Assassin’s Creed II: Early Look
Assassin’s Creed was easily one of my favorite games of 2007. Assassin’s Creed did have some issues that people knocked it for being too repetitive and not much of a stealth game, but those are as always supposed to be fixed with the ever prevalent sequel.
The AC story is a very interesting monster. It deals with a lot of time travel elements through Desmond’s (the main character) ancestors so the series can really go wherever it wants time wise. The first game was set in the crusades and featured a lot of horse riding and sword play. The iconic cities you visited were beautiful but felt a bit too small and not very “alive”. In ACII the game is going forward in time to one of Desmond’s assassin ancestors named Ezio, the timeline is somewhere around the Renaissance of Italy.
During this time Leonardo Da Vinci and other inventors/artists of that era are starting to experiment with different gadgets and new technologies. Da Vinci is touted as a sort of gadget maker akin to Q in the James Bond series. The main reason for this is to add different ways of killing/distracting your targets. For instance, Ezio will have access to a small caliber hidden gun, its not very accurate but can be used if you get yourself in a sticky situation. Also great for quick escapes are smoke bombs which can be smashed on the ground and used to distract your foes. Another easy distraction is throwing some coins on the ground near some peasants which sends them into a money hungry riot. Although, you shouldn’t throw all your money away because it can be used to purchase upgrades throughout the game.
The combat was one of the best parts of the first AC. In the sequel, the variety of the combat is taken up a few notches to allow more fluent transitions between attacks and the ability to counter attacks with more than one outcome. You can also pay off some close by mercenaries to help you out in battle to even the odds if necessary.
Now onto what maybe the most important aspect of AC, the free-running. After watching the first gameplay trailer (its at the bottom of this post!) it is easily evident that Ubisoft is taking what they learned from the last Prince of Persia and applying that to the AC series. There is much more depth to the free-running and some portions seem to notch up the difficulty a bit. This is very prevalent in the new “catacombs” sections of the game. These sections are said to take up about 5-6 hours of the gameplay and take place in the depths of Venice and other cities. These sections scream Prince of Persia so blatantly that you could easily get the two confused. These sections are said to break up the gameplay and make it less repetitive.
Before I did my research for this article I really wasn’t all that excited about ACII. I knew it was going to more of the same but overall I am happy that Ubisoft is at least trying to bring some innovation to the series. I love history so these games have always been right up my alley but I really disappointed with the first games assassinations. They were more brawls than anything else and I really hope that gets addressed.
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