I think the Assassin's Creed games are how I first learned about parkour, which would probably be nails on a chalkboard to Toby Segar and Benj Cave, two actual parkour athletes with team Storror in the UK. We asked Toby and Benj to judge Assassin's Creed's take on the sport in the latest episode of our new video series, Reality Check.
The two clearly have an affinity for the series, but took it to task in the realism department. I was surprised to learn just how effective the games' hay bale-cushioned leaps of faith might be in real life—up to eight stories with perfect execution, by Toby's reckoning—but the iconic sky high jumps of Assassin's Creed would result in "a perfect assassin's outline in the floor underneath the actual cart."
Something I really appreciated were all the little details Toby and Benj caught that just never would have occurred to me to question, like how fast the upcoming Shadows' Naoe can sprint across a tightrope or, indeed, how Mirage's Basim can do a one-story landing onto a rope and not just bounce off or slip into the streets below.
The thing Toby deemed "a hate crime against parkour" might actually be one of the most realistic moves they observed, though. In a clip from Shadows' previews, they saw big guy samurai Yasuke clamber up a ledge by swinging his leg up and putting his weight on his knee to mantle it. This move, an "alpine knee," is apparently a parkour 101 no-no. Given the sensitive nature and biomechanics of your knee, you're just never supposed to put your weight onto it like that when practicing parkour.
But this actually fits really well with Yasuke, who's your less agile, brute force tank character in Shadows, as opposed to the more nimble Naoe. It makes sense that he'd be alpine knee-level bad at parkour, especially when he's clanking around in 40 or so pounds of lamellar armor. Ubisoft's animators might have specifically selected the move to say "This guy's got a Dex score of eight at best."
Above the feasibility and physics of individual maneuvers, Benj pointed out that the biggest fictions in Assassin's Creed are probably the protagonists' iron endurance and flawless execution even after hours of rooftop antics, as well as their constant improvisation when real parkour is carefully planned ahead of time.
You can follow Toby, Benj and Storror on Instagram, while the team is also working on its own parkour sim of the same name, set to release in early access at the end of March on Steam. Meanwhile, you can follow PC Gamer on YouTube to catch future episodes of Reality Check, as well as our video reviews and other non text-based content of a PC gaming persuasion. Our previous episodes of Reality Check include a paleontologist's take on Monster Hunter monsters and a psychologist's assessment of drama in The Sims.
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