed” so feasibly integrated into the story, the plot itself is devoid of life and substance. The characters are stale and underdeveloped, the actions are repetitive, and the story ends with a cliffhanger. Luckily, the game’s ending suggests a sequel, a chance for Ubisoft Montreal to really exploit the immersive options they’ve created. The memory system and the open world — coupled with a good story, some well-developed characters and a diverse selection of things to do — would yield a really incredible experience.