My take on Assassin's Creed 2

I just "completed" Assassin's Creed 2 in the early hours of the morning and am still in awe from its awsomeness, very American, I know, but this game is just that good. I have to admittedly say that this is easily one of my best games of all time. To me it gives everything a game can possibly offer - action, romance, revenge, vengence, etc. The story is brilliant and the first game compliments it very well as you play as another one of Desmond's ancestors, Ezio Auditore. There is so much depth to the story and Ubisoft touch on some controversial topics that people discuss today about religion, power and conspiracies.

Ubisoft put a lot of effort into putting variety into this game and it shows. The introduction of "Tombs" was a welcomed one, it brought back the adventure platform puzzle style that Ubisoft were so great at with the Prince of Persia series. Although there is much more variety in Assassin's Creed 2 compared to its predecessor, you could count the number of variations on one hand. There is still an obvious formula to how they varied missions/side-missions/hiding spots, etc. Hopefully this is something they will work on in the next game and come up with a much more dynamic formula.

The combat has also got an upgrade and has been executed excellently. I actually have no issues with the combat at all, it's perfect. Even assassinating has become more like I wanted, which is having many possibilties to execute it either stealthly or just barge in with your sword hanging out! Either way combat is great and with the additions of new weapons and special moves it has become one of the greatest combat systems of a 3rd person action adventure to date.

One of the greatest parts of the game for me was uncovering the mysteries of "The Truth". The puzzles given to unlock data were really brutal at times. I was stuck on one for about 30-45mins, although it was frustrating at times this is what I want a game to do for me. It got me really involved, got me thinking hard. I refused to get any hints or help off the net, because I wanted to understand the answer to the puzzles and not only do it to get the clip. But you soon discover when unlocking the truth you are just left with asking more questions than you were before, the suspence is immense!

Another great addition to the Assassin's Creed series is economy. You can steal, earn and spend money. The system they put in is very simple but just gives you another thing to think about and manage, which is a good thing. The only thing that seemed a little bit pointless was the purchasing of weapons and armour because it was too easy to obtain. What would have made it more interesting is to have armour pieces and weapons spread out thoughout the cities where you would have to find them, or have to assassinate/rob a person to obtain it. The on going mission to get Altair's armour is exactly what I'm talking about, but if they applied that to get his sword it would've been a nice little addition. Ubisoft also shouldn't be afraid to raise the difficulty level on obtaining these special items.

There was one major downside to the game that really started annoying me.... it was the free-running system. It may just be me, but it seems like it took a downgrade since the first Assassin's Creed or they didn't improve it at all to handle all the new possibilites of ledges, walls, fences, etc. to catch on to. I found myself dying sometimes when trying to do a leap of faith because it didn't catch on and also while free-running Ezio just not going in the direction I want him to. I also experienced some animation issues when climbing. Ezio's arm would sort of be bending in a humanly impossible way, which doesnt really take away from the gameplay but you'd expect things like that not to happen in a highly budgeted game such as Assassin's Creed.

Another downside that I wasn't pleased about was the optimization of the graphics engine. It had people/objects popping into view when you get close and in a very obvious way. It felt like I was playing on a low spec PC sometimes. I understand that this game is very heavy on processing crowds and objects, but with the power of the PS3 it should be more able to avoid these issues. I haven't played this on the Xbox360 but I know that it runs better on it. The first Assassin's Creed performed poorly on the PS3 and although they have reduced the gap between them the PS3 still performs slightly worse. Check out this article highlighting the issues more specifically - click here.

Overall this is an amazing game and despite the minor issues the gameplay and story is not affected, so you still get the mind blowing experience that Ubisoft intended.

Assassin's Creed