I’ve just completed my second Assassin’s Creed game, ever. Hot on the heels of the first AC, I can honestly say, with a little bit of trepidation, that I really enjoyed it. That’s saying a lot, because I hated the first one. It’s clear that way back when Ubisoft was making this game, they took a lot of the criticisms to heart, because some of the worst parts of Assassin’s Creed were scrapped, including those god-awful canned battle animations that would stick you in a knock-down loop. The game was given an actual story this time around, with NPC’s that actually displayed some kind of personality.
It’s also easy to understand why Ezio was/is the most popular character. He’s very charismatic and even though the game never really allows him to show his playful side (that we get a glimpse of at the very beginning) it’s not hard to imagine him cutting loose and partying. He’s a likeable dude. The story is full of intrigue and mystery, and hey, I was even given some answers this time around! Granted, the reveal that the Gods were a race of extremely advanced beings that pre-dated humans isn’t the most original twist ever (it sounds really familiar to any Stargate SG-1 fan), it’s still a fun idea, and I’m interested to see where they go with it.
While the game was pretty good, it still had a lot of problems. First, the pacing was really weird. The game starts off in two large cities that you spend a lot of time in. Then you completely gloss over Forli. Like, literally. You don’t even have to go into the town if you don’t want to. Ezio is stopped at the dock with Leonardo and told he can’t go to Venice without a pass, and the mission to get the pass is literally 50 yards away and takes 30 seconds to complete. Done. Now you can leave Forli and spend the rest of the game in Venice, which is fuggin’ huge.
I am aware that there are DLC chapters that make up the missing time between Sequence 11 and Sequence 14, and they take you back to Forli for actual stuff to do, but it’s not part of the game proper so I’m not going to count it.
Anyways, back to Venice. I groaned a bit when I saw it. By this point I had put a lot of time into completing and revealing the other cities in the game, and seeing the breadth of Venezia was a bit bewildering. I was already getting a bit of AssCreed fatigue by this point. You can only hop on posts and climb up buildings for so long. On top of that, the missions started to become unnecessarily complicated, to the point where you’re just doing activities for activity’s sake. It was filler, is what I’m trying to say.
Competing in the different activities during Carnavale in order to win the golden mask was fluff. Escorting Antonio’s men to the different ambush points was pointless (they’re thieves that live in Venice, I’m pretty sure they know they area.) Several other missions, such as tailing a courier as he runs, hops, climbs, jumps, and meanders his way about the city were also tedious and annoying. The guy apparently doesn’t know he’s being followed, why the elaborate route, other than to just make me do what I’ve been doing 99% of the time yet again?
The platforming puzzles in the assassin tombs were good and varied enough, and I think I would’ve enjoyed them a lot more if, again, the entire game isn’t made up of exactly the thing they’re asking you to do. The core element of the game is running and climbing and jumping, and when all the puzzles and side missions are more running and climbing and jumping, it wears on a guy. But I have to give a little credit, the assassin tombs were cool, and I can see where they might have influenced a certain other popular series *coughTombRaidercough* to have their own optional puzzle areas.
In all, I enjoyed the game, despite it’s wonky pacing and reliance on “free running.” I do have one big, major gripe though, and while it doesn’t affect the game in any way, it’s something that kept taking me out of it because it’s such a weird and gigantic (i.e. “lazy”) oversight. The game apparently takes place over the span of ten years. Ezio himself even mentions this toward the end of the game. So how in the blue hell are he and his family stuck in a fucking time lock for the entirety of the game? Claudia sits in the same chair, wearing the same outift, looking the exact same age, for the duration of the game. Ezio’s mother is apparently in a perpetual state of shock, kneeling at her bedside, for ten fucking years? That’s a decade, people! Claudia and Ezio’s mother have literally not had a change of clothes for a decade. In fact, nothing really changes at all over the course of the game, and if it weren’t for the year changing every time you complete a sequence, there would be no indication time has passed at all. Even the improvements made to the Villa are instantaneous, so that example of progress is thrown out the window right there.
Also, in some sequences, even though a year has passed, the conversation topics pick up right where they left off. Did Ezio really wait a year to talk to Leonardo about what just happened? Or are we to believe that we are experiencing not only time jumps, but also the real-time events playing out at an accelerated rate? Did the mission that only took 15 minutes for us to complete actually take Ezio six months? We don’t know because they didn’t think to explain that to us.
So thanks, for that, Ubisoft. Here’s to hoping you’ll consider the actual timeline of events a little more carefully in the next game.
