Assassin's Creed 2 Review (or more appropriately, A Love Letter from 3N3MY)

It's been no secret to any of you that I have a very deep love for the original Assassin's Creed (AC). I love the open world, I love that the buildings aren't there as just eye candy, but rather are all climbable and have a purpose. I love the freedom to play it however I want and I even love the story (which has been met with fierce debate between Amateria and myself).

I just finished Assassin's Creed 2 (AC2) last night and consider me blown away. The game at it's core is relatively unchanged, but is much more fleshed out. A great way to summarize this is from something Lead Salad just said to me a few days ago about the first, which he is currently playing through, "It feels like a 2 hour game that's been stretched out over 12 hours." While initially I wanted to defend the game I had to agree that the game boils down to around 10 assassinations and that's it. Everything else you CHOOSE to do could be considered as fluff. I however did everything in the 1st and loved every minute of it.

The best way to describe the vast improvements to AC2's campaign is it's much more organic. It actually feels like a complex story. It's not go to this town, talk to the head assassin guy from that town, kill the target, come back. It’s about building relationships with others in the city, scouting out your kill locations and people, learn new skills, upgrade your weapons etc. When you get to a town feel free to explore it all and find everything and take your time, but when you want to get back to the campaign just go to the location on your map that's marked "Memory Start."

As far as the story goes, for those that don’t know, you’re Desmond Miles and you’re being forced to relive your subconscious memories of your ancestors that were old assassins. The company Abstergo, which is ultimately run by The Templars, is trying to find Pieces of Eden for some grand plan of world domination, but they say it’s ultimately to save the world. Reliving these memories through the Animus (the device that allows you to do this) will reveal to them where these Pieces of Eden are. The end of the first game was a bit of a cliffhanger that left you trapped in Abstergo with the Animus. There were a lot of unanswered questions with strange writing on the walls of your room.

The story in AC2 picks up exactly where the 1st ended and answers all questions of the 1st while giving you many more new ones (not going into spoiler territory). I was thrilled with the sheer amount of info in this game. Because of the Animus you have multiple stories going on at once and the amount of conspiracy in the game is staggering at times, but never pointlessly mysterious like LOST or Heroes. The game developers are truly unmatched when it comes to taking real history from across all recorded time and building a fascinating story of conspiracy about The Garden of Eden and the apple using historical text and paintings.

If you look hard enough in the game world you’ll find “glyphs” left behind by another Abstergo lab rat named “Subject 16.” Finding the glyphs unlocks puzzles and after you find all 20 and solve the riddles you’re treated to one hell of a sweet video that I don’t want to ruin for anyone by even talking about the subject. Needless to say there’s a ton of meat here and the ending….oh….the ending….it very truly creeped me the hell out. Of course I can’t say what it is, but rest assured your questions are answered and you get all new ones once again.

It was interesting to me that whenever I was pulled out of the Animus I couldn’t wait to get back in and Desmond seemed to feel the same as well. I felt like Jake Sully from Avatar. For me this was one of the more interesting and well thought out stories in a video game I’ve ever played and clocked in around 20 hours to finish it and that's doing virtually no side quests.

Other enhancements to the game are interactions with people and especially guards. In AC the guards would attack you for walking too fast which got very old, but in AC2 there is a notoriety meter and as long as it’s empty and you don’t do something stupid in front of them they’ll leave you alone.

Combat has been improved and is much more challenging while fighting some of the more difficult guards. Most of it comes down to timing, but who doesn’t like ripping a spear out of an opponents hands and running them through with it?

This review has gone on too long, but I can’t praise this game enough. It’s climbed comfortably into my top 10 all time favs list and shouldn’t be missed by any gamer period.

P.S. You have an uncle in the game named Mario and the first time you meet him he literally yells, “You don’t know who I am?! It’s a me! Mario!” I love this game.