Assassin's Creed II: game of the year
Assassin’s Creed II is a truly incredible game. The gameplay is one of the most fluid, and fantastic experiences in any game. The dialogue is hilarious as well as just great dialogue because it has such an amazing story to tell, which is tells perfectly. Oh, and then there’s the story, o man… where to start…. I’ll just tell you that it’s awesome for now.
Gameplay. There are a few different sections to look into when you’re looking at the gameplay. The combat, economy system, collectibles, mission variety (that’s right I said variety unlike the fist game), the replay value, as well as the in game tombs to explore, and the extremely large world.
Combat: The combat is simply amazing, it keeps the winning formula from the first game: counters. There might not be as many counter animations as you want in the game, but there are still a lot. Also, instead of the game being all like, you’re Altair, you get his sword and his sword only, there are 22 weapons to buy and you can disarm enemies and keep that weapon until you decide to start sprinting. The combat is extremely bloody and satisfying, but the hidden blade still wins over anything else. Oh, speaking of hidden weapons! You now have a double hidden blade, hidden poison syringe, and a hidden gun, and YES all of them are as awesome as they sound.
The economy system: No one asked for an economy system, so Ubisoft decided to take the risk and do it anyways, and let me tell you that I was quite nervous for this. But oh man, did they ace it. You can buy paintings to improve the value of your villa in Tuscany, which you get income for every 20 minutes or something, improving the value means you get more money. You can buy different colored robes which add the finishing touch to you’re dear little Ezio, and you can buy poison and medicine from doctors. But then there are the blacksmith, and o god are they disappointing. There are a total of 22 weapons which are pretty good, but then you look to get a long weapon and you cannot buy them, but the guards have them and you can disarm them, however you cannot keep them, which greatly disappointed me. (-.1)
Collectables: wow, another thing that Ubisoft decided to throw into the mix of additions to the sequel, that they nearly aced. There are 6 seals that you have the option to collect by exploring tombs, which are extremely fun to play. Ubisoft aced this because the tombs are not only extremely fun, but have a reward when you collect all 6 seals at the end of each tomb. This reward is awesome because it is one of the strongest armors in the game; Altair’s armor. Another thing are the feathers, which I found to be just annoying as the flags from the game’s predecessor except there are one hundred total in the entire world. The last are the glyphs, glitches in the animus left by the previous subject to show you ‘the truth’ I’m still working on that though.
Mission Variety and Replay Value: Even though Ubisoft added a whole new array of spices to their new game, they still took constructive criticism from the last game. I played through the entire story mode and the only bit of it that was repetitive was the oh look new target, kill him; however, how and where you kill him are all different, you have different allies almost every time, and there are different settings in which you assassinate someone, keeping a huge variety. Just like the first game, the main reason you would want to replay this game is because you want to get the collectables; however, I thought the story was so incredible that I’m going to replay it just for that.
Large Worlds: Ubisoft yet again impressed everyone by making such a large open world, just like the did in the first game. However, this game completely owns the first game when it comes to the world size. I beat the game and have not been to everywhere in each city; but I will tell you that all the cities are extremely fun and very big, they include: Florence, 2 towns in Tuscany (unless there are more that I haven’t found but I doubt it), Venice, Romagna, and Rome. But Rome was extremely disappointing because the only place you can go is the Vatican, I want to yell at the person who decided this because the two main reasons I was excited for Rome was the Vatican and The Colosseum, oh yeah then there’s the capital and all the OTHER awesome buildings that they did not include, (-.1). However, since all the other cities are so huge they make up for this disappointment. I have heard that the 3 big cities (Florence, Venice, and Romagna) have 5 districts, if that is true than each district in AC2 is about the size of 2 or 3 districts from AC1, basically, they’re massive. Except for Romagna, it’s about the size of a city from AC1, still very big though.
Story: play for yourself, because I would be happy to spoil it for you if you message me, but I do not want to ruin the incredible story for you. I have not played such a good story since MGS4, Infamous, or AC1 (haha, just kidding about the last one).
Graphics and Animation: Just like how AC1 was head of its time for graphics, so is AC2. AC2 is up there with some of the greatest graphics of all time. However, the animations are pretty repetitive but each one is satisfyingly bloody and just simply look awesome
Buy this game, it is so far the best game to come out in 09 and if you say it is not as good as MW2… I will be so pissed.
Overall: 9.8/10
