The First Templar is the story of Celian d'Arestide, a French Templar living through the time of the Crusades. He is a noble man, seeking to live up to the highest of standards; helping the innocent, being chivalrous and attempting to advance the Templar Order. In his studies and research, he finds information that he feels points to the Holy Grail. He is joined in his quest by a fellow Templar Roland, as well as Marie d'Ibelin, the descendant of a Templar. Throughout the game the characters travel across different location in Europe and the Holy Land in their quest to find the Grail, dodging the Holy Inquisition who starts to prosecute the Templars after they are declared heretics by King Phillip of France.

As the characters undergo their quest, they make their way through a variety of levels. There is actually some good gameplay value here, with the game having quite a lot of levels to get through. The levels have some variety to them, changing up the experience from one to the next. Of course there's the hacking and slashing your way through most of the levels. But sometimes you get to work your way through puzzles, instead. Some levels have you working your way through puzzles with hacking and slashing in between. Also you occasionally get to sneak your way through areas, trying to kill enemies before they can spot you.

The sneak mechanic is fun, as it's always fun to visit death upon unsuspecting enemies, but it is admittedly a little broken. Enemy line of vision is poorly handled, to say the least. They have a ridiculously small line of vision and practically no peripheral vision, making it easy to sneak up on them and in some cases to be walking practically next to them without them noticing you. Their line of sight is incredibly short as well, giving the player another advantage with the sneak mechanic.

But they're just about as dumb as rocks. The dead bodies of their buddies don't seem to bother them in the slightest and they walk right by them without even blinking. However, they occasionally and inexplicably break their pattern of stupid and are able to see you from incredible distances. And if you make the smallest movement to one side when trying to assassinate them (when you're not supposed to be in their line of vision), they sometimes freak out and prevent you from being able to stealth anymore for that area. The game does try to put in a distraction mechanic to assist in more difficult areas, but there can still be difficulty using the mechanic.

Combat can unfortunately be a little repetitious, with the basic attacks mapped on two buttons and a few mapped to others. This leaves a very strong impression of the game being a button masher which it tries to rectify by giving the characters special attacks they can perform to break up the gameplay. Sadly though, some of the moves aren't the most responsive. It can be difficult to time them properly in order to get them to activate the way they're supposed to, and some of the moves interfere with other abilities. For example, Marie interacts with objects with the same button she uses for a particular special attack, leaving the character sometimes wasting energy to perform a special attack when all they wanted to do was open a chest.

In addition some of the moves just flat out can't be performed on certain enemy types. There's no real indicator of which enemies the attacks can be used on, leaving the player to figure out when trying a special attack is going to get their face punched in. The best thing about the fights is that the moves actually look pretty good, with occasional special animations where the characters murder the heck out of their enemies.

Game puzzles are manageable but can be a little annoying at times. The game is designed so that puzzle solving is a cooperative venture, meaning that when playing in single player, oftentimes the puzzles have to be completed twice to finish them. That room with the spinning blades? Yeah, you get to go through it twice. Luckily the computer AI is fairly intelligent and in the areas where it can automatically follow you, it does so quite well.

Each level has main objectives for you to complete as well as additional, bonus objectives that serve to give you more experience for your characters. They also contain a variety of collectibles in the form of chests and tablets. The chests contain various items, ranging from experience to new outfits for the characters. Other times they give temporary abilities that last until the end of the level such as extra health or special attacks. The in game mini map shows the way to the objectives and collectibles as well as showing where health pickups are. This is incredibly useful when running low on health and having the collectibles show up helps eliminate some of the frustration in finding them. Not all of the collectibles are automatically on the map however; the characters have to find clues in the level to help point towards some of them, providing some challenge. For most players it's pretty easy to get all of the pickups with simple exploration, maximizing the amount of experience characters receive.