Assassin’s Creed II is a 2009 action-adventure video game developed and published by Ubisoft. It is the second major instalment in the Assassin’s Creed series, the first chapter in the Ezio trilogy, and the game that more or less solidified the franchise. The game was released on November 17th, 2009, and met with huge commercial success and critical acclaim. Several minor game-related features could be redeemed, including 3 downloadable expansions and spin-off games like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

Pros:

This game is amazing. It has some of the best freerunning mechanics I have ever had the pleasure of using in a video game, even better than mirrors edge or uncharted. Though it might be a bit cheesy when your character kind of self-corrects your movement, it’s usually what you were intending to do anyway. So you rarely have that frustrating death because you were controller command just a hair off of your target. Some training missions are a bit on the hand holding side, but they are needed and if you put the game down for a while you can always revisit the combat ring and get your fighting chops back up to par. Which is great because the in-depth combat system can get pretty awesome when you are on it. The map is also great for being able to come back to after a hiatus (something I could never do with older games). You can discover more of the various cities, by exploring, reaching the lookout points at the top of high buildings and buying map upgrades to help you find treasures and such. I often found myself enjoyably killing time just climbing and jump around these amazing maps with historically accurate buildings and features. There is even a little pop-up menu that comes up time to time where it gives you some extra info about the building you are climbing on and such. The game has a lot of great content, drastically varied and enjoyable missions, and even some pretty great character development. There are also A ton of side missions like assassination contracts, races and even some fun free-roaming treasure hunting/random encounters. You can upgrade weapons, armour, customize your clothing, even your home and town, which I found quite enjoyable.

Here are some fun easter eggs

Cons:

A young Leonardo da Vichy being your “tech” guy is pretty corny, but kind of fun in a cute way I guess. In group fight, many of your enemies will just stand there waiting for you to kill their friends before attacking one by one. The future storyline is light as best, sometimes you flat out forget that there even was a future. You only really revisit it from time to time to kind of remind you that its there and let you skip several years in the actual storyline set in the past. They sometimes narrate you along, but when they do, it’s really not necessary. Though the main storyline is not bad, I kind of feel it’s the weakest part of this game. There a lot of religious undertones, which makes total sense for the setting of Renaissance Italy, but it gets very Magical/SciFi towards the end. I didn’t mind running around collecting artefacts and discovering this kind of shadow conspiracy around the classic Bible stories of Adam & Eve and such, but to have the final battle be an ageing pope with magical powers… come on. I guess they had to build it up to some kind of grand finale, but there wasn’t any “magic” earlier in the game, so it seriously felt a bit out of left field. I guess you could argue that it was part of the bigger picture and what tied the situations to what was happening in the future with the stuff that was happening in the past, but I think I would have been just as happy to have just had a fun assassin game set in Renaissance Italy. That was the real game after all.