Assassin's Creed 2

Be warned, there be spoilers ahead out of necessity.

We start back as Desmond, kidnapped former assassin with a line of assassin ancestors. Having just given away the location of the remaining Pieces of Eden to the modern Templars, and realizing just how much peril the world is in, Lucy, the forlorn assistant turned secret assassin, helps get you out of the Animus machine and after a few scuffles gets you out of Abstergo by means of hiding you in a trunk.

When you come to you're led into a warehouse and meet your new compatriots: Shaun, an asshole with a love of history, and Rebecca, a nutty whiz technician who has upgraded the Animus to the Animus 2.0. Your new Animus comes complete with historical info about various places you visit along your journey, accessible by pressing the select button.

Also new in the 2.0 is the ability for whatever you learn as your ancestor to be learned in real life. Known as the "bleeding effect", it allows them to train you as an assassin while still learning about the Pieces of Eden and how to keep them out of Templar hands.

This time you play as your Italian ancestor Ezio, a roguish guy who loves women and a good fight. It's a welcome change from the angry, stoic, and mostly silent Altair. Soon enough you're introduced to Assassin's Creed 2's new mission format, where you accept missions to complete tasks and in exchange either the story progresses or you just get a monetary reward. And yes, there's now money. You can pickpocket it from passerby, loot it from corpses, get it from treasure chests, or complete missions. You use it to buy armor and weapons, or things like treasure maps, paintings, or dyes for your clothes. More on that later.

Soon enough your family gets tied up in some political plot and your father and brothers are killed before you can save them. Your father leaves you a note with the location of what becomes your assassin's garb, and a broken hidden blade. Your uncle lets you, your mother and your sister (who survived the assault) stay at his villa and trains you to be an assassin. From then on you can spend money to renovate the villa, which in turn pops out a certain amount of money every 20 minutes depending on what you've invested. Certain renovations also open up locations of hidden treasure chests, and give you bargains at the local shops.

You then spend the rest of the game tracking down The Spaniard, your father's killer and a Templar, to take revenge on him and his compatriots. In the process you find his real name is Rodrigo Borgia, and he has the "Apple", which is the same Piece of Eden that Altair once found. He claims to be "The Prophet" who will use the Piece of Eden to open the way to "The Vault" which would contain more Pieces of Eden.

Along the way you make lots of friends, including Leonardo da Vinci, who helps you translate codex pages you find that were left by Altair for future assassins (and also contain a hidden secret). These upgrade your health and hidden blade, as well as give you new weapons such as the poison blade which makes the target convulse and then die without raising suspicion on you, and A GUN.

Speaking of suspicion, it's now okay to run! And swim! Unfortunately the free-running is almost even more hampered than before. Ezio has more of a tendency to simply jump right off a wall into the open air and crash to the ground below, and also has a lot of trouble going where you want him to. When climbing up, often you need to position him EXACTLY in the right spot for him to climb to the next handhold when any normal person could just reach right up and grab it. There's also just a lot more stuff around for you to jump on, so it gets confusing both for Ezio and for you as to where exactly you should jump to. The rooftop chases simply don't flow like they used to.

Also there are now even fewer types of side quests to do. You can race, beat up a cheating husband (yes that's a specific type of quest), or fulfill an assassination contract. That's it. Thankfully they kind of make up for it by having the main quest missions be much more varied, but still, it would be nice to get more variety in non-story progressing things as well.

Thankfully now the guards will only be alerted if you do something like steal from someone right in front of them, and even then it only raises your infamy level a little bit. You can reduce your infamy by tearing down posters, bribing heralds (and then stealing your money right back), or killing corrupt officials. If for some ungodly reason it goes up to 100%, you then become recognizable and guards will attack you on sight. In this case you must reduce your infamy 100% to become anonymous once more.

And that brings us to combat. In the first game it was a simple matter of hold the block button, wait until someone attacks, counter attack and kill them, rinse and repeat. I'm sad to say it's still much the same. Yes there are lots more weapons to use, and you can even steal weapons from enemies, but for the most part your best bet of surviving is to counter attack with your hidden blade, which means an automatic kill. And it's even easier now because in the first game if you tried blocking with your hidden blade...you couldn't, and you'd get hit. Now your bracers act as a shield, giving you absolutely no reason to ever use your sword or knife. Each weapon is supposed to have different stats like speed, damage, and blocking that make some weapons better than others, but for the most part as they get unlocked there is one best weapon and other crap ones that you have no reason to buy until the end just for the sake of spending some of the millions (I'm not exaggerating) of florins that you've collected. The armor boosts your health, and can be broken if you get hit too much, making you lose that extra health, but often it doesn't matter at all.

There's also the matter of Altair's armor, the best in the game. You unlock it by finding 6 assassin's seals, kept in various tombs. These are honestly the best part of the game. Relying on some actual thought, many of the tombs require you to think about where you climb, how you're going to deal with the two guards up ahead, or just how in the hell to reach a ledge with no visible way to get there. These levels play like mini tributes to Prince of Persia, and they're highly enjoyable. It just made me sad there were only 6 of them.

You also find that in the logs you stole from Abstergo, the previous subject to you actually hacked the Animus and hid what they had found in various glyphs scattered around important landmarks. There are 20 in all, and each one requires you to solve a series of puzzles to unlock that piece of Subject 16's memory. Some involve scouring images for a hidden Piece of Eden image, some contain substitution ciphers solvable by a code wheel, and others require you to rotate rings of a picture until they line up. Some are simple, others are hard as hell, but the end product is certainly worth it, even if it makes no sense. You are shown a man and woman, naked but with silver marks running down their backs, running fast and carrying the "Apple". They run and run through a futuristic looking place, until the finally scale the building which looks like a futuristic resort. They then refer to each other as Adam and Eve, look surprised, and the memory ends. Weird, but cool.

Back to Ezio. You run through the story, and after skipping two corrupted memories (now revealed as downloadable content, the fuckers), you arrive in Rome to find your arch nemesis has now become Pope, and worst of all, the papal staff is another Piece of Eden. You challenge him, defeat him, but in an act of humanity let him live because you realize it won't bring your family back. It's then revealed that Ezio is the Prophet, and with the Apple and the staff merged, the way to the Vault opens.

And that's when shit goes crazy.

Stepping through into a dark room with some crazy moving silver on the walls, a holographic image of a woman named Minerva basically tells Ezio "Congrats, you're the Prophet, now step aside and let me talk cause this message is for Desmond...Hey, Desmond, I'm part of an advanced race that came here long ago. We made the Pieces of Eden. You know us as gods, but really we're just like some kind of advanced alien race. Long ago we created humanity in our image (and enslaved them), then they rebelled, then a massive sun flare wiped out nearly all life on Earth, so we joined together to rebuild. If you're hearing this message, the last of my kind is dead, but there's another cataclysmic event heading your way. When we rebuilt, we left several temples saying how to avoid it should we all die. So go find them. Peace."

Given only a few moments to be like, "....WTF?" you are soon pulled back into the real world, now with all the abilities of an assassin, and the Templars have found your hideout. You kill various guards who come at you, but when you reach Dr. Vidic, he drives away. Lucy speculates that Minerva might have meant something about how the Earth's magnetic field is currently in flux, and that a big enough solar flare could flip the poles and cause calamity. In the meantime the Animus 2.0 is loaded into a truck, leaving you rearing to climb back in for the final in the trilogy. You're also given the opportunity to finish up opening treasure chests, collecting 100 feathers, finishing side quests, or going through the new downloadable mission.

Overall Assassin's Creed 2 is a big improvement over the original, but it still has a host of issues. Once again the story and setting give most of the value to the game, while the actual mechanics suffer. The money, weapons and armor, while welcome additions, quickly become meaningless as it's absurdly easy to obtain cash from anywhere and you always have enough for all the best upgrades. The notoriety system, which finally allows you not to slowly walk everywhere, is too easy to beat, allowing you to get away with lots of stuff you shouldn't. The tombs are awesome additions, but there are very few, and the free-running involved can sometimes be unnecessarily difficult mainly due to poor controls. For every step Assassin's Creed 2 takes forward, it seems to take half a step back. But if the developers take all the feedback from this game and apply it as well as they did with the feedback from the first game, I think the final of the trilogy will be one hell of a game.

Assassin's Creed 2 gets a 7.5/10.

EDIT: After playing through it again to get my first and only Platinum trophy (all trophies acquired), I found I actually had a lot more fun with it. It's possible some of the mechanics were fixed in a patch, or maybe I was just more used to how the game worked now, but the freerunning mechanics were smooth as could be and everything flowed together much better than I remember it.

The corrupted memories are also worth the extra price of downloading, especially the extra 3 tombs with Sequence 13. The sequence in Foril expands upon the story quite well and fills in a lot of gaps, as well as adding some fun missions in there. The Bonfire of the Vanities boils things down more than Foril, putting 9 assassinations in front of you, which you can go after in any order, and some of which have restrictions (such as don't be seen). It does less for the story side of things, but if assassinations are your favorite part of the game then this will be a blast for you. Also included are these springboards scattered around the new district, but they seem like a failed concept as they don't really add anything to jumping across rooftops and are only located in this new small district. As for the extra tombs, as I stated before they were my favorite part of Assassin's Creed 2 and the extra additions are quite welcome.

So after all these considerations, I have to bump up my score.

Assassin's Creed 2 gets an 8.5/10.