User Review : Assassin's Creed 2

Assassin's Creed II I'm glad to say it lives up to its own hype.

Assassin’s Creed II is a sequel to the highly popular, but ultimately flawed, game Assassin’s Creed. Ubisoft promised that ACII would be much more open, there would be more variety of missions and less wondering around looking for flags, I’m pleased to say they’ve kept their word.

First some understanding of the story. Desmond is a descendent of a group called the Assassins, this faction unsurprisingly kills people, they do this in-order to make the lives of the little people better. They operate in the shadows as do the Templars, an organization that has been secretly controlling the world for well over 2000 years old. So the Templars kidnap Desmond, strap him to a machine and through some magical science access the memories of his distant descendant Altair and discovers the locations of ancient artefacts that will change the course of the world. Are you with me so-far?

Those that played the first game and managed to slog their way through until the end were rewarded with probably one of the worse endings ever conceived, Desmond starring at a wall with some weird symbols on it. Thankfully Assassin’s Creed II takes up directly after these events and Desmond is promptly sprung from captivity and hidden in an Assassin hideout. He’s then recruited and sent back to re-live his ancestor Ezio’s memories to pick up the needed skills. While all this is taking place you’re also following the events of Ezio, whose family is murdered early on and is on a quest for revenge. Players that haven’t completed the first game will at first seem completely out of depth, especially in the present time sections, but Ezio’s story is completely contained and is easy to follow.

As with the first game the focus is on free-running over the roof-tops of large sprawling cities with style. Ezio is capable to climb the sides of buildings with ease and then quickly pace over the numerous chimneys and balconies throughout the city to reach his destination. Completely contextual based the player only has to maintain a “high profile”, by pressing the right trigger button, to enable Ezio to perform some truly impressive stunts. The animation is fluid and life-like and is very hard to become bored with.

There are two massive cities for you to explore, two smaller towns and your Villa which is more like a castle. The large (yet linear) hub linking the cities of the first game is gone and there is only one section outside of the cities available to explore and each city can easily be reached by going to your local travel agent. Each area is designed superbly, each with their own distinct feel. Also your Villa can be upgraded, when you first arrive its run down and neglected. However once you pour some money into it you can open up shops, repair the local church, buy paintings and display your armour.

Yes the game has a money system, you gain money by completing missions, side quests, stealing and also your villa generates money as time goes on. You use this money to do the aforementioned upgrades to your villa but you can also pay to be healed by the doctors, portable medicine, also new armour and weapons can be bought and at the various blacksmiths dotted around the cities, as well as pouches for more healing items and throwing knives from tailors and the ability to dye your clothes. The only problem is that by the end of the game you’ll be richer than the Pope and have nothing to spend your money on but that’s a very minor issue in an otherwise welcome addition to the game.

Guards return making the life of an assassin a bit of a pain. They don’t like you picking on the locals and running around on roof-tops will make them see the red-mist. Guards are less agile than the first game, so less super soldiers in full armour jumping down four-storey buildings, more lightly armoured scouts desperately trying to keep up with you as they attempt to keep their balance. In this respect losing guards is a lot easier, you can just simply run away from them and 9 times out of 10 get away or you could hide in the bales of hay lying around, or blend in with the crowds, sit down on a bench or you could just beat them senseless.

Combat returns and Ezio has a few more toys than Altair, what with daggers, swords, hidden blades, fist fighting, hammers, poison and a couple of other items I won’t spoil for you. You can also steal and pick up weapons from your opponents and use it against them but the truth is you’ll rarely ever find this helpful as when you’re trying to pick up the weapon you’re going to be stabbed in the back and you can’t carry the weapon while in high profile. The combat is vastly improved on the old, stand in one spot and then counter an attack. That said counters are still king and you can quite happily just stand around with your hidden blade and counter the attacks of most common enemies, only when tougher opponents appear will you be forced to mix things up with some dodging, again all contextual based.

Still you don’t actually need to do a lot of fighting if you know what you’re doing. Other than just keeping out of sight and using stealthy kills you can now hire groups of people to do your work for you. Hire some courtesans to distract the guards with the seducing womanly ways, pay off some thieves to steal something and get the guards to chase after them or hell, just hire some mercenaries to attack the guards head on. Either way they won’t be paying attention to you and you’ll be able to slip by completely unnoticed.

The main complaint with the first game is that the main story was the interesting and fun section of the game, there were nine missions but in-order to get the missions you had to complete a series of side-missions to find out about your target. These weren’t fun, they were dull and repetitive, they made you do the same thing over and over again with only slight changes, they were dull because they repeated themselves, and basically they were quite repetitive and not very fun to play through because they repeated themselves a lot. This time however Ezio doesn’t have to do any of this and can just play the main missions, it does make him seem a bit too knowledgeable on the movements of his targets but it makes the game flow a lot more smoothly. Playing straight throughout the game will give you a good 10 hours play of cinematic story-telling which keeps you hooked.

Side-missions aren’t dead however, Ubisoft (in game I might add) say that they made 200 missions to play; around half of them are the main story. You’ve got races, you’ve got assassination missions, you’ve got beat-em-up missions, you’ve got courier missions, viewpoints to find, you’ve got over 300 treasure chests to find, a series of hidden symbols to find that open up into mini-game brain-teasers, 100 feathers to collect and my personal favourite, Assassin tombs. Assassin tombs are good fun and play like a Prince of Persia game meaning you’ll actually get to test out those jumping skills in a set environment rather than just climbing up towers and running over roof tops you’ll be jumping around the interior of chapels and through the dank over-sized sewers, a much welcome relief from the main game. All the side quests are pretty filled out; while some can be quite dull you can’t really complain about them as you don’t have to do them if you don’t want to. The only “dull” section of the game that’s mandatory is the collection of 30 Codex pages were if you weren’t collecting them throughout the game will seriously slow down your pace right at the end of the game as you need to go back across all the cities to hunt them down.

There are some slight problems with the game, the over dependence of contextual buttons does make the player feel removed from the game at times and Ezio (or rather the AI) will decide to do completely the wrong thing you were intending leading you to fall off a roof, miss that target or jump over that feather rather than down to it. Overall though the system generally works and does provide quite the visual feat but that’s the other problem, the difficulty. The game, like many modern games, has been designed to look good and people generally don’t look good when they’re failing. Therefore the game is ridiculously easy piling on the armour, the extra health and health items players will rarely ever die and if you do the worse that will happen is you’ll be transported 20 feet away from where you were with full health and all the items you’ve just collected.

The game however is one of the best I’ve ever played, it’s very open leaving the player to do whatever they like when they like, but making it clear where to go if you just want to do the main story. While if you do the side missions you’re likely to get well over 20 hours of play time. This is a game you should definitely pick up, even if you didn’t like the first game the improvements are so vast you’ll probably enjoy this and even if it’s too easy you’ll be having so much fun you won’t notice it until the game is over.