Attention Privates! It's time to continue our review of the Assassins' Creed series! This time we will be covering the second game, aptly titled Assassins' Creed 2, before I get into the meat of the review, let's go over the story.
This story starts off with Abstergo finding the location of the artifact they were using Altair to find in the previous game, and not only that, it is revealed that there are dozens of similar items all over the world and plan to use Desmond to find them all. Desmond escapes Abstergo with the help of Lucy Stillman, an undercover Assassin and they go into hiding with Lucy's group, Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane. It turns out Rebecca has an animus of her own and has Desmond once again delve into the mind of his ancestors, this time with the goal of training him how to be an assassin himself. This time he accesses the memories of an ancestor born in Renaissance Italy, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. As the story progresses Desmond hones his skills with the help of Ezio and the Bleeding Effect, which allows Desmond to learn his skills through living them as Ezio. I could go more into detail about the story but I do not want to spoil anything for those who have yet to play the game. Anyway, let's get into the review.
This game is a true sequel to the first game, not only does it seem to keep what we loved about the first game, but it fixes and enhances the aspects of the game we didn't like so much and includes some new ones. First of all the combat system has been streamlined to include dozens of awesome counter-kill cinematics, which change depending on which weapon you are using. Now in combat you can counter enemies when you have no weapon selected, which disarms the enemy and allows you to use their own weapon against them, this ability helps with the stronger enemies you can't counter. This game introduces a monetary system which works with a shop system to help progress through the game, allowing you to purchase stronger weapons and armor to increase your overall health and combat ability. You can find money by looting chests found throughout the game, pick-pocketing citizens (beware, this increases your awareness), and looting the corpses of dead enemies. You can also make money by purchasing upgrades for the various cities you can explore, allowing more money to flow into the bank for you to retrieve.
The minimap has been updated to make it easier to see where you need to go in main missions as well as the many side missions spread throughout the game. The free-running system has been changed to allow for quicker, more agile movements and the ways you can kill your enemies subtly have become more creative.
Overall this game not only improves on the flaws of the previous game, it enhances the overall feel of the game and ultimately furthered the games success. The story was even more compelling to the point where I beat nearly the whole game in one sitting before I realized it was 3am.
Out of a possible 10 I give this game a solid 10/10 for being a true sequel to an already awesome game.
Thanks for reading and once again feel free to leave a comment down below, and follow us on twitter to give us suggestions on what games to review next as well as to keep up to speed with what we will be doing next!
@SherdnGameCorps
All screenshots posted below are taken from the current generation of consoles-said Rockstar.
