Assasin's Creed 2

Jason's being a no-life and doing this thing again:

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Review:

Assassin's Creed 2 is the sequel to an immensely popular and fun video game named (surprise) Assassin's Creed. What Assassin's Creed did, it did right. The entire game felt like one giant cutscene during which you jump around stabbing people with the pointy end of your open palm and spend 50 of the 60 hours of gameplay stabbing guards in refreshingly theatrical counter attacks. However, this game was also criticized for not being varied enough. There was no money system and every mission in the game was 55 minutes of doing the same side quests over and over again to find out where the guy standing out in the open will be standing (sounded better in my head), 5 minutes of doing the actual assassination, and 15 minutes of watching a cinematic that slowly reveals another piece of the puzzle that is Assassin Creed's conspiracy theory of a storyline where there are a bunch of shiny things that alter reality and contain maps that help you find more shiny things. Which also contains the information that led to every technological advancement ever.

Now, Assassin's Creed 2 doesn't do that. It's more of a sandbox game, in this period of time where there are so many sandbox games, you could probably recreate Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, and still have enough sand left over to make a class of little kids very happy. Of course, Assassin's Creed 2 sacrifices the aspect its predecessor did the best, the fluidity and cinematic playing style of it all. It was almost like watching a movie in which you were the main character and every now and then and random beggars walk in your way while you're walking down the street and punch you in the face. The sequel, however, feels more like a MMORPG where the beggars have suddenly donned minstrel outfits and shove you backwards while strumming their guitars. Then they look at you like you're the asshole when you carve open their stomachs with a pointy sword coming out of a mechanism strapped to your wrist.

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Looking back in history, you'll find out an interesting thing. That is, Italians kind of suck. The only really important things they've ever done are killing Jesus and the Renaissance. That's right, deicide and a whole bunch of painters running around being gay.

So of course, it's during this gay painty period of history that Assassin's Creed 2 is set. As you're just joining, you wake up as Desmond, the crowd favorite for the world's blandest sentient life form competition. A fish-lady with blood all over her shirt tells you that you're breaking out of the company, and tells you to follow her. You do it, and she makes you sit in a machine and you watch a video of an Italian baby being born. She then snaps you out of it, you climb into the trunk of a car, and she takes you to the secret hideout of a couple of rebels who look like they belong to the local community youth group.

Now Desmond must relive the life of his Italian ancestor named Ezio Auditore da Firenze so that he learns how to be an assassin. I guess everything he did in the first game reliving the life of Altair, the most powerful Grandmaster of the super h4x assassins ever, was just for warm-ups, so they wanted Desmond to learn assassin's skills from someone with more emotional capacity than spoonful of pudding. And doesn't dissolve as soon as he touches water. And can jog down the street without a 12th-century SWAT team descending on his hooded head like the winged monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.

Overall though, Assassin's Creed 2 was an improvement on the original, as the progression wasn't as rigidly structured, and you have more to do in the game rather than watch a cutscene for ten minutes, hop around on rooftops for fifty minutes, then stabbing someone to start another cutscene that lasts another ten minutes.

'Course, every game has it's downfalls, and Assassin's Creed 2, robbed of the cinematic fighting style that made its predecessor so fun, has now been stripped down to you standing around for an eternity waiting for the enemy to attack you so you can one hit counter kill him. Creed 1 was this too, of course, but at least it let put on a good show while you were doing this. Then again, I can't really complain much about it, because I eventually got tired of using counters by something like the fourth mission and just resorted to punching my enemies twice, grabbing them, throwing them on the ground, then cutting another hole in their windpipe in a maneuver that would probably called the "Oh screw this."

In Creed 1, people complained that the weapon choice was terribly limited, as it consisted of one sword, one dagger, a hidden blade, and your fists. Well, in Creed 2, Ezio apparently carries around a giant invisible wardrobe that only pops up when you hold down the right bumper (xbox 360), because he has so many weapons that some of it gets a bit redundant, really. You can throw money and smoke bombs on the ground to create distractions, but you can only carry something like 10 smoke bombs around at once, and they cost 50 gold each, whereas you only need 10 gold to throw some on the ground, and you can keep throwing 10 gold denominations on the ground until all of Italy drowns in a shower of shiny coins. In addition, you have a poisoned blade that, when you stab someone, makes them dance around for a bit, start randomly waving weapons around, and then dies, a process that takes so long that virtually anything would be more efficient, if less funny.

You can also collect cash now, which you can use to buy weapons, armor, ammo for your throwing knives and such, and repairs for your armor. However, none of that stuff costs that much. The best armor in the game you get for free anyways if you collect enough cereal box tokens that are conveniently marked out for you in your map.

No, most of the money you sink into the management of your villa/tiny city in a sort of Sim City for retards minigame. You can restore the banks, shops, wells, gold mines, art stores, church, or even build a whorehouse there. What's the purpose of this, you ask? Well, it makes the tiny city look a bit nicer, and the game pays you an amount of money proportional to the amount of money you spend on the villa. However, you're only going to keep using this payment to upgrade the villa further and get paid more in an infinite loop that grinds to a halt when you realize that you can't upgrade your villa any further. So, the money keeps building up and sits in your bank account until you have enough cash to swim around in like an Italian Scrooge McDuck.

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Seeing how much gamers complained about Creed 1's dullness, Ubisoft overcompensated and stuffed Creed 2 with so much content that a whole lot of dead weight started pouring out of its nose and mouth.

There was a bit of hype going around in the pre-release stage about Ezio being able to get around by using Leonardo da Vinci's (Ezio's closest friend in the game) flying machine. However, the game already had so much content stuffed into it that there was no room left for this possibly incredibly fun element of gameplay, and you only ever got to use it for one mission, during which you spent most of the time crashing into the ground until you figured out how to use it. Once you master flight, though, the mission ends and the game sticks it in your villa's armory, where you get to do nothing but stare at it lying on the table and read a description that pops up when you interact with it.

I guess I really can't complain about the game having too much stuff, though, so I'll complain about something else. The story gets very hard to follow around the middle, seeing as you've got both a convoluted conspiracy theory involving all of documented history, a parallel storyline in the modern world involving your little hideout consisting of a lady who looks like a fish, a tech geek girl with an annoying voice, and a total douchebag that coordinates a secret society's actions, and the main storyline that has a Spanish guy dicking around in Italy killing off your family members and every important political character in Renaissance Italy's history left and right to meticulously keep track of. This, of course, is not helped at all by several arbitrary jumps forward in time. I was in one mission where I just finished killing a man and the game jumped forward two years later with Ezio sitting on a bench and a woman coming up to him with evidence of his last mission. Why did she take two years to do this, and why was Ezio's first reaction not to stab her in the face? He certainly had no qualms about doing this to every other person he met in the game.

The other thing is that while Creed 2 was definitely better than Creed 1, it's just too easy. While the guard pursuits in Creed 1 could be almost harrowing, the guards in Creed 2 will be willing to dismiss you if you so much as turn your collar up the other way. One of the weapons you unlock towards the middle of the game is, no joke, a freaking GUN. Now, I'm no armament expert, but in 15th century Europe where the epitome of weaponry is maybe an arrow lit on fire, that's not really giving your enemies much of a chance, now is it? In one mission, I was supposed to wait for a woman to suggest that I shoot a guy on a boat while fireworks were going off and slip away. Instead, I just shot him while she was finishing her sentence and then killed the legion of fully armored knights that maybe thought something was up with a guy in a menacing hood pointing an armed weapon at their lord in about two minutes without taking so much as a scratch. Without wishing to spoil anything, the final FINAL boss fight in Creed 2 is you in a pit punching around a fat old guy who happens to be the Pope. Somewhere between me grabbing him and kneeing him three times and then stomping on his stomach while he was on the ground, I realized that I was getting pretty bored. Beating the game felt like winning the Gold Medal in the Olympic long jump event. And all my opponents were paraplegic five year olds with AIDS.

In fairness, though, I kind of enjoyed the game.