'Assassin's Creed II' video game review

Step back into history, again, with this action game

By Paul Semel

Posted November 16, 2009

Special to Metromix

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal (“Prince Of Persia”)
Publisher: Ubisoft
Available On: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Reviewed On: Xbox 360

Though it was full of promise, a crippling bout of redundancy caused 2007's acrobatic third-person stealth action game "Assassin's Creed" to fall a bit short of its lofty ambitions. But with a serious increase in depth, and some meaningful tweaks to its already solid gameplay mechanics, "Assassin's Creed II" more than lives up to its potential.

In the original, you were Altaïr, a member of a secret society of assassins during the Crusades. Except you were really Desmond Miles, a modern day ancestor of Altaïr who, with the help of the Animus, a machine that reads memories in DNA, got to witness (and do) what Altaïr did back during the crusades. You see, the Assassins are in a long but secret war with the Knights Templar, and the Templar had kidnapped Desmond in hopes of using his imbedded memories to find a sacred artifact.

Now that you know what's going on, and have escaped the Knights, you're trying to fight back by using another Animus to read the DNA memories of Ezio, an assassin who lived in Italy during the Renaissance, and learn the ways of the Force. Er, the Assassins. Thankfully, you're not going it alone; you're helped by Lucy—who's voiced by and modeled to look like “Veronica Mars” and “Heroes” star Kristen Bell—the Animus operator from the original who, it turned out, was an assassin herself.

As before, all of the action takes place is a open world teeming with people and easily climbed buildings. Except that the game has been restructured, and now plays more like such other open world games as “inFamous” and “Grand Theft Auto” in that you get both story-driven and side missions from specific people, and thus don't have to keep running back to your home base.

These missions are much more varied than the original game's, almost to the point of being overwhelming. While some still test your skills at running, jumping, climbing and others your puzzle solving skills, you now also get to gallantly beat up cheating boyfriends and help your mom carry home some paintings she bought from Leonardo Da Vinci. Who, it turns out, will later return the favor by building you some contraptions to aid you in your quest.

For all its improvements, though, this still has some of the same problems that plagued the original. Your enemies have really, really good eyesight, and are really mistrustful, so you spend way more time running away from people or fighting them than you should, which makes this unnecessarily frustrating. What makes this worse is that running often makes them suspicious, but if you don't run, it takes forever to get anywhere.

Combat is also still the weakest part of the game. While it has also gained more layers, especially when it comes to counter-attacks and blocking, it still feels slow and labored (though, admittedly, less so than before). Still, a wider variety of weapons, as well as some new toys from your pal Da Vinci, do give it a good bit of variety.

Even with these annoyances, “Assassin's Creed II” is still a marked improvement over what was a rather compelling original. Getting to play this kind of game as something other than a superhero or criminal wannabe is a nice change of pace, as is getting to run around Renaissance-era Italy, a setting—like the Crusades from the original—we haven't been to countless times before.

Bottom Line: He's bolder, he's better, he's a real Renaissance man.