Assassin’s Creed 2 Review

Thanks to the retooled, restyled Animus supplied by Desmond’s modern-day assassin acquaintances, this silken semi-assistedness now extends to using crowds as camouflage. Rather than tapping a button to automatically and clunkily “blend” with certain privileged knots of “blenders”, you just slip in amongst any passing group (as demarcated by a silvery carpet of Matrix code) and let the Animus bleach Ezio to anonymity. Full manual control is retained, and approaching a well-guarded target at street level (not to mention fleeing the scene of the crime afterwards) is thus a more engaged, delicate process. The circle button is used once again to ease unwitting civilian accomplices to one side.

Swimming gets tedious pretty quickly.

The upgraded Animus has also given the irritating enemy AI a hair-cut. Rather than pursuing you endlessly till you slip into one of a very few, prescriptive “hiding zones”, alerted guardsmen confine their search to a circular area on losing line of sight, as in Grand Theft Auto IV, and return to their posts after a minute or so. Travelling through unfriendly districts is a far less aggravating experience as a consequence.

If Assassin’s Creed 2 thus builds on its predecessor’s admirable sense of balance, it also suffers from many of the same flaws. Missions still aren’t quite enthralling enough, despite a grab-bag of additional tools and abilities, with the developer mostly content to trot out the same (albeit more elaborate) find-and-kill, follow-to-destination or beat-the-clock varieties as before. True, there are stage-coach pursuit subgames, the expected hidden collectables and a couple of sojourns in Leonardo Da Vinci’s glider to alleviate the relentless stalking, plus the five or so hours of “Batman-like” interior adventuring Benoit Lambert promised us in October, but the action’s never really complex or audacious enough to be memorable.

Good man to have at your back in the fray, a mercenary.

It’s unfortunate, given this want of compelling material, that the game takes its sweet time doling out new features, though in fairness the relaxed pacing is a consequence of the beefed-up storytelling and praiseworthy 20-hour-plus run-time. While Desmond stepped into Altair’s waxed boots at the height of his powers, Ezio makes his first appearance as an athletic but decidedly non-assassin-like Florentine nobleman’s brat, concerned with little other than drink, brawling and prostitutes until the sham trial and execution of his father and brothers.

In the course of the ensuing, gratifying tale of revenge and self-discovery, players are drip-fed both the first game’s repertoire and new tricks like poison (a timed-action killer, great for causing distractions), smoke bombs and the fun but (given the existence of throwing knives) slightly surplus gunpowder-propelled hidden blade. Newcomers will welcome this laidback approach, of course, but if you’re one of the eight million people who bought Assassin’s Creed you’re going to be a little vexed. It took me the best part of three hours to reach the first proper melee combat tutorial.