Assassin's Creed: Recollection

Recollection elicits that kind of emotional reaction. It's a board game steep in difficulty and frustratingly vague in tutorial; enough to be a swing and miss to even mild-tempered players. It's also damned intriguing, and presents a worthy tie-in take of the Creed universe.

It takes the elongated city takeovers refined in later retail titles and makes a card game of it. There's a replacement of generalised genre lexicon with Assassin-friendly jargon - Memories, Sequences, Agents and Expertises - that flash by and leaves you struggling to remember which does what.

But the basic idea is that with a randomised deck of cards, you try and take over two of three territories, represented by three rectangles divided in two - one for each side - before your opponent. You play character cards onto the board to either earn Influence points, build sites in each territory to increase daily influence, and employ Action cards, all of which carry status-altering effects, some good, some bad.

Aside from certain Actions, cards and their properties take half a day of in-game time (around thirty seconds) to deploy. Hence gameplay ratchets between the slow burn of pre-planning strikes and finger dexterity to snap your cards in place the second they're active.

Each match is played in real time and the game's over when two territories are owned by a single player - designated by their influence in the region reaching the score of 10.

We've been playing the game since its release last week. It's only in the last couple of days we're getting our head around everything. It seems a heavy investment of time to spend but pays off in the long run. Give yourself the time to learn through playing and losing (tutorial basic primer rather than comprehensive guide) and you'll stumble onto the game's charms.

For a strategy title matches play out quick - the AI never goes easy on you, and matches can be over in the blinking of an eye if you don't keep watch of your computer opponent: multiplayer Versus Mode may be easier on the grey cells (though we're yet to get a match). Any card on board or in either players' deployment areas can be flipped over with a double-tap to see its effects once on the board proper.

There's a collectable card meta-game as well: to begin, winning matches as you roll through the game's story and you'll occasionally collect a handful of more powerful cards to reshuffle your deck with for the next match, while collecting experience-style credits lets you buy pre-made decks. Custom Decks, or Sequences as they're named, can be built in a Manager sub-menu to craft a Sequence favouring your particular play style.

And there's no denying that the interface is slick, basing its design as a mix of Animus and menu visuals from the retail titles. As an aside, you can unlock high-res artwork from the games (though sadly you can't save em to use as iPad wallpaper) and a twenty minute animated movie to watch.

But as we stated, your fortunes can turn swiftly on the play of a card. The system seems unfairly unbalanced against you to begin. Your default deck is simply far too weak, and your opponents' far too powerful in the first few matches. Where you have Agents with a 2/1 offering on Power and Health (their attack and defence strength respectively), they'll be tossing in 4/5s (in Top Trumps style, stats are stacked and subtracted against each other, the loser being obliterated off the board), as well as playing Action cards that'll either cripple you or empower them even more.

Getting to grips with the intricacies of gameplay and being quick off the mark are essential for survival. However, better cards need to be bought using in-game credits, and those are only collected so slowly through winning story-based matches (while we've yet to find a game, a company representative tell us that both can be earned in multiplayer matches).

You can optionally purchase credits, and therefore better cards, for real-world cash. That's created some debate online, but from what we've seen and played so far, it is possible to win with what you earn through in-game play alone providing your tactics are sound, athough the AI continually holds a better range of Action cards.

Creating new decks should be fun, but starts as pure chore due to vague explanations of the rules. We spent some hours studiously placing card after card into a new deck trying to work out exactly why we were receiving an "Invalid Sequence" red flag that prevented us from using the deck in play.

We eventually worked out we could only use two of the Expertises - the colour-coded divisions to separate the likes of artists, thieves, priests - per Sequence. A limitation mentioned only vaguely in one line on the tutorial, and completely missing from the optional quick-help guide that's supposed to aid players on each menu screen.

The story as well, explained away in a single text box before each match lends little to the experience unless you're deeply-rooted to the sort of name-dropping and political power play that dominates the backstory of the series. Its also a complete shame that you can't pause mid-game, which will keep playing even if you've brought up the shortcut menu. The fast-forward button is much appreciated however to hurry to the climax of the games.

Because despite all the issues, its a board game that manages to entice and excite.

Say when both sides are holding at 9 influence points apiece and waiting to deploy their last cards, there's a tense excitement as you hear the metaphorical dice roll in your ears. Or how you learn from watching the AI to deploy low-level Agents bolstered with status-increasing Action cards to ensure swift victory in matches. Or dropping a low-level Agent card to block a rival character from scoring points, even if the result will be yours being knocked out the game, leads to punching the air with glee.

As a branded tie-in its hard to fault, making sensible use of assets to create a great board game worth the price in its own right. The difficulty grates and its hard not to consider its pitch has been consciously steepened to offer enticement of the micro-transactions. However, we've been playing it over several nights in the last six days and, once gameplay finally clicked, tackled the story mode with gusto and intend to test its longevity in the multiplayer arena with friends.

As we finished off this review, a title screen update informed us of new content on its way, suggesting that Ubisoft plan continued support for the game. If it can tweak the card-collecting aspect to be more generous, and push the title to ensure an influx of online players to extend the multiplayer side of things, you can expect that score to be bumped up by a point.

We'll revisit the game in the coming weeks. But as it stands, for all its faults we've enjoyed our time, and considered it an App Store splash - £1.99 - well spent.