Title     Assassin’s Creed II Developer    Ubisoft Montreal Publisher    Ubisoft Platform    Xbox 360, Windows PC, PS3 Genre    Action and Adventure, Stealth Release Date    November 19th 2009 for console versions, March 3rd 2010 for PC

I know; Assassin’s Creed II isn’t that old of a game (I first played it at release just last November on the Xbox, and PC gamers will have only now gotten their hands on it at all), so writing a retrospective piece may seem a little premature… but it still seemed like an age since I was crawling across the roofs of Venezia and Firenze with Ezio. Something about Assassin’s Creed II demanded a second look, a second play-through so soon after the initial one. So that is exactly what I’ve been doing lately.

Assassin’s Creed II had quite a tall order to achieve when it was first announced. The first game was polarising with gamers and critics, splitting opinion between those who absolutely loved it and those who felt that it was repetitive and had too many minor flaws. I fall quite firmly into the first group, having played through Assassin’s Creed three times to date, and fully intending to do so again in future. The sequel would need to address the issues of the naysayers whilst still retaining the fans of the original, a balance which isn’t always readily achieved. Numerous franchises of note have eschewed their loyal followers to try and appeal to a broader audience, to varying degrees of success, whilst others have been content to cater to just their fans and retain a niche appeal.

I don’t honestly know what it is about Assassin’s Creed that isn’t to love. Millions of people across the globe have gone nuts over Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Demons and Angels, despite their being complete arse gravy, to paraphrase Stephen Fry. Assassin’s Creed offers a similarly outlandish, but much more intelligent and absorbing tale of religious conspiracy and cover-up going back centuries through human history, with much more interesting and better developed characters, and yet it was nitpicked for having repetitive gameplay (and what game doesn’t, anyway?).

Just a quick note of warning; whilst I’ll try to minimise them, any look back at a finished game is going to have spoilers creeping in, and I will certainly be referencing events from the first Assassin’s Creed so if you don’t want to know, you might want to give this a miss.

Assassin’s Creed II starts with Desmond Miles still a prisoner at Abstergo’s labs, following directly on from the end of Assassin’s Creed. Very quickly however, he’s busted out, and whisked away by the modern day Assassin’s Guild to one of their own facilities, complete with its own knock-off Animus, and even as a (not-so) nice bonus, its own knock-off sarcastic history buff replacement for Templar Warren Vidic. He even has a British accent, just to make it absolutely clear that he’s meant to be an antagonist as much as an ally!

Desmond enters the Animus, we see a very loud Italian lady giving birth, and discover that this is Altair’s replacement for the action of Assassin’s Creed II; Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Desmond and Ezio take the player through a long, winding conspiracy and revenge story that spans 24 years at the end of the 15th century, right in the middle of the Italian Renaissance. Along the way they encounter numerous historical figures of note, including a pope, the head of one of the largest merchant banking families of Renaissance Florence, and even Leonardo da Vinci himself, who just happens to be a close personal friend of Ezio’s. Fine, so the story takes some pretty big liberties with historical events, but it all weaves into the overall conspiracy, and none of it seems forced or included just for people to recognise and feel a part of an in-joke. At one point you even get to revisit Altair, though only briefly. The story moves along at a decent pace, moving between Ezio, Desmond and Altair’s lives at irregular intervals (though most of the action focuses on Ezio with the other two serving as interludes) bringing the player along with it. Either you become enthralled with it and don’t notice the incongruities, or you’ll probably not get very far into the game anyway.

In terms of gameplay, Assassin’s Creed II takes what worked so well in the first game, and expands on it. The combat system has been opened up to include more weapons, and different ways of using each of these new tools as well as the older ones like the hidden blade, throwing knives and swords. Assassinations with the hidden blades have evolved from sidling or charging up to someone and stabbing them in the kidneys or throat, to now being able to grab people from inside haystacks and other cover, pull them down from ledges and rooftops whilst hanging off the side of buildings, or drop on top of them from a roof. It all seems more varied, and makes planning an assassination more of an involved tactical process than simply deciding whether or not to creep up behind someone or just run at them and hope you get lucky. You can still do that, but it isn’t nearly as satisfying, and the game’s enemy AI makes it harder for you to do. In this respect Ezio seems to have taken a page out of Sam Fisher and Batman’s handbooks, with stealth, novel uses of tools and inventive plans of attack taking more of a precedence over direct confrontation and blundering your way through fights until you finally get the one guy you were supposed to.

When you do finally get that one guy you were aiming for in the first place, don’t expect to see more of the “You killed me, and now I’ll take a ten minute pause to tell you why you suck and it isn’t fair” speeches from the first game. Your targets now just say a few last words or sentences and expire, as you’d expect from someone with a seven inch blade in their neck. Instead of the story being doled out to the player in regular intervals after each major assassination, you now have to figure things out more or less for yourself, at your own pace, with occasional prompting from the other characters in Ezio’s life, or from the modern assassins monitoring Desmond’s progress in the Animus. Some of these clues to the larger conspiracy at the heart of Assassin’s Creed II come from solving some quite involved riddles and mini-games, requiring at least a passing knowledge from the player about historical or biblical figures and events, from Cain and Able to JFK.

It isn’t just the story that isn’t handed to you on a platter in Assassin’s Creed II. In the first game, Altair received additional health and upgraded equipment at pre-set points in the story. Ezio has to pay for these himself, using money gained by picking pockets, robbing the corpses of his victims, and eventually by receiving taxes from the citizens of Monteriggioni, where the Auditore family villa stands and where Ezio and his uncle Mario are the local nobles. The game world of Firenze, Venezia, Monteriggioni, Tuscany, and Forli is much more detailed and more of a sandbox open world than in the previous game, with various shops dotted about selling weapons, armour, health items, maps, and decorative pieces to display in the Auditore villa. Members of the public will also ask Ezio to assist them with problems as he gains notoriety as a kind of Robin Hood figure in each region; everything from delivering valuable messages, to beating up unfaithful husbands and sending them back to their wives, which, the game being set in Italy, happens quite a lot as it happens.

As in the first game, you still reveal events and locations in each area on your mini-map by climbing tall buildings with eagle lookouts at the summit and synchronising with them. However, there are fewer of these than last time, and they’re placed more intelligently throughout the game world, rather than being there just for the sake of climbing up them as a kind of collectible sight-seeing side-quest. Some of these can’t be climbed until Ezio gains certain advanced climbing abilities though, which can be extremely frustrating the first time you encounter it and don’t realise it; I wasted a good 20 to 30 minutes in November trying to climb the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fior Duomo in Firenze at the start of the game before losing patience and giving up, only to realise much later on into the game that I needed a special jumping ability to get up there.

The flag collecting from Assassin’s Creed is gone, which is no loss whatsoever, and probably the one really tedious aspect of the original that I didn’t particularly care for. However, collecting side-quests aren’t entirely gone from the game. There’s now feather collecting! It’s just as exciting as looking for flags, but there are fewer of them, it makes more sense in the context of the wider plot instead of just seeming tacked on as an afterthought, and this time you get rewarded for collecting 50% and 100% of the feathers in the game with a new weapon, and a special cape, respectively. There are also codex pages, ancient manuscripts which are excerpts from a Manual for Better Killing written by Altair after the events of the first game, to collect that you pass on to Leonardo da Vinci to decode and use to build upgrades to your hidden blades. And finally there are treasure chests seemingly all over the place, some guarded and some not, which contain money. These aren’t vital to find however, though the money inside can be very helpful, and you can buy maps of their locations in each area, mitigating a large chunk of the time it would otherwise take to hunt them all down. The maps are worth buying, as the money in most individual chests is more than the map costs, and you can occasionally find yourself lacking funds for a vital piece of equipment or armour in the early to middle sections of the game.

Another mini-game of sorts is a series of assassin tombs and Templar strong houses. These contain free-running challenges, which are designed to test your reflexes and help master control of Ezio’s movement abilities, and some of which can be very challenging. It makes a nice change of pace from crawling across rooftops, and the six assassin tombs reward you with a seal; when all six of these are placed in their spots underneath the villa in Monteriggioni you get access to the game’s ultimate armour; Altair’s master assassin armour. The Templar strong houses however only offer treasure chests as rewards, and these can only be accessed anyway by owning the Black Edition of the game, or buying the slightly more costly enhanced version of the second DLC pack.

In terms of visual presentation, the graphics of Assassin’s Creed II are fantastic eye candy. Occasional framerate tearing to one side, Assassin’s Creed II is one of the most beautiful games on the Xbox 360. The vistas offered of each town in the first Assassin’s Creed from atop an eagle lookout point were impressive, but the sequel makes them seem horribly inadequate by comparison. Each Italian town and city has a unique and individual style, fashioned on historical knowledge of how they looked at that period. Certain buildings that still exist today, like the cathedrals and palazzos, have clearly been copied with a great deal of attention to detail. Monteriggioni especially is well replicated; the town still exists as a walled town filled with the original preserved and restored 15th and 16th century houses and shops, so the game’s designers were practically gifted with being able to lovingly recreate the town for the game. And throughout all of this attention to detail, access for Ezio to climb buildings and traverse rooftops via scaffolding and cables has been subtly woven in seamlessly, never standing out as an obvious contrivance. There’s less grey than in the first game too; the Italian Renaissance is depicted as a much more colourful and vibrant world than the Middle-Eastern Middle Ages. It’s a real graphical achievement that pushes the bar considerably higher for other future games on the 360’s hardware.

This attention to detail carries over to the sound design. The soundtrack skilfully transits from flowingly beautiful orchestral pieces to a more tensely moody or rhythmic and driven style when the story or action require it, and at no point does the soundtrack get in your face and distract from the dialogue or what is going on in the game, subtly enhancing the mood in the background as only the best game and film composers can achieve. The sound effects are similarly unobtrusive and true to the setting and feel of the game.

The voice acting is fantastic. From Ezio to the supporting characters, to just random pedestrians in the streets of Italy’s towns, everyone sounds right. You’re never distracted by poor voice work, though you may occasionally find yourself pausing to wonder if you just heard right, as the dialogue writers have dotted the speech with occasional moments of humour, both genuinely surprising and funny (hearing “Whatta da FUCK?!” in an incredulous high-pitched Italian accent when Ezio knocks an innocent bystander to the ground and dashes up the side of a building in free-running), and occasionally cheesy and more likely to make you groan than smile (Ezio’s uncle introducing himself with a loud “Itsa me! Mario!”… ugh). A word of advice, though – unless you’re fluent in Italian, turn on the subtitles in the options at the start of the game. Assassin’s Creed II has a lot of un-translated Italian dialogue in it, right from the off, which only adds to the authenticity and style of the presentation, but can occasionally make it confusing as all hell to understand what’s going on. I quickly learnt that the small amount of Italian I possess from travelling is completely inadequate.

Pros

• Absorbing and fascinating characters and plot-driven story.
• One of the best looking and sounding games of this generation.
• Expanded action, combat and strategic options over Assassin’s Creed.
• No bloody flag collecting.

Cons

• Occasional framerate issues.
• Two sections of the story cut out in order to sell as DLC packs.
• “Itsa me! Mario!”

Summary

Assassin’s Creed II is one of the most exciting, gorgeous action games to have come out for a long time. It takes critics of its predecessor by the scruff of the neck and gives them a damned good thrashing, improving on almost every aspect of the first game, expanding on them, and adding a lot of new and welcome features to boot. All in all, I think we can expect Assassin’s Creed to be around for a long time to come, and I for one am looking forwards to seeing where the franchise goes next. That this game was completely overlooked recently at the Gaming BAFTAs is a complete travesty, and for me personally, Assassin’s Creed II would be a very strong contender for game of the year 2009, alongside Batman Arkham Asylum and Dragon Age: Origins.

I fully expect to revisit Ezio and his story again in future. Playing through the game a second time I noticed a lot of smaller details I’d missed the first time, as you have with all the best games and films, and I still feel as though I’ve yet to see all that Assassin’s Creed II has to offer.

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