Assassin's Creed II

On to Assassin’s Creed II and introducing one of the greatest Itialians that ever lived – Ezio Auditore di Firenze!

Assassin’s Creed II is essentially Assassin’s Creed in different clothes but as I’ve previously stated, it was great fun so I had no problem with this at all. And also, the developers addressed the biggest problem of the previous game in that Altair’s personality could be likened to that of a piece of wood.

In contrast, Ezio is just as likely to fuck your wife than assassinate you (and will more than likely do both). He also has a decent motive for revenge in that the Templars killed his family versus Altair’s, ‘I’m an assassin so let’s fuck up dem bitchez!’

Visually, it is standardly improved across the board and Ezio’s assassin outfit is a tad more discrete than Altair’s... a tad. He still may as well walk through the streets of Italy with a big Assassin sign above his head and he also suffers from the syndrome of being labelled as such if he moves faster than a seventy year old man.

On to the gameplay and they have expanded on the non-assassin things you can do - you can now build your own hideout! Many people have criticised this, but I found it relatively enjoyable. It gave me a sense of purpose, like I was building my own assassin hideout which was great. Incidentally it is also the location of where Future Desmond and his band of do-gooders are hiding out in the modern world, so it was all very well rounded.

The storyline flows more smoothly here too in that you don’t have to start every mission or sequence from the same location. It was actually like the developers looked at their last game and tried to improve it which makes a great change. That said, it does suffer from the same platforming issues present in the previous game. When faced with the choice between plummeting to his death and jumping to the pretty obvious ledge, Ezio will often pick death. Maybe it has something to do with endless amount of meanlingless sex he has, who knows.

Ezio does have another favourable quality over Altair – water doesn’t kill him. This means that some of the unexplainable, dumbass, jumping decisions described above aren’t the end of the world. They are simply annoying.

Achievements – 50 Achievements – 1,000 Points

The achievements for this can be broken down into a few specific categories. Stuff you need to collect, stuff you need to buy to improve your house and stuff you need to do to various enemies, like killing them and stuff.

It’s all relatively straightforward with the exception of 1 missable achievement which you can only get during one mission, and maybe the feather collection as these do not appear on the map.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary it’s an easy 1,000 points and nowhere near as time consuming as the first in the series. I did find myself becoming bored towards the end though after having explored eight different cities across the two games, collecting crap and performing a limited amount of assassinations.