Like the Renaissance, but more murder: A Review of AC2

Due to my 6-month sojourn, I only a couple weeks ago got around to playing Assassin's Creed 2. I only today beat it, since I went the semi-completionist route, and thought I'd share my thoughts, for those handful of you who haven't played the game yet still might (I'm guessing that's a very very small number, though).

As a sort of disclaimer, I really liked Assassin's Creed 1. The main complaint that most people had was the repetitiveness of the tasks, and while I was bothered a bit by this, overall I thought it was a great game, albeit with its fair share of flaws. Well, its sequel is pretty much the same: another great game, with a lot of cool new additions as befits a proper sequel, but again with its own flaws.

The biggest improvement is the number of things our noble (literally) Assassin can do, from a large number of weapons (pistols, poison, smoke bombs, lots of swords and daggers, etc) as well as some new techniques (picking up weapons, jumping while climbing, others). They also remedied some obvious flaws from 1, since the PC can now fall into water and not instantly die, although strangely enough the enemy still die instantly when making contact with any liquid. The missions are more varied and the "find x object" quests are either streamlined or eliminated (with the exception of the feathers). It still has great free running, and the locations and characters look as good as ever, with some decent voice work (although Ezio's fake-Italian accent bugged me the entire way through). Notoriety was a cool new touch, although I don't feel like it added much to the game mechanics. Basically they took everything that worked from the first game, kept it or improved it, then launched it into a new location with more cities.

However, on the negative side of things are some stuff they didn't improve. Combat-wise, counter-kills are still by far the most effective way to take down enemies, making combat somewhat monotonous, especially since I got my fill of counter-kill animations in the first game. I was even saddened by how few of them there were, and got bored pretty quickly (and the one time you can play as Desmond in combat, he has different kill animations, making me wonder why they didn't add more to Ezio). I only found out after I finished the game that you could learn additional attacks, something that game never told me was the case, which is rather annoying although after trying out I doubt I would have added many to my repertoire (except for the 3 dagger throw).

The enemy AI also varies between being incredibly dumb and preternaturally alert, which can get frustrating or laughably bad. For instance, walking up and stabbing three guards in a row while they all watch each other die,  or having one go on alert, pull out his sword, and still allow me to walk up and hit him. On the other hand, an NPC walking into me, causing him to drop his box, one time instantly got guards on high alert. I did appreciate having the ability to buy NPCs like courtesans, but it felt kind of boring after the first few times and I never found a use for anything other than the whores. Go figure?

Also a holdover from 1 was the camera and control issues. Normally it's not a problem, but occasionally the camera would get kind of funky and more often than I was pleased with free running would do something stupid, like go diving off the side of the building. I suspect it's one of those selective memory things, where it works most of the time without me noticing it, but there'd be crucial times where I'm be attempting to beat a clock or something similar and an easy jump onto a wire would instead result in me nosediving onto the concrete.

Perhaps this is me having too high of expectations, but for being an assassin, the game is incredibly unstealthy. I want to do things kind of like Splinter Cell, but Ezio simply doesn't have a lot of the options, and often I feel like the maps aren't even designed to allow for stealthy type things. Even when I tried, it often just ended up being simple to kill everything, since even when there was a mob of 30 guards they'd all run away in fear once I killed 4 or 5 of them. The poison option was a nice touch, but beyond that there weren't a whole lot of stealthy options beyond going up and stabbing someone, and even the throwing knives are no longer 1 hit kills when thrown on unsuspecting guards.

The cities also disappointed me, but not from a gameplay perspective. One advantage to waiting to play the game was that 3 of the locations were cities I actually visited in the last 6 months, namely Florence, Venice, and Rome/Vatican. Florence felt a bit similar, but Venice was disappointing in that it's composed entirely of tiny streets. That means that, for balance/design reasons, the streets couldn't be realistic and had to be widened a lot. This meant Venice didn't really feel like Venice, which was a disappointment. I was also looking forward to Rome the entire time, only to be disappointed again when the final section in Rome was actually only about 10 minute on a wall of Vatican City. Even in the Sistine Chapel for some bizarre reason they decided to not include the ceiling, one of the most famous pieces of art in the world (Edit: Nevermind, they were being true to history. The ceiling hadn't been painted at the time the game takes place). Highly disappointing, although like I said the cities were still interesting, if not particularly true to life.

Finally, the story kind of bugged me. The first game was good, it set up a cool story and left me wanting more with a good twist at the end. The second tried for the same, but ended up making everything like a fanatic's conspiracy theory (every single major person in history is either a Templer or an Assassin, and every great man/women who died was assassinated, basically) to the point it just felt ridiculous. And this game's ending went so far over the top and out of the blue that I didn't feel "what a twiiiist" but rather "you're joking, right? o_0."

Assassin's Creed 2 is a solid game, and contains quite a lot of fun if you're the type who enjoys the genre, but be prepared for numerous small flaws that may or may not bug you depending on your personality. It definitely surpasses its predecessors in a number of ways, but also brings itself down in a few as well. It brought me a lot of hours of fun playing, and I'd recommend it for anyone who even half enjoyed the first game.

-HTMC