I'm new to the Assassin's Creed series. After watching a friend play the first game I thought it looked boring and got distracted by other titles out at the time. When I heard that developer Ubisoft was working on a sequel that supposedly solved many of the problems from the first game, I was skeptical at first. After getting my hands on Assassin's Creed 2 and spending some time within its masterfully created world, that skepticism quickly evaporated.
Essentially a third-person action game, the story in Assassin's Creed 2 starts out strong. Unlike many games that put you in the role of a hooded guy who stabs people for a living, the game's protagonist Ezio is introduced as a living, breathing human being that's as capable in conversation as he is in combat. A few dark turns early in the narrative provide the impetus for Ezio's eventual transformation into something that resembles a Renaissance-era Batman. The story's power wanes as things progress but I was so busy enjoying everything else that the title offers that I barely even noticed, even at the thinnest plot points. Great voice acting is only occasionally spoiled by cheesy dialogue or bad Italian accents.
Assassin's Creed 2 is set in several Italian cities during the 1400s. Running across rooftops or fighting city guards in dark, dank alleyways is made all the more immersive by the painstaking detail put into these locations. Based on the cities of Florence and Venice (among others), their layouts and architecture closely mimic that of the real thing. I've heard accounts from gamers who were able to find their way around in the game after spending time in one of the cities on vacation. Another story involves a player using Google Maps to seek out a certain landmark, and then finding it in that exact spot in-game.
Artistic license combined with breathtaking Italian scenery makes for one of the most beautiful and captivating worlds I've ever experienced in a game. Standing on a rooftop and seeing Venice stretch on as far as you can see, and then knowing that you can actually go there in the game is an incredibly cool feeling. Watching townspeople going about their daily lives, people having conversations in the street, the city guards investigating a corpse you didn't hide quite well enough, all of these things draw you deeply into the world and make you want to stay there for hours. Composer Jesper Kyd's mixture of orchestral and electronic elements for the soundtrack further deepens the world's mystical feel. Add to all of that an incredible amount of interaction (tossing coins into a crowd to create a disturbance while fleeing from guards or blending into a group of people, for example) and you can spend enormous amounts of time just discovering all the things there are to do, let alone actually doing them.
In the style of Grand Theft Auto and other open world games, Assassin's Creed 2 leaves you free to roam (for the most part) wherever you please. Icons on your minimap clearly direct you to optional side missions or stashes of treasure, though some of these are guilty of getting stale and repetitive after a while. Assassination missions in particular were sometimes annoying, and often were frustratingly difficult or uninteresting due to their lack of structure or scripting.
These little one-shot quests aren't the only things to do besides the story missions, and many tasks run the entire course of the game. Collecting all of the hundred hidden feathers or finding hidden glyphs that require you to solve varying puzzles to unlock their secrets are only two such examples. Eventually you'll take control of an entire villa owned by Ezio's family, with options to upgrade its shops and infrastructure to gain discounts on weapons and equipment as well as earn income from taxes. This home base not only adds an unexpected layer of depth to the game, but gives you a place to show off your achievements by providing display areas for the equipment you've unlocked and the treasures you've found. They're touches that I wouldn't expect to find in a game like this, but they add a lot to a world that's already really good at pulling you in.
Considering the freedom of movement that you're given in the game, I'm truly thankful for the obvious work that went into getting the controls working as well as they do. Just about any surface you see can be scaled in one way or another, and only rarely did Ezio fail to do what I wanted him to when climbing or leaping. After a few hours things really start to mesh well, and you'll forget that you're even holding the controller in the first place.
Assassin's Creed 2 gets all the basics right. A believable main character that's easy to like and a stunning environment filled with enjoyable and interesting things to do are tainted only by the occasional control glitch or overly frustrating quest. Things can get a bit brutal at times (you ARE an assassin after all) so I wouldn't suggest gifting this one to junior for the holidays. Definitely one of my favorite games of the year, and a great example of how a sequel should be done.
Title: Assassin's Creed 2
Price: $59.99
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC (Sometime in 2010)
ESRB Rating: M for Mature
Score: A
