This comes as little comfort, I should imagine, to anyone with a PS3 who isn’t online and so can’t easily get the patch.

From here the game gets into a really lengthy ‘save game building’ session – as in, staring at a little bar creeping across the screen for about three and a half minutes - before you finally get chance to actually play anything. Funnily enough, all this waiting around kind of sets the mood for the game that eventually follows…

For the first hour or two, though, Assassin’s Creed will have your jaw hanging open in awe. Seriously. Not, tellingly, because of anything particularly grabbing about its gameplay, but simply because of the flawed but still undeniable glory of its graphics. For more on this, see the Graphics section.

The story, too, initially intrigues. The much-criticised efforts to bolt a sci-fi backdrop onto the main Crusader-era action in my opinion immediately provides more narrative complexity to help draw you deeper into the game's oh-so-pretty world.

Damn shame, then, that many of the other experiences the game delivers tend to kick you right back out again, alienating you through sheer frustration and, especially, repetition.

For starters, there are a few too many long, barely interactive and not always interesting cut scenes for comfort, especially early on in the game.

Then there's the huge 'Kingdom' gameplay area that you have to pass through to get to all the different cities. There's nothing inherently wrong in having a sort of 'wilderness' to join key locations - many great games have followed the same approach (Zelda, anyone?). But Kingdom is way too large and way too short of local character to avoid becoming pretty tedious very fast.

Even hiding 100 flags and a bunch of Templar Knights around the landscape for die-hard explorers to chase down does little to alleviate the boredom.

It doesn't help the Kingdom section, either, that you're seldom able to gallop on your trusty steed for more than a few yards before the dreaded 'you're being watched' warning sound kicks in, forcing you to go into 'stealth mode' or face the consequences. And since being 'stealthy' in Assassin's Creed means plodding around at roughly the same speed as my wonderful 85-year-old gran on her zimmer frame, even the most patient gamer will ditch stealth in favour of either fighting off all the nearby soldiers, or trying to run away. Yet tragically, neither of these options is much fun either.

Go for the fighting option, and you'll be left with a surprisingly turgid combat system that gives you precious little sense of control over what you're doing - especially early on in the game, when you're stripped of most of your combat powers.

Opt to run away, though, and you'll just spend ages charging around at full pelt with a horde of guards in pursuit until you stumble across a pile of hay to hide inside. It's like a fun-free version of the end of a Benny Hill Episode, when Benny gets chased in fast-mo by a group of scantily clad young ladies - except that the ladies are, tragically, replaced by eerily identikit guards.

Once you've found all the cities in Assassin's Creed, you can thankfully skip Kingdom entirely. But for me, if the game was doing its job properly, you wouldn't want to.

Let's shift now to the main meat of Assassin's Creed: the various city locations the game so loving recreates. But here again Assassin's Creed fails to deliver.

First, the 'freerunning' across rooftops element that's looked so cool in demo footage turns out to be anything but free running in the actual game. The whole process is hamstrung by an unnecessarily unforgiving control system that makes charging willy nilly across rooftops nigh-on impossible. Instead you get a tedious drudge of missed jumps, slips off edges, ridiculous instant deaths when you hit water, and reams of annoying rooftop guards. The whole process feels totally stop/start - the very antithesis of free running.

Every now and then you'll suddenly, usually without quite knowing how, put together a slick series of leaps and runs that finally gets your adrenaline pumping. But these never last for more than a couple of seconds, and mostly serve as cruel reminders of what the game might have been.

All the way through my time with Assassin's Creed I kept thinking lovingly back to the Xbox 360's Crackdown, with its brilliantly fun approach to leaping and climbing your way across a city. Obviously such comparisons are a touch unfair in some ways, since the character in Assassin's Creed is only a well-trained human rather than some scientifically enhanced 'super soldier'. Plus the cityscapes in Assassin's Creed are graphically far more dense, detailed and, for want of a better word, realistic.

But the game's developers could easily have focussed on making the rooftop running element far, far more free-flowing and adrenaline-fuelled - and the game would have been many times better if they had.

So the promise of free-running glory isn't kept. Maybe the main Hitman-style 'gather information on a target and then use it to assassinate him as cleanly as possible' section of the game will carry the day? Not really.

For starters, gathering all the information you can on a target is made rather a drudge by the fact that the process is so mind-numbingly repetitive. It (invariably) goes like this: you first have to find 'people of interest' by climbing view-towers scattered around each city. Then to get information from those people you have to sit on a bench and eavesdrop, pick someone's pocket, beat someone up until they tell you what you want to know, or else finish a some menial chore for someone.

Finally you have to go to the local Assassin's Bureau with what you've learned and the actual assassination mission becomes 'live'.

This exact same process is necessary every single time you're up for an assassination, making for a 'rinse and repeat' approach which, in failing to offer anything genuinely new, really kills that essential gaming drive to play on to see what might happen next.

What's more, the net result of all the game's repetition is that success appears less connected with thought and cunning than sheer patience.

Sure, some of the assassination 'clues' you pick up include maps and details about guard rotas etc, which you can use to make the assassination go slightly smoother. But since the game allows you to make a kill after only collecting a couple of the information elements (the rest are optional), you quickly realise that bothering with a particularly studied approach to killing your mark just isn't worth the time. Especially as there are no serious rewards for doing a particularly stealthy hit, or repercussions for doing a particularly clumsy one.

So far, I've not exactly been very nice to Assassin's Creed. Yet actually, for all its glaring gameplay faults, it isn't absolutely without appeal.

Some elements of the story are quite intriguing and even clever from time to time, for instance. Also, the constant lure of actually being able to explore such stunningly designed environments never completely loses its power. And in a bizarre way, if you allow yourself to really commit to this game, its very repetitiveness can give it an almost hypnotic charm.

At first I thought I might quite enjoy, too, the game’s attempts to add depth and make you explore the landscape fully in the form of collectable flags and 60 Templar Knights dotted around the place for you to take out.

However, after an initially enjoyable couple of hours spent carefully scouting around for flags in Masyaf, Kingdom and Damascus, it suddenly started to become depressingly clear that this apparent ‘hook’ really isn’t nearly as effective as it should be because a) the flags and Templars tend to be way too hard to find and b) there are no rewards on offer (such as extra abilities) for finding all the flags and Templars anyway. The words 'why bother then?' thus quickly becoming branded on your brain.

It’s hard to avoid the thought that the flags and Templars were only really included as something for Xbox 360 users to get involved with, since they at least get gamerscore ‘achievements’ for completing all the side quests. On the PS3 they’re nothing but a total waste of a scary amount of time.

Oops. Just realised I'd gone back into 'slagging off' mode again. The reality is that - incredibly perverse though it may sound - despite all of its flaws, or maybe even because of them, I can actually imagine Assassin's Creed earning something of a cult following among a certain type of stubborn gamer, as a sort of labour of love title.

That said, I can safely say that this is a cult I will not be joining. And that's saying something from a bloke who's so far spent 233 hours lost in Oblivion...

PS I should note here that happily the patch I had to download before playing the game appears to sort out the console-crashing moments Assassin's Creed users reported when the game first came out.

The good stuff comes from their sheer beauty, style and above all, sense of scale.

The moment where you first get a view across Damascus and realise that you can explore every one of the fantastic multitude of roofs and towers on show is a real HD ‘money shot’.

And remarkably the game never stops delivering similar sorts of graphical thrills. Getting to the top of some of the very tallest ‘reach points’, for instance, invariably rewards you with views so good and draw distances so great that you want to take photos and send them out as postcards.

Adding to the sense of wonder at these views are some impressive aspects of the graphics engine. For instance, you can go from sitting miles above a city to running around its perfectly recreated streets in a matter of seconds, without any sense of perspective issues or any ‘cheat’ cut away as you shift (or rather dive) from above to within the city. In other words, the entire game world feels completely solid and real no matter how dramatically you shift from vertical to horizontal exploration of it.

Down on street level, meanwhile, there’s more to marvel at in the shape of the city population. Admittedly there’s the usual, probably inevitable problem of the people on the street all being made out of a pretty limited selection of character models. But somehow there’s just enough variety - especially if you’re exploring at a running pace and so don’t have time to take in all the details - to really make the city streets seem alive.

It helps that the level of animation in the crowds is surprisingly good, and that there’s absolutely no slow-down at any point, regardless of how many people might be on screen at any given time.

More good news finds some of the cut scenes looking nothing short of gorgeous. I’m thinking in particular of the one where you first meet a fat poisoner dude in Damascus. Plus the animation and detailing on the assassin himself look achingly good, with scarcely a glitch in sight.

Ubisoft seems to have consciously given the assassin a very high-contrast look, too, that really emphasises the amount of detail in his character model.

The generally outstanding graphical standard, though, is let down a little by one or two annoying glitches. I’ve already noted the repeated character models for the denizens of the game, and should add that there’s occasionally some minor pop up in the extreme distance, especially when exploring Kingdom.

On top of this the game seems to judder rather during rapid camera pans, and images can ‘shear’ at the same time. Finally, there’s also an occasional horizontal line twitch.

These issues occur really pretty regularly during normal gaming, with the result that you’re suddenly thrown out of the game's otherwise immersive world – a real shame in a game that otherwise tries so hard to create such a cohesive environment.

But let’s not be too churlish here: although let down by glitches, when it’s at its best Assassin’s Creed is probably the best-looking console game I’ve played in 26 years of gaming obsession, and you can’t say fairer than that.

For instance, there’s just about enough general crowd ‘hubbub’ going on in the surround channels to help the game create a better sense of a real living, breathing city around you. The dialogue acting is decent for the most part too, notwithstanding one or two flat bits from Altair himself, and the game subtly uses audio to try and inject a bit more tension into the main assassination sequences.

The musical score is generally atmospheric and well integrated too, leaving as my only general complaints the facts that a) there’s not enough different dialogue for all the citizens you have to rescue, and b) more effort still could have gone into the ambient effects.

I also spotted a few little audio bugs during my hours with the game on PS3, with the soundtrack seeming to drop out or ‘pause’ briefly every now and then.

Yet ultimately not even graphics this good can quite hide the fact that the game engine underlying them is really quite extraordinarily basic and even just a little bit broken.