Explore Renaissance Italy, Meet Interesting People, And Kill Them: Assassin’s Creed 2

Assassin’s Creed 2 lets you play as an angry young man named Ezio and basically do whatever you want all across Renaissance Italy. Want to walk around like a pimp with an entourage of prostitutes? Go for it! Want to shoot that annoying minstrel in the head? Why not! Feel like running across Venice without touching the ground? Have fun! If nothing else, Assassin’s Creed 2 really gives one a sense of almost total freedom. At least after you have spent several hours getting through the agonizing tutorials…

But let us start with a brief summary. In Assassin’s Creed 2, you play as Ezio Auditore de Firenze: A spoiled brat who fancies himself a womanizer but is really just an irresponsible kid with too much time and money on his hands. At least at first. Over the course of the game, this character becomes significantly more interesting and much more vicious, if not a bit emo in the process! You play the game from a third-person perspective and mostly run around anywhere you want while occasionally engaging in sword-fights and dramatic assassinations!

Now for some of the highlights of the game. Truly, this is a gorgeous game to look at. Easily one of the best looking console games I have ever seen, not just from an artistic or technical perspective, but also because of all the little details that truly bring the vibrant colors of 15th century Italy to life! Another plus is the awe-inspiring sense of freedom the game gives you after you have played for a while. Being able to go anywhere, do anything, and kill anyone takes a long time before it gets old, which ties into another major highlight of this game: If you go out of your way to accomplish all of the secondary activities, this game will easily occupy you for 50+ hours, making it a great deal, especially now that the price has gone down!

But, enough of that! On to the disappointing aspects of the game. To start, this game suffers from some absolutely terrible pacing. In all honesty, the first quarter of the game is basically a painfully long tutorial in disguise, which doesn’t make it any less irritating that it takes over an hour for your character to even acquire a basic sword. Some optional activities also totally destroy the already horrid pacing, especially the 20 different puzzles that you can seek out and solve. To say they are out of place in this game would be an understatement, and although none of them are terribly frustrating, they only really serve to confuse and keep you from doing something much more interesting, like killing someone. Along the same lines is the new “notoriety” system, which basically forces you to waste money bribing heralds and find posters to tear down in an effort to keep all the guards in the city from attacking you on sight, which would make many of the missions in the game almost impossible. I will also briefly mention that after you have played for several hours, a whole system will open up which allows you to upkeep a small city, replete with all the joys inherent in spending money on renovations and other trivial tasks that offer little in the way of a tangible reward and costs a great deal of money that will only take you more time to earn. Although all of this is completely optional, it still feels totally unnecessary and keeps you from all the wonderful back-stabbing.

So, to summarize this review, Assassin’s Creed 2 is like most women: Beautiful to look at and fun to play with, but takes far too long to open up and allow the more fun activities. Also, don’t bother wasting your time on the frustrating puzzles or city planning unless you love migraines and upgrading banks in your little virtual town. Other than that, have fun throwing hapless guards off tall buildings and randomly stabbing annoying minstrels!

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