Assassin's Creed 2 review

Ubisoft is one of my most loved development companies, one of the reasons for this is their commitment to making games where I get to climb all over everything!  One of my first memorable exposures to the Xbox 360 was the first Assassin’s Creed; I was suitably impressed.  Ubisoft had done something never before seen visually as well as with the game play.  The game seemed to fill an unknown longing I had always had, to not be bound by vertical obstacles.  I can only guess that this yearning was not limited to my in game life but, had somehow been ingrained in me ever since I began watching Ninja movies in the eighties.  I loved that game and carried on loving it even when I found out it played like a long demo.

With the most repetitive missions since Galaga and literally no found or purchased weapons, all we could do was play it though and wait for the next one.  And that is exactly how that shit went down. As I played the much-awaited sequel I just kept saying to myself “I can’t believe they came through in every area I hoped for”.  Ubisoft must have been listening in on focus groups for years, or the makers of the game just had the same complaints as I did.  The new game is large, that’s for sure, and they put a lot of opportunities for choosing your own weapons and armor in this version, along with a variety of other ways to upgrade your character’s inventory and skills.  I particularly liked the family villa that I got to restore by improving the commerce of its surrounding hamlet.

It was, as with the first one, a very liner narrative, but really I wasn’t looking for a revolution in that area.  I just wanted the first game again with a much wider scope and man, was that ever delivered.  I won’t bother going into the details of the already well-known story...Ezio in the Renaissance...Desmond in the present day...That was all pretty well understood by the game’s release date.  What I will talk about is the twist I was hoping for the most. In the first game one of the most irritating things about it was how useless Desmond was, all you could do with him was walk around his very sterile living quarters and have one-button conversations with the two other people in that story.  This was made all the more frustrating by the stark contrast to your abilities in the other time line.  Much to my relief, they had the good sense to work out that kink in number two.  Firstly, by having less of the game spent in the present timeline, but secondly (and this is the kicker) by writing in something called the bleeding effect. It turns out that Desmond has been spending enough time in the Animus (you remember the thing that he sits in for the time travel/dream sequences) that the skills he learns there are starting to bleed into his body or brain; however you want to explain it.  The practical upshot of this is that as a player you finally get a couple scenes of jumping and climbing on stuff in the modern story. Not many however, but enough to give you a taste and leave you holding your breath for the next installment of the franchise.

The game looks and feels much like its predecessor, luckily that is awesome!  It’s a testament to the first Assassin’s Creed that the graphics hold their own to this day.  This new installment is set in a different time period so in a couple ways the look is a little different.  The thing is Ubisoft really nailed it the first time and I am happy they chose to focus their efforts elsewhere in this sequel.  One of the things that I found funny was, since the setting was Italy and the game was bound by the English language, everyone walks around talking with their hands and pouring on a thick (often fake sounding) Italian accent.  Now I’ve never been to Italy to hear what people sound like there when they speak English but, that didn’t stop me from cringing every once and a while when Ezio would gesture with his thumb and four fingers together, holding his hand around face level, like we was waving an unjust parking ticket at a cop.

One of the ways I can tell if I’m playing a game a little too much is if I start to see the real world through the lens of the protagonist’s abilities.  Oh jeez, did that ever start to happen.  During the couple weeks it took me to finish the story in Assassin’s Creed 2, I was dreaming about climbing buildings, found myself actually considering how much faster I could get to the bus by jumping off our deck and god help me if we walked by a church.  All I could see was a rout to the top, I spent that two weeks convinced that I needed to be perched up on that cross, knees bent and arms casually to the sides for balance.  How else was I going to find my way around?