The anticipation that greeted the original Assassin’s Creed was tempered by a game whose ambitious aims did not always add up to the sum of its parts. While it looked gorgeous, in its seeming desire to be all things to all gamers – part RPG, part stealth game, part adventure, part third-person combat hack-and-slash – its free-roaming maps left many gamers wandering in search of an ultimate gaming satisfaction that proved hard to find. In Assassin’s Creed II, as you loot, fight, flee, trade up in weaponry and armour amid the game’s 25 hours-plus main quest (when you’re not busy earning coin and experience in its many varied sub-quests), free-running across the meticulously rendered Renaissance rooftops and galloping on horseback through the verdant Tuscan landscape, that search may well be over.
The Ubisoft developers have been hard at work addressing the caveats aimed at the first game; the results are exhilarating. Beginning where the original left off, ACII finds Desmond fleeing the Templars (who’ve gone over to the Dark Side) with fellow assassin Lucy Stillman to a bolthole, where Lucy reveals that she and a small team have been working on a new device, the Animus 2.0, through which Desmond will view and relive the memories of one Ezio Auditore da Firenze as he searches for the deadly Pieces of Eden artefact – something the Templars would love to get their gauntlets on. We enter Ezio’s life from birth and he is soon brawling through the streets of Florence, Montagues and Capulets-style, caught up in a conspiracy based upon the late-15th-century historical backdrop of the warring Medici and Pazzi families – a conspiracy that reaches right up to His Holiness himself. Ezio soon becomes embroiled in a revenge quest after the murder of his father and brothers amid the internecine hose-wearing shenanigans. The storyline uses the historical backdrop of the period to inventive effect in more ways than one: the likes of Machiavelli lurk, and in particular a 25-year-old Leonardo da Vinci figures as a sort of Renaissance ‘Q’, dispensing cunning gear with that famed flying machine among his offerings of genius. Luckily for you, he’s on Ezio’s side.
Gorgeous mapping can flatter to deceive, while an intriguing plot with convincingly delivered dialogue (Danny Wallace and Kirstin Bell among the voice-acting talent) involving a multitude of sinners can also mask a multitude of sins. It’s in the game play that any title stands or falls and, happily, in ACII that gameplay has become as versatile and flowing as it is free-running over the rooftops of the fabled cites of Florence, Rome and Venice. Vertigo has never felt so good as when swallow-diving from a castellated tower high above a city after unlocking another area of a particular map. You can blend in with a crowd or unleash the Renaissance equivalent of a Friday night high street rampage, an onscreen icon displaying your notoriety. If you accidentally rouse city guards then try to escape by scrambling up a building and slipping across terracotta tiles spattered with pigeon crap, it will not be enough: they will climb right after you. Whether you decide upon the subtler strategies, like hiring courtesans to distract adversaries in the streets, or take the more direct route of full-on fisticuffs, there are a mass of tweaks and enhancements to collect from traders; and holding, punching and butchering moves aplenty along with lashings of gore. Gore delivered not least of all by the nifty dual twirling blades Ezio hides up his sleeves and which you can perfect in combat. Likewise, Assassin’s Creed II has worked hard at perfecting some of the best tricks it had up its sleeve in the first game and comes up with a whole host of new ones.
In the end, clever means justify a great game.
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