A Couple of Gamers

ACII Puts the “Sin” back into Gaming. Or “Ass.” But in a Good Way.

Posted on Jan 04, 2010 by AndrewC in 360

I’ve played through Assassin’s Creed I and II with my fiancée Ashley, and we both agree that the second is (pun intended) hundreds of years ahead of the first.

The first thing to mention is the characters: In Assassin’s Creed II, Ezio (the player character) grows and meets many characters, some of which we became very attached to. A missed QuickTime event prompt caused Ezio to decline a hug from a very let-down Leonardo Da Vinci. It’s interesting that we felt terrible about that for the rest of the evening, yet we didn’t care about stabbing some minstrel that was in our way.

As developed as the characters are, Assassin’s Creed II’s best character is Renaissance Italy. The world is so strong and believable that one feels right inside a condensed version of Venice or Florence. Even if Assassin’s Creed II doesn’t have the graphics of Uncharted 2, we still had a wow moment the first time we climbed a tower and saw how huge the city was. Free running over the rooftops is a blast; especially if you have guards trailing you.

When free running, we would sometimes expect a platform where there was none, and we would have a long fall from the rooftops. My fiancée plays games a lot and never feels motion sickness or any such experience but, when she falls off the roofs in ACII, she feels like she’s on a roller coaster.

Another thing we really liked besides the world was how dissimilar in pace and structure ACII was to ACI. The first outing in the series places the player in an assembly line of killing; the objectives became tedious and repetitive soon into the game. Assassin’s Creed II has a huge amount of variation to keep things fresh. Side quests, armor and weapon upgrades, collectibles, cryptic messages to decode, assassin’s tombs (all-platforming sections), and refurbishing Ezio’s uncle’s villa kept us busy when we needed a break from knife-facing. The problem was deciding when to take a break.

Due to the open-world nature of Assassin’s Creed II, it’s difficult to assign turns and decide what  the next move will be. It’s not a strike against the design or execution by any means, it’s simply that a game with so many directions to go doesn’t lend itself to a group playthrough.

Assassin’s Creed II is a solid game and I would recommend it to couples for controller-passing playthroughs. If you do play it, I would advise you play it during the day because you may miss some of the complex storyline if you happen to fall asleep while your significant other is still playing.