This game could win any number of awards from me this year. Most Surprising, Most Improved, and Best Use of Renaissance Art come to mind. It also was one of my favorite games of the year. I really didn't expect to be saying that before the game came out. The original Assassin's Creed was a good game, and I enjoyed playing it, but it had some serious issues that really kept me from holding it in any kind of high regard. Dialogue and missions repeated themselves far too often. The beggars were the definition of annoying. And worst of all were the drunk/slash insane people who only ever seemed to have a problem with your character. Everyone else they let be, but when you came around, they came out swinging. Maybe they all just really resented dudes with white robes and swords on their hips? That's a weird kind of guy to pick a fight with, but I'm not going to judge them. I'm just going to grab them and toss them into the street. The story also left something to be desired, as they established a large fiction for their universe and then failed to satisfactorily resolve any of it. Altair's story was left on a cliffhanger, Desmond remained a captive, and you still had no idea what the heck was really going on. Altair, your protagonist for the majority of the game, was also extremely unlikable for most of the game, which made it hard to want to keep controlling him.
Thankfully, Assassin's Creed 2 fixes almost all of these issues. The story is far more interesting this time, and it moves at a far better pace. You feel like there is more variety to what you can do. Ezio Auditore, the protagonist this time around, is far more likable, interesting, and sympathetic. The world seems more engrossing too, filled with Italian Renaissance art and key individuals of the period. All in all, it just was far more fun to play.
The original split its time between Desmond in the real world and Altair in the Animus a fair amount. I'd say it was about 75% Altair, 25% Desmond. Well in the sequel you spend closer to 95% with Ezio and 5% with Desmond, and yet the overall story with Desmond actually seems to take a larger role. You finally get to find out more about the crazy conspiracy theory, Dan Brown style backdrop to the Assassin's Creed world. In fact, I think my favorite parts of the game were hunting down the glyphs that are scattered around Italy. When you find one, you delve into history and get to see their spin on how world events went down. Then you get a segment of a weird video that features naked people running. I'm not kidding. And when you finally get to control Desmond again, it leads to one of the more surreal yet stunning moments in the game. Not to mention one of the best ending credit segments in video game history.
I loved most of the side stuff you could do in the game. Whenever I would unlock a district, I would immediately go scale every view point so I could find new codex pages, then get Leonardo Da Vinci to translate them, then go exchange whatever cash I could for paintings so I could return to my home base and pay an architect to improve my villa so I could make even more cash to upgrade my armor and weapons. Plus, you get to display the paintings in your house, which makes you feel all kinds of snobbish. Then you can also find tombs that you have to navigate so you can find pieces of Altair's ultimate armor, and these areas are where the control scheme works the best. In the open world, it's a bit more frustrating, as Ezio will often leap to his doom when you really wanted him to jump onto a balcony or wire. Despite that, the navigation still seems more elegant and streamlined than the original game, so chalk that up as another improvement. There's always an incentive to continue on with the story, though, which is more streamlined and interesting than the original. Instead of just pursuing a list of targets like in the first game, this time the assassinations have more weight and backstory to them. You always feel like you're moving forward in the game and getting closer to some answers. It also helps that the game looks fantastic, with stunning recreations of areas like Florence, Tuscany, and Venice. After playing this game, I really would love to take a trip to Italy and visit these places in person, because this game makes them look beautiful.
One of my only real gripes with the game is that it's almost required to play the original first. I want to recommend that you go out immediately and buy this game, but if you haven't played the first one, you may get pretty confused as to what's going on. It lays down a bit of backstory at the start, but not nearly enough to get you up to speed on Desmond, the Templars, and the Assassins. Plus, there is a significant moment in the game that showcases a character that was very obscure in the first game. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who have played the first one didn't even know who that person was. And I don't really want to recommend you play the original since this new one is so superior in every way. Maybe you'd be better off reading Wikipedia or watching some videos on YouTube to get caught up on the story, and then play Assassin's Creed 2.Assassin's Creed 2 was a game that I was far from caring about before it was released, and yet now I'm counting it as one of my favorites of the year. This is a testament to the quality and polish that the team over at Ubisoft put into the game, and now I can't wait for the next chapter. This is how sequels should be made.
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