Assassin’s Creed II
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft
Rating: Mature
Score: 4.5 (out of 5)
For their sequel to 2007’s blockbuster action-adventure game Assassin’s Creed, development studio Ubisoft Montreal could have cut-n’-pasted a new hero and locale into the original game’s template, shoved it in a box and likely sold another eight million copies. Resting on their laurels? Heck, they could have made a king-sized bed of those laurels and slept for a year.
Instead, Ubisoft took criticism of the first game’s flaws to heart when developing the just-released Assassin’s Creed II, listening to fans’ complaints about the original game’s grinding repetition, jarring time shifts and infuriatingly limp ending. All of this has been fixed for Assassin’s Creed II, and the result is an epic, engrossing, killer of a game.
Set in Renaissance Italy, Assassin’s Creed II casts players as Ezio Auditore, a fiery young nobleman in 15th-century Florence. Over the course of the game’s storyline, which spans many years of Ezio’s life and can easily take 25 or more hours to complete, gamers will delve once again into the shadowy world of the Assassins, a group waging a centuries-long secret war with the sinister Knights Templar.
A shocking turn of events will sweep Ezio up in this war, dropping him smack-dab in the middle of a deep Templar conspiracy that pervades Italy’s political and religious elite. But all you really need to know about Assassin’s Creed II is that it contains the same core gameplay of the first game, yet improves on the structure, pacing and variety in several meaningful ways.
This time around the adventure unfolds organically, rather than through the constricting “get assignment, investigate target, stab guy to death” loop found in the first game. As you carry out assassinations of corrupt Italian noblemen, wicked politicians and other ne’er-do-wells, layers of the game’s complex story are peeled back. There’s a lot more going on in the (mercifully less frequent) present-day segments of the game as well, with our modern hero Desmond Miles getting a more action-oriented role.
New characters, locales, gear and gameplay elements are salted in from start to finish, making this one of those “just one more mission and then I’ll go to bed” games that you find yourself still playing at 3 a.m. In fact, Assassin’s Creed II almost suffers from an embarrassment of riches. There’s such a variety of cool things to do, see and collect in this sprawling epic that it can be tough deciding which way to go first.
Will you seek out and eliminate all the targets in the conspiracy? Clamber across the rooftops of Venice in search of hidden loot chests? Decode puzzles found in secret glyphs? Buy classic works of art from merchants? Or maybe even fix up your family’s Tuscan villa and turn the town around it into an economic powerhouse that puts huge piles of cash into your own coffers? It’s all here.
Thanks for listening, Ubisoft. Now get to work on Assassin’s Creed III.
Bottom Line
A charismatic hero, luscious Renaissance Italy locales and staggering variety of things to do and see make Assassin’s Creed II an all-out stellar sequel that will murder dozens of hours of your free time.
