Before I say a word about Assassin’s Creed 2, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I hated the first Assassin’s Creed.
To me, it felt rough and unpolished, with the gameplay elements disjointed from one another to the point that the entire game felt more like a proof-of-concept or technology demo. In addition, I left that the story was undermined by the intrusive, badly written and wholly unnecessary science fiction meta narrative. Taken together, these elements all added up to form the single greatest sin a game can commit: it was boring.
With that in mind, it was with some hesitation that I put Assassin’s Creed 2 in my Gamefly queue and with even greater hesitation put it into my Xbox 360 and began to play it. To my surprise, I found that I greatly enjoyed it.
Please note that there will be some minor spoilers from here on out.
That’s not to say, however, that the game doesn’t have faults – the sci-fi storyline is still present and not at all necessary – but as I played through the game it was unmistakable that someone thought about how to make the gameplay fun. Gone were the disjointed mechanics of the first game, and even though the mission types in the second were all fairly similar their contexts in the overall storyline tended to keep things fresh.
Where the game did stumble throughout was in the science fiction elements of the story. To my mind, all they do is to serve to break the immersion of Ezio’s narrative. It gets so bad that, in the game’s grand finale, Ezio’s own immersion in the story is broken when he learns of the existence of Desmond. If it wasn’t at the very end of the game that they decided to break the fourth wall I would have given serious thought to quitting the game right there. Some folks might not mind these aspects of the game, but I felt the whole story would have been better served without them.
Story quibbles aside, it’s a game that I’d recommend and don’t at all regret spending the time it took to play it through.
I only hope that Ubisoft decides to can the sci-fi the next time around.
