Assassin’s Creed II is about Desmond, this time he steps inside the shoes of Ezio, an Italian assassin. Here is our Assassin’s Creed II Review.
The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft, it was released on November 17, 2009, for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. It also got released alongside Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed Revelations in the Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection on November 15, 2016, this is also the version of the game we used to review it.
Desmond is back, but with a hectic start, he escapes the claws of Abstergo together with Lucy and gets settled in a new location, here he also jumps back into the animus, but also a new person. This time he experiences the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze a young guy who doesn’t even know about the Assassins yet. During your story, you get some setbacks that set you on your adventure to become a master assassin.
Pretty quickly you meet some people who put you in the right direction and cripple the Templars who are looking for the Apple of Eden. There are some codex pages from Altair that give you upgrades and send you to special locations around the world, but 1 specific area is of note for the end game. While the story is pretty old now, it still is as much fun as it was when it was first released, and with the inclusion of all the DLC, some parts of the story might not be known to people who only played the main game back in the day.
The gameplay loop is a lot better than it was in the 1st game, there you did the same 3 things over and over again making it pretty boring, but here, they perfectly balance all the gameplay so you dont do too much of the same after one another and have a pretty good amount of time in between the type of missions, especially the more dreadful ones. The climbing can at times still feel a tiny bit stiff, but that has improved a lot over the 1st game as well. The combat feels great, but also a bit harder than the 1st game, this might be due to more types of enemies that are walking around now and that there is an actual health system. But the counter is still the best move to get through enemies quickly.
They also added a currency system that works with building up your hometown with upgrades and by buying up paintings, weapons, and more. This system makes making money a lot more fun and became a focus for me right away to get the most money as quickly as possible. I did have to skip a bit of the weapon and gear upgrades due to it, but when I started making money and bought all the gear upgrades with it, I became more unstoppable than before.
Visually, the game didn’t age that well, with the upgrades they added to the visuals, the nature and clothing look a ton better, but the faces are now just offputting and weird the majority of the time. Going over the city streets across the rooftops feels great with the updated visuals, you wouldn’t notice the bad things 90% of the time, but in cutscenes they really make the game feel like a drop in quality.
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