Review: Assassin's Creed 2

Here we go with review number 1. I'm going to try to start reviewing games here to help you. Because its all about the viewers, or readers.

Anyways, here is Assassin's Creed 2, the sequal to that one game, where you ran around killling people and occassionally planned out assassinations, but most of it was either running from, or sword fighting the local law enforcement. Does AC 2 fix the problems of AssCreed 1?

Story: IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED AC1 PLEASE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SET UP THE STORY?

Assassin's Creed 2 picks up right where AC1 left off, in the Abstergo lab. Lucy shows up, and tells Desmond its time to leave. Before going, she downloads your new memory sequence, and you escape. On the way out you do a little fighting as Desmond, but its nothing special. You are then transported to an Assassin hideout, which is really just a warehouse with an apartment next to it. You meet a female technician and a history junkie who show you the Animus 2.0, which is upgraded and looks more snazzy than your plain white one back at the lab. After a little talk, you are dropped into late 1500s Florence, Italy, where you are literally born as Ezio Auditorre, or as I like to call him, Audi EZ. He's the son of a very influential man in Florence, who gets in to trouble. From there, you travel from Florence, to Tuscany, and to Venice, trying to unlock your history, protect your family, and help the Assassin's. As for my opinion's on the story, I thought it was well put together. I only had one gripe, where they had a precious something or other, then lost it, but then they found it again, but to learn how they got it back, buy the DLC. Other than that, story was very engaging and the ending makes your jaw drop. And Subject 16's life at Abstergo and death are explained.

END PROBABLY SPOILERS

Gameplay: The gameplay has had little tweaks. You'll eventually get another hidden blade, a poison blade and also a gun. The freerunning has gotten slightly better, but you still have those WTF moments where Eizo just jumps off a building when you wanted him to move slightly to the left. The fighting hasn't changed much either. They've added in fighting with the hidden blades, hammers, big axes, and big swords. The hammers don't change much, and usually a sword does a better job. The heavy weapons (big axes and swords) cannot be kept, only carried, which causes major discomfort. These weapons make you feel like a badass, smashing into someone's skull, or knocking someone off their feet with a giant sword in their stomach, but you can't take it with you. As for the gun, it feels very... weird. Its goes unnoticed until fired, and takes about 5 seconds to aim properly. It's great in combat when blind fired right in front of an enemy, or for shooting out a unsuspecting dude below, but it doesn't really feel too overpowering, because of the aiming issue. Besides the combat changes, AC2 gives you a brand new buying system, where you can buy new armor, weapons and err, paintings? Its something that could have been better, because in the end, you have 500,000 Fluorines extra (The best sword costs 10,000) and you end up using the weapons and armor of Altair. Yay for strategy. One of the cooler additions to this money system is your villa. Why do I love the villa so much you ask? Well its because you get to be as awesome as a Medici. You choose how you want to upgrade your own little piece of land, in the ways of Barracks, Shops, Brothels, and Thieve's Guilds. And this in turn, brings in more people, which increases your income (because you own the land silly). This is why you end up having a ridiculous amount of money at the end, but you feel like you have so much power deciding want you want to improve in your city.

As for your normal story missions, the same basic tasks are there, however, they are put in a matter that makes sense. In AC1, you followed this systematic list of things to do. Do a couple of these planning missions, kill target, move on. In AC2, the missions are laid out in a way that makes sense. The missions are varied and no one part of the game feels like the last part. There are also 30 codex pages that need to be found in order to complete the game. These help you develop new tricks and weapons as well as up your health. As for replayability, there isn't much here. You run through all 11 (13 if you get the DLC) DNA sequences, then you've got some side quests: beat up missions, assassin contracts, races, 100 feathers and another thing called glyphs. The 100 feathers are the same things as flags, but there are only 100 spread out across the whole game. They are still annoying. The glyphs are markings hacked into the Animus at famous locations in Italy that supposedly show you "the truth" of what happened. I don't want to spoil to much, but you find the glyph, solve a couple of puzzles, learn some interesting history along the way, and get a video segment of, THE TRUTH.

If you loved Assassin's Creed 1, you will love this game. I had loads of fun with both games, but I favor AC2 because of the locations and the improvements. The game is more varied, and I think its an amazing game. But it is only killed by one thing. The DLC.

Here's the scenario for you, Desmond finishes sequence 10 with Niccolò Machiavelli being introduced as an Assassin. Then, the Animus fades out and Desmond finds out that sequences 11 and 12 are corrupt. You move on to 13 and finish the game and Niccolò Machiavelli doesn't play a part in anything, and really, you didn't need 11 and 12 to understand the story at all, besides why Niccolò Machiavelli was introduced in the first place. You then go and buy both DLCs for the odd price of 640 MS points or 880 if you want 3 secret locations. The 3 secret locations aren't worth the extra cash, unless you are a die hard fan, and the same could be said about the DLC. The story for it isn't really thought out, bugs are ridden throughout, and the game becomes tedious and repetitive for some reason. I don't know if it was just another 2 or 3 hours of AC caused the game to be more boring for me, but the DLC really wasn't worth it, and is the only thing causing this other wise amazing game, from being great. Its a good thing it was just DLC though. It makes you wonder if they left out 2 whole sequences just because they were awful and then released them to the public as a sort of "Director's Cut" version.

To review, the game expands on the formula created in AC1 and makes the game better in every way possible. Its a definite buy and if you can find it on sale (like I did ) then pick it up, because it is an amazing experience. Don't forget, AC: Brotherhood comes out later this year, so get ready.

To any and all that read this far, thank you. This is a quick posted review, and I want all the feedback you can give me. Please, bear with me, this was my first review I think I've done all the way through, and if you think something was missing, or I did something incorrect, please let me know. I hope to do more stuff like this in the future. The next game I will do is probably Splinter Cell Conviction, another Ubisoft game.