I won’t be doing a full review of this because I just haven’t played enough of it to do so. According to walkthroughs I was a bit over half the game, and I didn’t really experience much of it, not doing any of the side-missions or anything like that. So instead I’ll give my impressions on the short time I did play the game.

Since this isn’t a review, there won’t be a Save Factor. And a different format than the usual review.

So read on and see!

What I liked about Assassin’s Creed 2
If there’s something to like about the game, it’s the locales. All the different cities look really damn good. There’s landmarks everywhere so you can always know where you are, the architecture feels genuine. Walking/jumping through the cities feels very good because everything looks really well made. Interior levels also have a good deal of work done to make them feel nice. Not exactly as good as outside, but there’s still some good stuff here.

The character animations are, overall, really good. The whole parkour thing looks really good, and when Ezio is climbing up something it looks real because he always use footholds and such that you can actually see, making the building climbing feel very realistic. The jumps and such rarely feel too unrealistic either, other than the fact that I doubt that jumping into a stack of hay can protect you from really high falls…

Chase scenes are also quite fun. Either when you’re running away from guards or chasing after an assassination target, it all feels really good. It can be a bit frustrating at parts, but it never feels cheap.

The assassinations are also pretty good. Easy to do and there’s a good variety of them this time around. With multiple weapons and such, you have various assassinations you can do. I especially like using poison because it makes a person go berserk before dying which is pretty cool. The assassination missions themselves are a step up from the first, making you feel a bit more like an assassin than in the first where it was pretty much just cutscenes for each target.

What I didn’t like about Assassin’s Creed 2
Well that about does it for what I liked in the game. Now for what I didn’t like.

The character models are pretty bad. Well… the faces are the bad part, the rest looks fine most of the time. Some look great, no doubt about that. From far away most of them look pretty good. But zoom in to them just a bit and… wow. They look horrible. Completely deformed faces, some of which just don’t look human. If a character is unlucky enough to have facial hair… it’s been a long time since I’ve seen facial hair that looks this bad in a game. Looks like they tried to make it look realistic, but on the way they forgot how beards looked and just put random hairs in random spots.

The combat is still pretty bad. It was one of my biggest complaints in the original, and it remains almost as bad. It’s actually a bit better than in the first, since now countering everything doesn’t always work, as some opponents can resist countering and even counter you as well. Sometimes you have to dodge too. But in the end you can button-mash your way through most battles, if you’re not countering your way through them. The fighting is still really boring.

The parkour, while it looks great, isn’t very fun to actually do. All the jumping is done by holding R1 and X. No need to time your jumps or anything, just holding 2 buttons and a direction is all you need, it’s basically automatic. Climbing buildings is the same, except you don’t need to hold X, just R1. No matter how good it looks, I can’t really enjoy it if it’s boring to do. And sometimes the control are unresponsive or don’t do what I want them to, occasionally making Ezio kill himself when I meant to make him jump in a hay stack.

The story is a total bore. The idea of having the character use a machine to live his ancestor’s past and learning assassination techniques and all, I love that concept. But the story inside of the machine and the character’s past? Very boring. I just didn’t feel any of the scenes, the scenes themselves are long-winded and not fun to watch, the dialogue is corny and boring, the characters pretty much all suck… There was nothing I really enjoyed story-wise. And the game has so many cutscenes and conversations it just wasn’t really interesting to move on with the game (which is why I stopped halfway through).

Overall
The game is definitely better than the first. It’s a bit less repetitive, especially now that you don’t have to climb down the fucking mountain at the start of every mission. And you spend most of your time in the Animus so there’s no “breaks” in the story. The assassination missions are a bit more fun. The combat, while still lame, is a step up from the first. And Ezio is a more lovable character than the boring Altair.

It might be better, but it still gets really boring really fast, and definitely couldn’t keep my attention until the end. Fans of the original will love it. Otherwise, I say skip it.

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, ps3, xbox 360