Although the other Pete already reviewed the game 6 months ago, I’m just now getting around to playing Assassin’s Creed 2. As usual, he’s already said everything I would plan on saying, and been more eloquent about it. But, I get paid by the word here, so I’m going to opine a little here on some of the things that AC2 gets right, compared to the first game.
The Personal Is Political
My first observation is that the plot of AC2 is worlds ahead of that in the first game. Overwrought? Perhaps. But the plot in the first game was so distant and emotionally uninteresting that I really wouldn’t have cared if every character in the game died in a fire. For all of its flaws,the story in AC2 is one with a little bit of personal pathos.
In Assassin’s Creed 1, I felt like I was playing with a vaguely interesting physics engine that was occasionally interrupted by a bad plot. AC2 has managed to keep me interested in the plot. Although it does have the moments of distraction that psu talked about — “Must save my friend, who is being tortured! Oh, wait, I want to climb this tower to get a nice view, first” — on the whole it feels much more well integrated.
Interestingly, like the first game, Assassin’s Creed 2 also opens with a note asking Wahhabi extremists to please not murder the developers or their families, since they are very nice people.
Duomo Arigato
Here is what the first Assassin’s Creed was like, from a visual perspective. First, you’re in a desert town with nondescript architecture. Then, you get a mission to go somewhere else. So you get on your horse and ride through a brown landscape, punctuated occasionally by bits of tan dirt, and the occasional tan guard tower, until you reach your destination, which is another desert town with nondescript architecture.
You can almost imagine the planning meeting for AC2 where someone said “What’s the most interesting building made during the Renaissance? The Duomo in Florence? OK, that’s where the game will be set.” If you have ever been to Firenze, playing Assassin’s Creed 2 is going to make you want to go back. No one in the entire world felt that way about Damascus in the first game.
Epiphany: The Futuristic Office Building Is Not Interesting
In the first game, your character kept flipping back and forth between Altair’s crusader-killing-spree in the Middle East and the futuristic office building where you were being held prisoner. I am not that far into the game, so this may change, but at least so far apart from the game’s opening sequence, I haven’t been back to The Boring Office Building. I’m hoping that continues, and if it does, it will have been an improvement on the first game. Hint to Ubisoft: next time, skip the cover story completely and just drop us in whatever past era the game occurs in. That’s why we are playing. (Footnote 1)
Minstrels are Better than Beggars
Because at least the minstrels make me laugh.
Il Nome Della Rosa
It’s not clear to me yet how long I will maintain my interest in the game; as I said, I’m only partway in. It’s likely, I suppose, that the bloom will come off the rose at some point. But whereas by my second session of the original Assassin’s Creed I was already starting to think of it as a sort of a disappointing job that I was obligated to undertake, tonight I had to force myself to stop playing AC2. And that’s a pretty good place for a game to be.
Footnote 1: May I humbly suggest “Assassin’s Creed 3: Ninja’s Creed” in Edo-era Tokyo?
Regarding “Epiphany: The Futuristic Office Building Is Not Interesting”: The game drops you out of Rennaisance Italy exactly twice: once halfway through, and once at the very end of the game. Apparently that message was received loud and clear. Unfortunately, they’re still really keen on Desmond’s storyline, so they found other ways to wedge interruptions into the flow.
what platform are you playing on? pc? Has your bi-annual pc-console migration occurred?
You almost never go back to the future in AC2, and the renaissance Italy locations actually get _much_ more interesting and cool as the game progresses. They really went gonzo with the locations in this game; it’s downright awe-inspiring sometimes.
Together with the wide variety of gameplay and excellent modelling of crowds, etc, I thought AC2 was a great game; as much as ubisoft gets beat up for mediocre games, it’s nice to see they have it in them to put out something really excellent too.
Re: edo-area tokyo — nice thought, but I’m not sure an endless succession of small 1-story wooden buildings would really work so well for this game…
Hmm, I never read the “other pete” review, but I did just now, and it seems kinda over-wrought. When you add it all up, AC2, is _cool_, and it’s _fun_, and the minor flaws that review spends so much time whining about are like little eddies on the periphery of a giant roaring river of actually-quite-neat.
Granted, whining endlessly about minor issues seems a staple of game reviews for some reason…
grs: Yes, Winter is over, summer is here, and I’m playing on the Xbox again. It’s just like when the swallows come back to Capistrano.
snogglethorpe: More specifically, I would say that whining endlessly about minor issues is pretty much this site’s reason for existence! It is tleaves.com MANDATE! LONG LIVE THE
FIGHTERSWHINERS!I stand by my previous whining. I tried to play through the “minor” details but ultimately they made me not give a shit about the game. So I quit.
The wahhabi extremists thing probably has something to do with:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2001/11/29/samirmohamed011129.html
Ubisoft’s offices are just a kilometer away from the corner of Parc and Laurier.
“No one in the entire world felt that way about Damascus in the first game.”
What an odd claim, given that almost all of my enjoyment of the first game was based around climbing Islamic architecture, and Damascus was probably my favourite city in the game!
One of the reasons that I’m not in any hurry to get the sequel, despite my delight in Ubisoft having toned down the incredibly intrusive narrative wrapper (a point you make here also) is that I’m just less interested in Renaissance Italy versus the “Holy Land” in the time of the Crusades. And yes, part of that interest is precisely the fun I get out of scaling a Mosque.
It makes me want to go and put the game on now… but I’d have to leave it running for an hour before actually playing, because incredibly you have to let the story replay itself every time. If it wasn’t for that, I’d put the game back on much more often.
All the best!
Chris.