Review: Assassin’s Creed II
I found myself wildly frustrated with Assassin’s Creed 2 to the point where I was scolded for shouting profanity at my telly box in the evenings and being told that it was “just a game”. Nonetheless, I should give credit where credit is due: Assassin’s Creed 2 has a few redeeming factors that make it worth your while and when it’s good… it’s very good.
For starters, the storyline is solid: a direct sequel it may be to its predecessor but it goes into far more detail. The setting of the Italian Renaissance is a great choice because not only have Ubisoft Montreal implemented real parts of history in the form of real people from the past, they’ve managed to create a living, breathing middle-aged Italy with some absolutely astounding attention to detail. The far more convincing characters in the game help move the story along excellently.
The main character in the adventure, the one you take control of, is Ezio Auditore de Firenze who is the son of Giovanni Auditore de Firenze, a member of the order of assassins. Giovanni and his sons are wrongly hanged for treason and Ezio inadvertently becomes a part of his father’s history when he chooses to take revenge on those who had his family killed.
Much in the same vein to the first game, you are playing a piece of another character’s past in the form of Desmond Miles, who exists in the present and is being used to dig up his ancestors’ memories in order to find artifacts in the past that have mystical properties. He is wired up to what is called an “animus” which allows access to the ancestors memories of the person who is connected to the chair. While you play through Ezio’s memories, Desmond is hooked up to an animus. The setting for Desmond has changed however as he is no longer being help captive. The Assassins and Templars have had a long history of rivalry and war between them and in the first game Desmond is being used by the bad guys who are the Templars. In Assassin’s Creed 2 however, Desmond is in the possession of fellow Assassins. The Assassin’s Creed storyline is something Dan Brown would be proud of. It’s a maze of intricacy I find hard to describe without revealing too much of the story to you. I want you to experience it for yourself because of how deep and mythical it gets.
Ubisoft Montreal go crazy with the mythical aspects, throwing at you more plot twists, mythology, enigmas, puzzle-solving, unearthed mysteries and historical links than you can shake Ezio’s sword at.
And speaking of Ezio’s sword, the choice of weaponry is something else that has been bulked up in the game. While playing, you can access a handy little navi-style ring, which pops onto your screen when selected, allowing you to choose from a vast array of weapons, more being unlocked as you progress through the game and build up your capital and make more money. Money is a new addition used to beef up the game’s longevity, but while it’s a somewhat welcome addition to enhance the realism of the in-game world, it’s also a little short lived. After about 3/4 of the way through the storyline, if you’re resourceful, you’ll have bought everything you need to buy, and will be well-equipped.
Your real estate ventures which tie in nicely to your money-making will have flourished, but will have reached their peak, and other than for throwing at mere peasants and distracting guards, and buying medicine and poison and the like, it becomes quite inconsequential and irrelevant almost. I have a vast empire around me, which is close to completion, but after completing the game, I found myself passing the time by throwing vast sums of coin into crowds of civilians who so desperately needed money, much more than you.
One of my favourite parts of the game. Da Vinci's flying machine is fun, exciting and a nice breath of fresh air in the game's story.
Civilians in the game, and the NPCs in general, are improved on the prequel in their modelling and believability, as I never found myself meeting the same people twice unless they were whores and bards, but you literally enter a breathing, living world of habitants who curse and swear and tut at your barbaric actions, who fight and steal and are sex-craved and violent. It’s almost like being in the real world. Even though I experienced some issues with the NPCs tendency to revert to the intelligence level of the prequel’s AI system, full of faults and idiocy and frustration, I must say that Ubisoft Montreal have created a very believable AI atmosphere, especially in the dialogue and reactions.
The more important characters who appear in the story however can be quite lacklustre, particularly some of the assassination characters, a few of the guard character models and a couple of your allies. They take away from some of Ubisoft Montreal”s hard work because they don’t gel very well into the story and the memorability factor but other characters such as De Medici and Da Vinci more than make up for this. Leonardo Da Vinci is a fantastic character in the game, the young rapscallion with a lot of ideas.
He serves as the Lucius Fox to your Italian Batman, as he builds and upgrades your arsenal, giving you news tools and a few very exciting perks to help you with your killing sprees. His flying machine is one of my favourite parts of the game, where Ezio takes control of a set of wings and flies around the Venetian landscape during Carnivale taking down guards on rooftops.
Other characters that feature in the game are the thieves, which have their guild, much like Elder Scrolls, and hire you to kill people who have wronged them and help you steal items from other people. The thief characters are a mix and match of quality, a few shining out with great personalities and Italian flair, but others simply unmemorable and uninteresting. Plus, it tries to create a relationship between Ezio and a thief named Rosa, but that just stops at some point in the game and fades away. Kind of annoying since it’s part of the storyline, but it doesn’t detract from the game at all in the long run.
The thieves in the game can be used to help your missions, along with courtesans and mercenaries, by distracting guards and helping you escape or get guarded treasure. The thieves steal, the courtesans flirt and the mercenaries fight, and they are one of my favourite new additions to the gameplay mechanic, because the faculties help spice up the gameplay variety and as they never get old, it certainly helps with the issue of repetitivity (oh yes, put that down in the Scrambled Pixel dictionary).
This new addition enhances the parkour aspect in the game, which is still very much there. Much like the rest of the game it feels improved upon, allowing you to grab more, jump higher and traverse more building but when you are running around the rooftops you get slowed down by Ezio’s slightly clunky movement. Plus, when you are escaping pursuit the game has the tendency to throw you off course when you are aiming in a certain direction outside of an 8-point axis.
Say you want to jump off a building and land onto a platform or wide open spaces. Sometimes the game will throw you off course and make you jump somewhere completely different. This can be especially frustrating during races when you have to move around a certain path very quickly. Also, when you jump off a building if you don’t make a jump and you’re ground-bound you lose a large chunk of health but if you hit the ground with only a few bits of health, you’ll lose only a little.
Much like this issue Assassin’s Creed 2 can be inconsistent. While the story is solid in general, the ending is very poorly constructed in both access and direction. It’s a quite frankly abysmal ending that ruined some of the believability for me and to access it you can’t just play it, you have to collect Codex pages to access it. Why make a game that makes you do side-quests to complete the storyline? I can understand the side-quests and extras but it should be an unwritten rule that game developers shouldn’t make you run through side-quests to complete the main part of the game.
The inconsistency crops up in other areas too. There is a fair bit of texture clipping, particularly during roof assassinations and a few missions which annoyed me greatly because they were so blatant and just like in the first game. Also, some of the textures were off at times with facial animations which had the tendency to look wooden and boxish. I’m not saying the whole game was like this because for a lot of it the game looked fantastic, but when it happens it’s very noticeable and quite disappointing in retrospect.
Also, at times the atmosphere created in the bustling and lively cities can be taken away from you by the modernistic white animus shine that appears in Ezio’s world. Characters from the present voice over occasionally too giving you little pointers and discussion about the story but this is not only distracting and generally stating the obvious but also quite frustrating in that it takes away from some of the Renaissance realism that Ubisoft Montreal have clearly strived so hard to create.
Diving from insanely big heights does nothing to your health if you land in the water, but land a few metres away onto land, and you're dead.
However, even with those issues Assassin’s Creed 2 stabs itself in the foot with one big blow: it tries too hard with the longevity factor. While the storyline is fun and engaging for the most part you’re constantly distracted by a massive amount of quite frankly average side-quests which litter your map and mini-map and become a nuisance. There is a ton of treasure, feathers, statues, armor, races, courier missions, mini assassinations and more but all of these clog up the game and okay, you can miss out on a large portion of it if you choose to but if you do, when the game is done you’re left with a ridiculous amount left to do. I completed the 12-hour storyline with only 55% synchronisation. I don’t particularly want to walk around every town looking for hundreds of different treasures because then the same problem occurs that was rife in the last game: monotony. Glyphs are in awkward and non-believable places and the puzzles you have to solve are pretty hard at times. It becomes a case of trial and elimination to solve some of them and what’s your reward for completion? A small piece of the story that could have been explained in a cutscene.
A few of the missions have a similar issue: they weren’t necessary and they could have been cut down to a cutscene. The arduous timed platforming sections where you have to run through areas to collect stone circles from assassin tombs are frustrating, annoying and give you little reward, not helped by the camera angles flipping to show you where you should go, forgetting where you are and making movement awkward. The reward for completion of them? An ugly-looking armor made by Altair in the past, which is the best armor in the game. It helps when you are fighting, but I like the look of Ezio’s father’s outfit. Shame.
Also during Carnivale, the game makes Ezio run through hoops as well, trying to win an item to help him access a party and thus aid his completion of an assassination. But the challenges are stupid, pointless and detract from the storyline and when you’ve done them it turns out that you don’t even win the bloody item. You are then tasked with stealing it off the “victor” in a mini-stealth mission. Why make me play 1/2 hour of piss-poor gameplay to make me do something that didn’t require that effort?
Overall Impressions:
Admittedly there are more people who loved the game than didn’t and I’m willing to bet that a lot of people that read this won’t agree with my opinions, but despite the clear improvement to the game in general, the mass of issues I had while playing meant that when I had finished I was left disappointed. I tried valiantly to play the game as much as I could and I gave it in excess of 20 hours of my time to see whether it was just me being frustrated with a few small aspects. That wasn’t the case.
Assassin’s Creed 2 is a great game, no question. It’s a sequel to a brilliant idea, it’s a breath of fresh air and it has some very redeeming factors. Unfortunately the game is let down by similar flaws from the first game and too much content for its own good that clogs up the game and makes you wade through the bad to reach the good.
Assassin’s Creed 2 can be summed up like this: it’s an infuriatingly good experience.
Rating: 
I’d just like to point out that you gave Wolverine a higher star rating than this game.
Re your comment on it would make a great movie: You watched Assassin’s Creed Lineage? Short film prequelling this game. If not, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcE8xJkK6t4
I loved this game. Easily my favourite of the year. Can’t wait for AC3
This game really is outstanding. Venice was my favourite city by far, it’s so satisfying to be chased over rooftops and then dive into water to escape. The design elements were incredible, as is the free-running and the character development and plot were great. Hats of to them.