Assassin's Creed 2 Review
Ezio StabbyMcDoubleBladedJazzHands has just left the building.
The Good: Occasional moments of brilliance/awesome, free roaming, graphics
The Bad: Accuracy, the parts where you aren't killing someone, glitches
Pre Review warning: This contains minor AC1 spoilers. If you haven't played it and still want the plot point they spoil about three seconds into the first Assassin's Creed to remain unspoiled, turn back now! And by turn back, I mean go and get it at your local Target. I mean, what, the games like 4.99 now, ya lazy bum.
Oh, Desmond. You really drew the sort end of the Karma stick, didn't you? That must of been some horrible deal you pulled with the universe. "Yeah, hey, you get to be a bartender for, say, ten or so years, and then we strap you into a giant chair, jam a visor over your face, and force you to relive one of your ancestors kill, oh, say, everyone. How's that sound? Deal? Sign on the dotted line! Oh, yeah, minor detail, but you'll be kidnapped for the length of your memory induced killing spree! But, boy, will you have a great dental plan!" Will Desmond's lot in life improve in time for the seconds Assassin's Creed, or will our cuddly hoddie wearing bartender get an even shorter stick (Pssst: The forecast? Cloudy with a chance of very short stick.) Read on!
Review
Throughout most of Assassin's Creed II (Henceforth known as "AC2" or just "AC") you play as Ezio Auditore de Firenze, a young adult on Florence, whose daily chores involve washing the clothes, running along rooftops, playing with his sister, climbing buildings, getting places unseen, and taking out the trash. Your family gets the axe (Well, the noose. And it's only the males of your family. So, you know. Half your family gets the noose. Same thing) and you go on a roaring rampage of ravenous revenge.
Sort of.
See, the first assassination kills the guy who ganked your Dad and other male family members, and after that the game loses any sort of plot steam or momentum. Sure, the guys you're killing now maybe kinda sorta if you look at it the right way had something to do with killing half your family, but I *already* took care of the guy who back stabbed them. The game isn't helped out whatsoever in this matter by how the game times things. It takes you roughly twenty (yup, two-zero, 20, years) to finally get around to killing everyone who, if looked at after staring at the sun for several hours and making a funny half shut eyelid look, maybe had something to do with killing your folks. The smaller plot points that tie the larger plot points manage to do better, but only just. Sprinkle in a few plot points here or there, maybe some questionable voice acting, and bingo bango bongo you've got a barely workable plot. If there's one saving grace of the entire story, it's that everybody's little death speech has been squeezed down to about 2-3 lines. Even this victory, however, is diluted since almost half of those 2-3 lines will be in Italian. No, really. About a quarter of the games dialog is in honest to goodness Italian. It's annoying.
Questo e Ezio. Vedere come questa cosa fastidiosa e italiano?
But you aren't here to listen to Italian! You're here to stab people! To fly from rooftop to rooftop like the winged angel of wrist blades, bringing down your furious anger on those who have wronged you, those that might of wronged you, and poor guards who just want to feed their families and survive another day. These portions of the game work pretty much one to one with how they worked in Assassin's Creed 1. Sure, there are a few new moves. You can leap from the sky and stab people. You can shoot people with a concealed pistol. You can toss money (Money money money!) into the street to distract people. You can reach over a ledge and yank someone to their doom. You can kill someone and hide them in cover. You can leap from rooftop to rooftop with the greatest of ease, the wonderful man on the swinging trapeze. However, the basics of the game still remain. Do a bunch of missions you really wish you weren't doing. Sneak through the city with guards on super high vigilant if-you-litter-I-will-turn-your-body-into-an-arrow-pincushion mode, stab someone in the back (Or the face! The game is an equal opportunity stabber), and then flee.
The problems remain the same as they were in Assassins' Creed 1 as well, just...expanded. Sure, there are more diverse missions with 100% less flags to find (Damn flags), but by the end of the game you'll be just as sick of beating people up, stabbing random people, and racing others as you were of eavesdropping and pickpocketing as you were in the first AC. Sure, you'll enjoy the numerous new weapons, enemy types, and counter moves until you realize that all you have to do is one of two different two button press moves to kill pretty much every enemy in the game. If there's one major difference between AC1 and AC2, it's that now there are lots of plot specific missions to hate, instead of just merely three generic missions to hate. You'll guide thieves to their rooftop hiding spots. You'll escort mercs to their ground based mischief places. You'll escort lots of people around town as they talk your ear off. You'll kill guards. You won't kill guards. You'll run on rooftops. You won't run on rooftops. The common denominator in all of these is that you'll be staring at your TV, bored out of your mind, wondering why the hell you aren't doing awesome assassinations.
The redshirt army, folks, about to get axed a question.
Eventually, you'll get to these assassinations and it is then, and only then, that the game manages to pick up all of it's subpar pieces and provide you with an experience that is possibly worth the price of entry. You'll sneak through a party and time shooting a baddie with your hidden gun to coincide with the ongoing fireworks show. You'll scale the walls of a fortress before dropping into an open window to cause your mischief. You'll fly (yes, fly) on one of Leonardo's drawings brought brilliantly to life by the (virtual) man himself. You'll bound from rooftop to rooftop as you chase down two fleeing targets in a crowded dock area filled with sailors and guards.
And fly you will. The free running system from AC1 is back with a vengeance, and with, you guessed it, the same problems as the first! The game is great at broad brushstrokes of movement, and if you don't care how you get from point uno to point dos, the free running system works like a charm. The moment you attempt to do anything accurate, however, the game breaks down in quite a bad way. This was bad in the first Assassin's Creed, but in AC2 it's even worse due to the increased emphasis on accuracy and the generally larger move set. The number of awesome assassination moments was quickly outpaced by the number of curse laden tirades I subject my TV set to. "No!" I may scream at the lifeless color dots staring back at me "I wanted you to jump from fucking pole to fucking pole, not slam your head into a bridge! Why the goddamn hell would you think I'd want to do that!" Another one of my favorites was when, hanging off a ledge, I wanted to assassinate a guard. I hit my assassination button and fully expected Ezio to reach up, grab the guy, and send him to his doom. Instead, Enzo jumps up, stands in full view of the guard...and merely flicks his hidden blades in an out. I couldn't help but literally face palm myself as the guard promptly hit me, sending me flying off of my rooftop perch and to the cold, hard, and deadly ground below.
I could continue to go on about smaller things. The sound's wonderful. The new money system/villa is somewhat headscratching but not a gamebreaker. The graphics are absolutely beautiful, easily some of the best this generation. Your characters hands will clip numerous times through the object you want to grab, only for Ezio to totally miss them and grab something else entirely (Or, worse, not grab anything at all and return to your starting position.) The camera guy deserves a handshake and a bullet to the head for his performance in the open world (the handshake) and timed sections (The bullet.) Bodies do a funny glitch whenever they die, which turns not so funny when they glitch themselves off of a rooftop and alert some guards. However, none of this matters. Your enjoyment of Assassin's Creed 2 will be measured based off of how much soul crushingly annoying slash bad slash aggravating parts you can withstand in order to get to the genuinely rockawesome assassinations.
Conclusions
For me, the payoff was not worth the price of admission. No matter how awesome the next assassination promised to be (and yes, practically every assassination lived up to that promise), chugging through the low parts tying the pure distilled win (the assassinations) together eventually became too much for me. However, if you can survive the horribad parts, Assassin's Creed 2 might just be worth it.
Rent It
SimpsonsParadox lives beneath a rock and only appears once every 200 years to eat generic cliche'd Russian leader chicks. He wishes you'd point out any grammar/spelling/generic errors. He is aware that he could just suck as Assassin's Creed and that went into his scoring. And, yes, this is his idea of a short review.
Flame Suit On!
