GamerNode: Reviews - Assassin's Creed II

Assassin's Creed II

• Assassin's Creed II
• PlayStation 3
• Ubisoft Montreal
• Ubisoft
• November 17th, 2009

Two years ago, I called Assassin's Creed "the foundation for future games to build upon," with the potential to be considered among the best games of all time. With Assassin's Creed II, Ubisoft has taken leaps and bounds that rival Altair's and Ezio's own free-running acrobatics, and have created a game to rival most any other that I have had the luxury of experiencing. Assassin's Creed II is not a work of perfection, but taken as a whole it so satisfyingly delivers upon every aspect first laid out in its prequel, as well as a broad spectrum of new gameplay elements and non-gameplay additions that transcend the medium, that it is difficult to offer anything but praise for this superb title and the development team behind it.

The game is quite clearly a visual masterpiece, rendering the cities of Renaissance Italy in beautiful detail so rich that comparisons to their real-life counterparts yield only minor differences, inside and out. Standing atop the campaniles and church spires treats players to expansive cityscapes, and walking the old-world streets provides a romanticized look at what life (or at least tourism) may have been like at that time. Ezio's eagle vision very usefully changes all of this to a dark, cloud-covered void, revealing hidden secrets, mission objectives, friends, and foes in bright highlights, and when dealing with the latter, the game's combat animations, action-camera adjustments, and focal targeting heighten the tension and improve the cinematic experience. It is here, in the midst of such graphical achievement, that my primary complaints about Assassin's Creed II lie. Screen tearing and shadow pop-in, where nearer shadows are rendered more smoothly than distant ones, are common, and those shadows rendered at lower samples often appear to fluctuate until brought into the higher-quality range. These can be annoying initially, but even so, the effects tend to disappear with prolonged play.

Improvement over time becomes a theme as one plays Assassin's Creed II; the characters, the plot, the gameplay mechanics, and the player all grow steadily from beginning to end. In doing so, the game's pace remains as steady or as segmented as the player wishes, because aside from the linear organization of the "memories" that comprise the story, the game features many side missions and personal ambitions for players to partake in. Unlike the previous game, where repetition was unavoidable, only these optional enterprises based on contract assassinations, races, message delivery, et cetera show any signs of monotony, and are all entered into by choice. The assassinations in particular are actually very varied, and can be approached from a number of imaginative angles.

Ezio himself is a solid lead to the finely crafted and intriguing plot. Along with the game's mechanics, he begins as an unrefined version of what he matures into over the course of roughly 20 hours of play; from a young, rash, untrained hothead, he develops into a skilled, tempered, and discerning assassin. He learns new ways of approaching and eliminating targets, such as leaping from above, ambushing from hiding places, ordering hired groups of thieves or courtesans to distract guards, or swimming below the water's surface and reaching up onto the deck of a ship to seize his prey. Even the simple act of blending with the crowd has become entirely natural, allowing Ezio to simply walk in and out of groups of people to avoid detection, stopping on benches when moving, human cover becomes unavailable to him.

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