Assassin’s Creed II

(PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
5/5
Of all the things in life that ought to have been good but weren’t – tree houses, Transformers, our visit to Egypt the other year when we ate a pigeon and spent one day thinking we were going to die and two wishing we had – Assassin’s Creed was one of the most befuddling. A combination of parkour roof-running action and stealthy throat-cutting, the Crusades-era, Middle East-based actioner ought to have been brilliant. But repetitive gameplay, an unconvincing sci-fi element (the player is controlling Desmond in the year 2012, who is himself controlling his ancestors via their memories that have been encoded in his DNA) and dodgy AI pretty much put paid to that. It was like playing an early, incomplete demo of a much better game.

Thankfully, two years have made all the difference to Assassin’s Creed II, which not only sports a sexy new location – Renaissance Italy, complete with velvet caps and swarthy rogues – but also a complete overhaul of pretty much everything. The AI, for example: guards are no longer foxed by your clever technique of just jumping in hay bales right in front of their eyes, nor do they now get stuck behind walls or run off down the wrong alleys like confused geriatrics.

The missions, too, have been improved, with more varied objectives tied together by a stronger storyline of familial vengeance and political intrigue. Desmond’s historical avatar this time around is Ezio, the playboy son of a Florentine politician who quickly becomes a Ren-faire Batman after failing to stop a family tragedy. His induction into the underground war between the good-guy Assassins and the evil Templars simultaneously acts as a game tutorial, an introduction to Renaissance Italy (yes, there’s genuine educational value here) and an entertaining depiction of Ezio’s moral descent.

The game even manages to successfully weave the Michael Crichton-esque sci-fi gubbins with the historical elements, as Desmond discovers digital data files that have been imprinted on the past by a prior time-traveller, hinting at a huge, centuries-spanning global conspiracy and a threat to planet Earth itself. It’s all ludicrously OTT but works brilliantly, and does a better job of making us excited about the larger, game-spanning arc story than its predecessor did.

Frankly, the only bad thing about Assassin’s Creed II (aside from an inexplicable – and awful – acting job by comedic writer Danny Wallace) is that to fully appreciate the more complex elements of the story you’ll need to have a working knowledge of the first, deeply inferior game. We’d recommend skim-reading the plot summary on Wikipedia then picking up this little gem.
Available in stores.