Assassin's Creed II was embarrassingly addictive right from when I first started playing it. I ended up 100% the game's weapons, armors, treasures, feathers, assassinations, beat up, races, and platinum trophied this game.
Fun 5/5, Overall 4/5 since its a little repetitive still...but muuuch better than AC1.
Pros:
Combat is extremely fun and can be often funny when guards run from you out of fear lol. Storyline is quite fun and for the most part compelling as it sucks you in quickly and keeps you going for the long haul (the ending is a little weird but not bad at all could be interesting to see how they wrap it up in upcoming AC titles). The storyline missions can be fun although they are often kind of short in my opinion (good for casual gamers). There are plenty of mini-games to keep you occupied, renovation game is especially rewarding in my opinion. Additional DLC / Uplay downloadable things
Cons:
Treasure Hunting is extremely repetitive and useless mid-end game which is similar to finding all the flags in AC1...which to say the least is very annoying. The badges for finding all the feathers for petruccio is easy...but extremely time consuming. I wish that there were more skill based badges based on fighting like god of war badges (more like the doctor/sweeper/messer sandman AC2 badges). There are a few horrible platforming places when scaling buildings. Lastly, though I enjoy thoroughly destroying my enemies, by end game no guards are really a challenge anymore since you just fight more of them after a certain point. There are agile, brute, and seeker mobs which all are harder to fight but they too will become easy once you perfect your fighting technique. The missions to kill conspirators gets a little repetitive and I felt like a few of them could have been taken out completely if I didn't rather have a longer game and more stuff to play/kill lol. There are only a few times where you can't kill a boss the same way as the last. It's still fun to kill them...but just not always innovative.
Combat:
I loved the combat system and found myself trash talking all the guards that said "Ah HAH! Gotcha...just to die seconds later =D. Many times if you time your sneak attacks correctly you can jump from guard to guard and insta-kill them (even better when you have dual hidden-blades so you can kill 2 people at a time mwuahaha, extremely fun and funny to watch if you do it 2-3 times in a row.) The countering system is great but could use a little work. You can't always counter a person's attack so you end up having to get hit a few times and when they are weakened, you can counter and kill them. I found myself mostly just using the dual hidden blades instead of using the sword, dagger, throwing knives, etc. Hidden-blades let you counter and insta-kill and are very fast so you can keep opponents off of you and keep people behind you in check with an occasional attack. The hidden-gun is useful assassinations where you are not able to be detected (SPOILER:also for borgia at the end). Smoke bombs are also your best friend if you don't want to constantly dance around tapping opponents to keep them from surrounding you and even better for getting the No Hitter achievement (kill 10 people without getting hit). You get 3 smoke bomb, gather 10+ guards, use bomb, kill 4-5, use another bomb, kill the rest, etc. Makes you basically a god for 5 seconds and you can just 1 hit kill anything you can reach in that time. Lastly, throwing is a godsend and saves also of time for the stronger guards when you are short on time. Throw guards etc. into the water or off buildings for a insta-kill or just throw them to the ground so you can walk up and instakill them yourself (great for heavily armored dudes who just keep blocking). As for stealing weapons from the guards...its mostly useless unless you are trying to get the Sweeper Achievement where you need to trip 5 guards at once with a sweep attack that you can use when using a spear you steal off the guards.
In sum, though you might end up fighting the same way for every encounter...its still tons of fun.
Story:
I am an avid reader, and love games with great storylines. AC2's storyline has alot of potential and seems to be carefully plotted out in order to maximize the plot twists similar to a book. Sure not all of the story is original or even cleverly tied together, but the overall character growth and storyline progression is quite nice. The historical and fictional lore blends extremely well with the real world environments in which they are placed. I loved reading the occasional database entry (though they get annoying sometimes when I want to check my map and not read the database since both use the select button for ps3). The Subject 16 videos also are interesting. SPOILER: however I hope that Assassin's Creed doesn't go too much into the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull territory...Its breaking away from historical fiction and going more into sci-fi...which I enjoy reading but its kinda inducing a culture shock on the story and making it kind of a bummer if its not done well in the future.
Music:
I personally loved the Florence background music and am trying to find where I can download it atm lol. The rest of the music is very well done as well such as venice etc. But Florence is my personal fav (enjoy the beginning since you start in florence).
Graphics:
For the most part they are pretty solid, not quite as incredible as other games i've seen but i'll compromise for the lack of loading times for the most part (other than switching towns, desynchronizing, and next missions). They are still very nice to look at and I like the day to night transitions you can witness throughout your play. The Movie sequences also aren't totally top grade but are still pretty nice...and having the story actually matter kind of compensates since you are busy listening to the story and watching it unfold instead of needing huge explosions every 5 seconds to keep you playing the game. (There are still quite alot of explosions though lol).
Platforming:
The platforming is incredibly smooth for most of the game, but there is 1 spot in particular that was almost impossible to get through which I'll explain after this. Other than that one spot Ezio does do some retarted stuff from time to time but for the most part you can counter it by just getting alot better at exaggerating directions on your analogue sticks. In general, much better than Assassin's Creed I.
SPOILER DON'T READ IF YOU CARE: There will be a time when Desmond slips into his ancestor's memories without the animus and when you have to scale a tower at the end of this short sequence, you have to jump from a balcony to a post with a light on it that is directly in the middle and perpendicular to the balcony. I spent countless times jumping back and forth from one edge of the balcony to the other, while trying to adjust the angle of the jump to just about every part of the balcony ledge...that or falling to my death and having to start the whole sequence over again. Suffice to say I finally got through it by a fluke, died because of more retarted programming, and finally got to the top of the tower after a few more tries and multiple curses.
Renovation Mini-game:
I LOVED the renovation of the Auditore Villa which reminded me of the Skies of Arcadia (old dreamcast/gamecube game) pirate base renovation which was really fun as well. You earn money via pickpocketing, treasure hunting, questing, etc. and you can invest in re-opening or improving the villa's businesses such as: blacksmith, tailor, doctor, art dealer, Prostitutes, Thieves Guild, Barracks, Well, etc. When you upgrade these buildings you not only increase the value of the town (which gives you residual income every 20 minutes) but they also unlock additional treasure locations you can only reach after renovating the building. Also the villa evolves through the years and % renovated which is fun to see. All of your weapons and armor can also be put on display (automatically) when you buy / earn them which also leads to increasing the value of your villa and how much money you earn as a result. After a while you dont even need to pickpocket/treasure hunt anymore unless you want to because you are earning a couple thousand every 20 mins (at 100% house renovated you earn 15k every 20 mins). I ended up having around 600k gold from mid game until the end...I enjoy randomly sprinting around venice and florence while spamming throw gold to all the poor peasants and watching them scramble for it lol. (BTW throwing 300 florens to the townsfolk is another achievement lol).
Treasure Hunting:
Great for early game income and helping to renovate your villa...but becomes very repetitive and useless when you already have 100k+ gold you'll never be able to spend. Theres not even an achievement for getting all 330 treasure chests...I still did it just to clear my map for treasure boxes everywhere and b/c i'm a completionist / badge whore. But If you dont want to spend hours not doing the storyline just to get 200-500 gold (rarely more) then don't bother past Florence.
Races, Beat-up, Assassination:
Fun early on...but annoying / repetitive later. Races are cool ideas and help you learn to platform quickly, but gets annoying quickly when a badly timed guard stones you, or you jump off a building instead of up it...despite you telling the controller to go up. They aren't bad once you notice the next spot is on the mini-map and you stop trying to spot them by manually looking for them. Beat-up quests are basically carbon copied but with different looking unfaithful husbands to beat up...Just once i'd like to just have a fist fight for bragging rights or something...There is something similar during the Carnivale Festival in Venice...but its a jokingly easy. After I did the first 4 assassination quests in florence I just moved on since they were basically the same. I finished them later after I beat the game...just because I needed something to do while I wait for Assassin's Creed Brotherhood to come out lol.
Additional DLC / UPLAY:
There are some additional DLCs for a few more missions you can do outside of the normal storyline, and you can unlock the Auditore Family Crypt at your Villa for free once you unlock enough Upoints by playing through the game. You can also use uplay points you earn throughout the game to upgrade how many throwing knives you have maximum, get an altair costume you can turn on/off, and the assassin's creed 2 uplay theme for ps3 (not sure if xbox has something similar). Uplay stuff adds about 10-15 mins more of game play, but its free and has some nice background lore to it. The DLCs I might buy in the next few days since I need to kill time for Brotherhood to come out, but I've heard in general positive things about them (The forli DLC sounds cool since you can freely use the Da'Vinci Flying machine =D).
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Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2010
Platform For Display: PlayStation 3Edition: StandardVerified Purchase
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2009
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