Review – Assassins Creed 2

Assassins Creed 1 & 2: Revenge of the frilly outfit.

Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Publisher: Ubisoft
FingerSports Rating: 5/5

I’ve just finished Assassins Creed 2, and bloody good fun I had too. The game (for those of you living with your head in the sand) follows the story of a really unlucky guy who gets strapped into machines that allow him to re-live the lives of his ancestors through his genetic memory, traipsing through time finding artefacts of great power for some evil corporation. It is an action/adventure platform with nice stealth elements built in.

This flimsy pretence is kept up really rather well, and if you can finish the first game (Through its endless repetitive side quests) you are rewarded by a stomach churning and epilepsy inducing final fight – and a jaw dropping ending twist(ish). Creed 1 was a good game, not a great game, not a terrible game. It just suffered from too short a timescale to deliver what they wanted to achieve. As a result, the original Assassins creed featured the same assassination repeated half a dozen times just with different surroundings and increasingly whiney targets. The ending is worth it though, especially if you pay attention to the story!

Assassins Creed 2 picks up exactly where the first game finishes, with our confused hero being thrown into a world of Templers and Assassins without anyone even stopping to offer him breakfast. This continuity is very rewarding for those who played the first game, but I can see how you might be a little thrown at first if you’ve no idea what’s going on (or should I say ‘gone on’ this time travel lark is confusing).

Visually, Creed 2 looks nicer than the first, although rather than fancy graphics improvements I suspect that this is more to do with the better opportunities for rich costumes and environments that the renaissance offers compared to the Dark ages. The engine doesn’t seem to struggle with much of the game play, (I was running it on a PS3 and a dirty great big HD TV. Engage smug mode.) and the only frame-lag occurs when the camera does it’s spinning oh-look-at-how-nice-our-city-is thing from the top of the taller towers. Assassins Creed 2 also offers a more balanced feeling combat system than its predecessor, and there is more flow to most of the other features too.

One nice touch is the ability to reduce your notoriety in cities by doing various tasks, but this does make things rather easy. Even when you’ve killed a dozen nobles and a couple of score guards, tearing down posters suddenly makes all the guards forget who you were. Even with full notoriety, you can still blend with crowds and sneak down side alleys; I think that the game is a bit more fun like this!
The story is also better told than its predecessor, you are strung along a series of events – but the sandbox game style allows you to break out and go on a rampant killing spree if you fancy a change. Also, there is a small township that you get to directly manipulate; you can upgrade the various dilapidated areas to increase the towns’ income and thus your own. I liked these little breaks from the action, there are also really nice areas where you get to explore old tombs, these levels often have no enemies, and are a real challenge to your free running skills!

I didn’t find the game very challenging, but still great fun. I managed to beat it over a long weekend, 20+ hours game play. There was one challenging aspect to the game though, there are puzzles scattered across the game world that are often quite well hidden themselves (That bastard bridge in Venice had me tearing my hair out). These puzzles unlock a ‘Truth’, I’m not going to spoil anything here, but it really is interesting doing the puzzles, some are so hard that the game even gives you a ‘hint’ option. That’s like saying “Ha! You’re stupid. Let me help point out the thing you’re missing.” And it didn’t help much.

The game really does have very few faults, the free running is very well executed and great fun, the fighting is brutal and guarantee will have you going ‘Oooh’ and ‘OUCH!’ out loud. (Go on, get counter kills with the hammers, vicious!) The story is great, the characters are likable and the game is big enough to warrant a replay or two. It’s a shame that you can’t skip the cut-scenes, and the inability to load an earlier mission or save irritates me, I’d like to re-do some of the great sneaky assassinations. Also, although the game keeps an encyclopaedia of locations you’ve visited and people you’ve met it doesn’t let you highlight them on a map, so unless you remember where important location A is, you’ll have to do a run around to find it again. Your character is also practically invincible, only really daft falls and completely failing to find the block button can result in your death. You really don’t need to stealth anything; I’ve got the achievement for killing ten guards at once without being hit.

All in all, Assassins Creed 2 is a great game. It is better than its predecessor in almost every way, it is exciting and the story is really building for a crescendo finale; I just hope they don’t milk it too far.

Roll on Assassins Creed 3!
DukesOfDevon