Assassin's Creed 2

I recently beat Assassin's Creed 2 for the 360 and thus figured a review was in order. I also beat Secret of Mana (finally) so my next review should be for that. Yes, the SNES game, shut up.

Assassin's Creed 2

Overall:

Assassin's Creed 2 is the sequel to Assassin's Creed (who would have suspected that?). You follow Desmond Miles a regular guy living in the near future who is living out parts of his ancestor's lives via a machine called the Animus. This would be rather boring if his ancestors were bakers or tailors or whatever and we're fortunate enough that his ancestors happen to have been assassins who were involved in a secret ongoing war against the Knights Templar which are still around and into the whole world domination bit. In the first game you were captured by modern day Templars and put into the Animus so they could find where your ancestor had hidden a powerful ancient artifact. This time you escape and are helping the modern day assassins to discover where other pieces of Eden are as well as find out some historical information. You control a different ancestor this time, Ezio Auditore, in Renaissance Italy. Ezio is trying to unravel a conspiracy that involved his family (I'm being vague here to avoid plot spoilers) and in the process discovers his family has a proud assassin heritage that he must take up in order right wrongs.

Pros:

This game fixed a lot of the repetitiveness that was the biggest complaint against the first game (+0.75). You no longer have to gather intel on your target via the same handful of mini games, you find out who your targets are as part of the story and the mini games are gone.

They've added a lot of new options to combat as well (+0.50). You still have a knife, a sword, throwing knives, and your hidden blades but you get a second hidden blade for double assassinations, a gun for powerful ranged kills, poison for killing a person without them even knowing, smoke bombs to escape (overpowered like crazy, you get 20 seconds to kill everyone around you), and even throwing sand in your opponents eyes when unarmed. Like much of AC2 they kept the general mechanic from AC1 and refined it and gave you some more options.



As far as sneaking around goes you get a few new options. You can now blend in with more then just the traveling monks or their equivalent in a Muslim controlled city. Any crowd of people can allow you to blend in (assuming the guards aren't actively chasing you with line of sight) (+0.25). In addition you can hire prostitutes to distract guards that guard key areas (but not to have sex with), thieves to mess with the guards which causes them to chase after the thieves and effectively does the same thing as the whores, or mercenaries who you can tell to engage targets which makes a fight a lot easier since if you go up an enemy engaged to one of your mercenaries you can stab him in the back for an instant kill (+0.50).

You can also throw money to distract low level guards and citizens which will cause them to flock to the area (+0.25). I assume this would be good if you're trying to escape and wanted to slow down guards but I usually made a run for the rooftops and tried to lose them there.

They have a handful of extra little optional side missions you can try to accomplish for money such as races or assassination contracts from Lorenzo de Medici (+0.25). These bring in money that you'll be spending on inventory upgrades allowing you to carry more throwing knives/poison/etc. and on healing yourself at nearby doctors as well as on your Villa.

The Villa is a neat little project you get to work on throughout the game (+0.50). It serves as your home base but you can upgrade parts of it such as certain stores by paying money. Upgrading stores gives you a discount on them but the real advantage is that you start making money based on how much your Villa is worth which depends on how much you've upgraded it. Also every weapon or armor you buy adds to the Villa's worth as they are on display (where you go to change weapons/armor) as well as the collectible feathers you can find throughout the game. In fact most everything you buy that doesn't get used up like smoke bombs counts towards making your villa better. You see your town start looking better as you upgrade it too. Granted you'll end the game with more money then you know what to do with, but this isn't really a problem.

The assassin tombs are a cool little sidequest (+0.25). You have to do the first one, but after that in every major city you go to you can find one or two and upon finding the entrance you're tasked with a slightly more challenging puzzle/platforming section then usual and rewarded with some money and an assassin seal. If you get all six you unlock the best armor in the game that turns you a cool shade of black (much like Zero's armor).

I also liked the hidden chests that would be marked on your map if you bought a treasure map (+0.25). Good source of money but you still had to track them down. Reward for effort that made you work for it, but not to a ridiculous degree.

The puzzle involving the 20 glyphs founds throughout the world. "Subject 16" the guy before Desmond left clues to some secret hidden truth. You find these glyphs and have to solve a few ciphers or where's waldo type puzzles and you're given a half second clip of a video and usually some background information on the Templar's actions throughout history (+0.50).

Fist fight with the pope (+0.25). Enough said.

+4.25

Cons:

I miss the lengthy scenes when you assassinate a story character (-0.50). It still cuts to you talking to your target in limbo, but they say like one line and you tell them to rest in piece and it's over. I also sorta miss the lead up, they still have it a bit, but it feels less epic when you go to kill one of the conspirators, less of them put up a fight and just sorta run which is less satisfying (-0.50), and the ones that do fight aren't very tough to kill (-0.25). Granted an old man shouldn't be super hard to kill, but even some of the young physically fit ones just sorta go down without much fanfare.

Also they made the years fly by, like over the course of the game ten years go by (and then another ten near a time jump at the end) but if they didn't tell you the year at the beginning of each memory sequence (aka chapter) you'd assume the game happens in approximately 6 months to a year (-0.25). They do it so the events and deaths of the characters that exist in history match up to when they actually died and I don't know why it bothers me. I guess it just feels weird when Ezio knows where the next guy he needs to kill is and waits two years to do it (-0.25).

The feathers are the new flags from the first game. This time there are 100 spread throughout the game. They're just as much a pain in the ass to find as the flags were (-0.25). You apparently get a reward at 50 and all 100 but I ended up with maybe 36 or so and had zero interest in getting the rest. Not a huge complaint since it's entirely optional. I'm hesitant to dock points for a feature that is completely optional but here the problem was they missed the opportunity to do what they did with the hidden treasure chests and mark them on your map once you had bought a map (-0.25). I would have been much more willing to look for them if they marked them on your map or even just had a small circle showing which part of the map they were in.

-2.25

Overall Rating:9.0/10