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.

Assassin's Creed

Back in my university days, Assassin’s Creed was released and I immediately thought, ‘yes that is exactly my bag baby,’ and went out and bought myself a copy. It was okay, I had learned to survive without food by this point and could spare the forty quid to buy a new release.

Of course this was years ago and I’m writing a retrospective review mainly to get up to date with the recently completed Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

The very first Assassin’s Creed revisits the Crusades where you take on the role of Altair, an assassin who goes about killing Templars because that’s what he is; an assassin that kills Templars. Although, in actual fact you are Desmond Miles, some dude in the future who has been captured by an evil corporation and forced to relive ancestral memories so that the bad guys can find the Apple of Eden, a powerful device that is owned by Altair’s mentor in the twelfth century. Or something like that.

Basically the whole Desmond thing is just there for framing and the main game is jumping about ancient civilisations as Altair.

The first time I rode into Damascus, I think my jaw dropped. At the time, I was amazed. You ride out on top of a hill that overlooks the entire city and you can explore every inch of what you can see. It was beautiful. Modern day consoles will make this look like shit now, but at the time, it was fantastic. I went about exploring and doing side missions and climbing really tall buildings and actually forgot that the reason I was in the city was to kill someone!

This is where the game fails – with the thing that is in the title – assassinations. Despite being called Assassin’s Creed, you spend very little time actually trying to assassinate people and more time doing mini-missions in preparation to the killing. These mini missions are exactly the same, no matter what city you are in, so it feels very lazy in terms of development. That said, it’s kind of balanced with the amount of work that’s gone into developing the scenery and cities, however I’ve always said that you should never sacrifice Gameplay for looks and it feels like that is exactly what the developers have done.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

When I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was going through a rough time with my Xbox360. It decided that it didn’t like having games inside it and would destroy anything that entered it – much like that movie, Teeth.

My first copy of Assassin’s Creed became unplayable after my Xbox had chewed it up and spat it out. This caused me to send the Xbox off to be fixed which left me without an Xbox for six weeks. This meant it took me a long time to get to the 1,000 point mark due to these unforeseen circumstances and also the fact that there are several collectible achievements in the game which take forever to do.

In my Toy Story 3 review, I mentioned that there was no way of tracking the collectibles. Assassin’s Creed not only has a way of tracking them, it marks them all on your map. You have to kill 60 Templars and collect, wait for it, 420 flags across the different locations. This was at a time when I thought Grand Theft Auto’s 100 hidden packages was excessive.

I think I spent three nights running around collecting flags and kept having the same conversation with my flatmate. ‘What are doing?’ he would ask. ‘Collecting flags.’ I would say. ‘Still?’ he would retort. ‘Yes,’ I would answer. Once I had collected the last flag, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. My flatmate called it a waste of time.

The only real problem with the achievements was the Conversationalist one. In the future framing environment, something I didn’t think I would have to worry about when going for achievements, you have to have all conversations with a girl called Lucy. These are missable and cannot be revisited. I found this out half way through the game and restarted to save a full second playthrough. But I was still very annoyed about it. It added no extra dimension to the game so why they put an achievement in for it, I have no idea.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Despite the long haul of collecting the flags and repetitiveness of the missions I do have fond memories of playing the game. The scenery is the best part of it and that makes the exploring element much more fun.

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

This one was bought as part of a four for £20 deal from Gamestation so I wasn’t expecting big things from it. However, even with my initial low expectations I was left with a brand new feeling of disappointment, only achieved by playing probably the worst game ever released.

Anyway as always, firstly an overview. As you would expect the game is based, very loosely, around the plot of the movie with some bizarre additions. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the movie, which was also a pile of wank if memory serves, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t fight a giant green dude called Super Skrull and I’m also sure they didn’t travel to a Russian Space Station to fight monkeys.

It’s hard to find someone to say a kind word about the film and even harder for the game. To start with, it’s graphically awful. The looks are more at home on an early Playstation 2 game, not the dizzy heights of Xbox360. Equal effort was put into the dreary repetitive soundtrack, and  despite my unfavourable view of these elements of the game, they are in fact the better ones.

The gameplay is probably the worst I have ever experienced in the history of games and that is some award considering some of the games I’ve played in the past. The gameplay is ridiculously unimaginative. There are three areas the developers have worked on.

1.       The gameplay environment. Their work consisted of having six different levels with different wallpaper. They are all corridor based fighting sections where you have to fight enemies and press a button to unlock the next corridor.

2.       The characters’ special attacks. Each character has four special abilities that you can upgrade. They are all used once at some point and then can be completely disregarded for the rest of the game afterwards. The only reason they are there is because there are four characters with ‘special’ powers. As you level up said abilities, they haven’t bothered to improve the way they look or the graphical actions of you performing these abilities, so the only reason you know they are upgraded is because the enemies die faster. The only ability required to complete the game is The Thing’s ground pound attack which makes all of the other character abilities redundant.

3.       The enemies. The same as the above. There are two... no wait, three! Three different enemy types. One that cannot shoot you with a gun, one that can and one that can fly. The lack of development is so severe that when use The Thing’s ground pound attack, this is capable of destroying the flying enemies as well.

This goes back to my Toy Story review of how the game was release solely to make money off the back of the movie and this is even more evident here due to the complete lack of effort that has gone into make the game. This is meant to be the Fantastic Four and the characters are about as fantastic as manure.  

In addition, there are flying sections with the Human Torch because, you know, they may as well make use some of their special abilities (considering flying is about as useful as paper condoms in a corridor based game environment) and these sections leave a lot to be desired. The flight plain and the environment don’t balance which means you spend half the time flying into the ceiling or flying into floor.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

As per the actual game, the achievements are a load of crap as well. It’s fairly basic to have stackable achievements where difficulty is concerned and it pains me to have to play through a game twice but this was made even worse by my discovery of something new to complain about which fucked me off so badly that I don’t even know what to say about it.

The cut scenes cannot, I repeat, cannot, be skipped. They can’t be skipped and the game wants you to play through it twice. They can’t be skipped and there is a requirement to grind out ability points to upgrade all the characters’ abilities. Why can’t they be skipped?! It is one of the most fucking annoying development issues I’ve ever come across. Do I want to watch the same cut scene twenty times to grind out ability orbs? No! Fuck you Take 2 Interactive, you lazy cunts!

There are also achievements for collectibles which are generally easy to find due to the corridor nature of the levels however, several were hard to find in last level again due to the ‘only having a requirement to use abilities once’ extravaganza. Earlier, I mentioned that the Human Torch can fly but this is pointless due to the corridor-style nature of the levels, however, in the last level there is a raised area that can only be reached by flying. Never has this happened in any of the previous five levels so why now? Just to be different? To add a new dimension to your one dimensional piece of shit game?

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s just shit. There’s nothing else to say other than that. The game play is shit. The aesthetics are shit. The sound is lousy (just to be different) and everything else is complete balls. The sheer lack of effort into the development of the game has led to a very shit and very forgettable gaming experience.