Some words about Assassin's Creed 2

If you've been following me on twitter, or better yet happen to talk to me in the so called "real life" you know that I've been bashing my head against the wall while playing Assassin's Creed 2. To say that I hated the game would be an understatement. At least I did hate it. Now? I kind of just feel that it's a mediocre game that can be fun at times, and extremely frustrating and dull the rest of the time. So while I may not hate the game anymore, it should go without saying that I think all of the praise is undeserved.

In my opinion Jim Sterling's controversial review over at Destructoid sums it up best. For the most part I agree with everything Jim had to say about the game, with a few exceptions. The main exception being that I feel that Assassin's Creed 1 was a far worse game, hell I couldn't even play more than about 3 hours of it before I decided it was utter shit. So, yes I'd say it's alright for you to believe people when they say Assassin's Creed 2 is a better game, but that certainly isn't saying much.

I could leave it at that, but I think I'll ramble on for a bit about some of the things I did and didn't like about the game for a bit.

My two biggest complaints became less annoying as I progressed with the game, so I'll meet the game half-way and say that some of the issues I had were my fault. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Firstly, the climbing in this game isn't nearly as easy or as fun as it should be. One of the biggest parts of the Assassin's Creed series is being able to climb up and around just about every building and object in the game's world. So you'd think they'd get this part right, but no they didn't.

The biggest part with climbing up things is because the game treats climbing more like a puzzle than free form exploration. There were a few times in the game where I can recall being utterly stumped on how to climb up a tower. The game needs you to climb a specific way, and it doesn't give you any hints on how to do this.

One example: I was on the balcony of this tower with a wooden pole sticking out of the side of the tower just above the balcony. I tried climbing up on the sides of the balcony and jumping towards the pole to grab onto it - this often sent me flying off the side of the tower to my death, and being forced to restart the whole 5 minute chase segment all over again. What the game really wants you to do is climb up on the balcony in front of where the pole ends and jump up and grab the end of the pole and pull yourself upwards. Why you had to do it like this? I don't know.

There are many other times in the game where I'd get stumped for shorter amounts of time, but it still slowed downed the progression of what should have been a quick painless process. God forbid I ever wanted to do any of the race side missions and have to deal with figuring this stuff out while being timed.

A few final words about the climbing: I finally got the hang of what the game wanted me to do in most situations in the later part of the game, but I would still be stumped from time to time. That combined with Ezio randomly decided to wall jump off of things to his death didn't help matters either though. So who's to say I don't just suck at climbing shit in games? Well, I certainly didn't have any trouble with it when I was playing Uncharted 2.

My other big complaint is the combat. And while I feel there are many problems with the climbing and jumping around in AC2, my beef with the combat might just be because I suck at it, sadly. Still it seems like some of the mechanics might be wonky anyways. Hard to say.

Basically, in Assassin's Creed - as far as I can tell - the game wants you to take advantage of the "counter kill" ability. So by parrying, dodging, or disarming a foe (depending on it's type) you can one shot kill every normal enemy in the game. I could be wrong about this though, because as I have stated - I kind of suck at this.

So for the first half of the game I spent a large portion of combat just wildly swinging away at enemies until I was lucky enough to hit them. This resulted in really long battles where I would have to chug a bunch of medicine to stay alive.

Eventually I started experimenting with counter kills and the results by the end of the game were as such: I could parry counter kill 50% of the time, dodge counter kill 0% of the time, and disarm counter kill 100% of the time. Most of the enemies you need to parry, so only doing it right half of the time kind of sucks. The enemies you need to dodge are the toughest enemies in the game, so never being able to do it REALLY sucks. And the guys with pole arms? Well I fucked those guys up.

So I imagine anyone who is a pro at this will have a lot of fun with the combat in the game, because admittedly it it quite satisfying to brutally murder a dude with one attack. Sadly, I could not get a grip on this system though, so the combat was annoying most of the time. I was lucky when I could get the jump on a couple of dudes and assassinate them both at the same time with my double hidden blades, avoiding the whole tiresome combat altogether. Plus it looks sick as hell.

Well, those were my biggest problems with Assassin's Creed 2. The rest of the game was either hit or miss. There were a couple of aggravating sequences that I could rant about, but won't because this is already pretty long winded. Well... maybe I'll just bitch about one of them.

The part in the game where you have to do a bunch of bullshit side-quest type missions in order to proceed with the game. That was easily the worst part of the game. Playing Capture the Flag? Seriously? I'm a god damned Assassin, I shouldn't be forced to play some stupid mini game that pretty much revolves around the frustrating climbing mechanics of the game. Oh - there's also a race mission. I fucking hate that part of the game.

Aside from that, there were some cool moments in the game, but I don't care enough about actually liking the game to talk about those. But I will say, if you at least rent this game, you'll get some enjoyment out of it. And that's about the nicest thing I can say about it.

Does the game deserve a 4.5? Maybe. I'd probably rate it a tiny bit higher, and even higher still if I was good at the combat. Is it the Game of the Year? No. No it isn't. The sad thing though is I know at least one outlet that's going to give it the honor, and if they don't I'll be surprised.

You don't have to take my word for it though, god knows nobody really cares what I think. But I figured I'd at least contribute to knocking the game down a peg, while venting my frustrations of course.