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1. Assassin's Creed 2 - The Return of the Reviewer
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Nov 20 2009

   There is no doubting that the first Assassin's Creed's charm was in the extravagant graphics and straightforward action - the incredible climbing and free-running, and the intuitive thrill of stapling people to the dirt with a hidden blade. Of course, there were many people who, after trying to play Assassin's Creed (1), were put off by what they called repetitive game play. Those whom agree with that, typically follow up that sentence with another downplay or two ranging from "bland color palette" to "barely passable sword combat". Before you could kill your target, you had to complete a few "investigation" missions around the city to gather information. There are only four different types. They start out incredibly easy, and get a tiny bit more difficult as the game goes on, becoming just "easy" without the "incredibly" modifier. But being that you are reading the review for the SEQUEL, you either know this, have already formed your own opinion, and are getting the "I'm right, you are not" speech ready. Yet before you begin flaming, hear this: For all you can complain about in the first game, it did enough things right to make me purchase the Limited Edition Assassin's Creed 2.
   
   Assassin's Creed 2 starts out with Desmond Miles, yet still strapped to the Animus machine. Unlike the last game that developed two very different story lines simultaneously, it will be defined by the lessons of his ancestor. Yet the sequel begins as messily as anything I can remember. Friendly lab-tech Lucy helps Desmond escape from the Abstergo facility where he's being held.
   
   Abstergo, of course, is a futuristic front for the Templar Knights (try to keep up), and she's busting him out so they can no longer use the Animus to steal his genetic memories for the location of super-powerful objects called Pieces of Eden (seriously, keep up). Lucy and Desmond escape by running down corridors, doing clunky stealth and having an awful fight in a carpark. When they get where they're going, it turns out Lucy's fellow Assassins are rejects from Scooby Doo, who live in a snazzy loft conversion at a warehouse. And then they strap Desmond in an Animus (2.0) anyway. Desmond is reborn inside the Animus as another of his ancestors, Ezio Auditore, who lived in Florence in the 15th century.
   
   Slow, rough start, but things quickly improve. Assassin's Creed II is quickly freed from the burden of narrative expectation, because there's no longer any mystery about those weird graphical effects in the Middle Ages. We know you're a man in a time machine, there's a war between Assassins and Templars, and the Templars want Pieces of Eden so they can enslave humanity. The game is instantly forced to stand on its own merits.
   
   So it does. You're still an assassin, of course. You still plan for kills by completing little missions within huge cities, and you still spend most of your time clambering over rooftops using a parkour-inspired platform move-set. You get a few new attacks, the range of possible assassinations is better defined, and you learn a new platforming trick or two, but your actions are rarely different to Altair's in the first game. The difference is that the sequel puts them to proper use!
   
   In addition to making the parkour aspects work, they used a similar improvement on the swordplay. Now, guards are harder to kill, yet they have mini-health bars, and they wont swarm you like crazy.
   
   There is a nice addition to the "hiding spots", in that you can hire moving cover, not only to provide stealth, but you can use said moving cover to distract, allure and kill guards, so you can sneak by unnoticed. Which brings me to the next new addition, Notoriety. Sure, if you punch a guard, them, and their friends will come to kill you, but walking by a guard on a sunny day, and walking by the same guard right after killing his famed leader now prompt two very different responses. The notoriety meter depends on recent actions, and varies the amount of awareness the guards put into their jobs.
   
   Oh, and did I mention that the most evident change in Assassin's Creed 2 is the lack of repetitiveness? Yeah you heard me; the game shows new actions at every single turn. Each assassination attempt is different, and there will be no "reporting back" to the higher power after each successful attempt.
   
   The game also adds a unique economic system into the mix also that will feel like that of Fable 2's town Upgrade system.
   
   (Man this review was impossible to complete without spoilers! I just completed assassin's creed 2, and after 23 hours of game play, I have 900/1000 gamerscore, and I am more than eager of the third part of the sequel.)
   
   I can think of plenty of words that could describe Assassin's Creed 2 - involving, exciting, cinematic - but there's only one word that sums it up beautifully. Killer.

   
   

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Link has 1 comment on this chronicle.

1. JackDaniels624
   Posted On Nov 20 2009

   Congrats! You made me put my disc in the tray!