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| Ezio Auditore de Firenze on top of a church in Venice. |
The game, like its predecessor Assassin’s Creed, has a framing device and a main story. In the framing device, Desmond Miles is using a machine called an Animus to quickly learn how to become an assassin by experiencing the lives of his ancestor, so he can help defeat the evil Templars. In the main game, which takes place during the Italian Renaissance, Desmond’s ancestor Ezio Auditore de Firenze’s family is wrongly accused and executed, prompting Ezio to locate the Templar conspirators responsible and murder them one by one using, his newly acquired assassin equipment.
There are two ways to assassinate a target. One way is to sneak around where the target is located, find a hiding spot, and kill the target quickly and quietly with the blade hidden up his sleeve, hopefully without attracting any guards. Or Ezio can run in, fight all the guards with his sword, and kill his target, if the target has not run away by then. The second way requires less thought, but it can take longer, the target can escape, and it feels a lot more satisfying to plan a silent kill.
When spotted by the guards Ezio can fight off the guards or hide. Fighting the guards is easy, but can become boring at times. Hiding takes less time, but sometimes it is hard to lose the guards, and every so often the guards will check his hiding places, like on benches or in haystacks.
One of Assassin’s Creed II’s biggest selling points is his ability to stealthily assassinate people in a variety of ways, thanks to his amazing prowess at climbing and running over rooftops, which never gets old. From the rooftops Ezio can quickly cross cities, evade guards, and take out archers and other targets from a distance without being noticed.
The visual design on the game is beautiful. Over the course of the game Ezio visits Florence, San Gimignano, Forli, and Venice. While the developers of the game could not know exactly what those cities looked like in the 15th century, they worked hard to make the cities look as distinct and real as possible. All the cities are memorable in their design, from San Gimignano’s many towers to Forli’s swampland.
There are several side missions Ezio can partake in, some more important than others. There are essential ones, like where Ezio has to brake into the tombs of older assassins and collect assassin seals. And there less important ones, like races across the rooftops. The only ones that are really tedious are the actual assassination side missions, because those involve a lot of following people and fighting guards.
Another fun extensive side mission is decorating Ezio’s villa. Ezio gets his own villa and town to renovate early in the game, which he can invest money into, to improve the stores in town, or buy paintings for his villa. Doing so will lead to the stores giving him discounts and to him receiving income that he can pick up from his villa, which he can then use to buy more stuff. Sadly the town can be completed by the time the game is halfway over.
The only real problem with Assassin’s Creed II is that the story and game play suffer a bit in the last third of the game. When Ezio reaches Venice, he stays there for the rest of the game. Before Ezio was travelling to and exploring several cities in Italy. Staying in one city is boring by comparison.
Throughout the game there are hidden puzzles that Ezio has to find, that use codes or various works of art throughout history as clues. For the most part they provide a decent challenge, but the last four are really unfair.
Near the end of the story there is a point where Ezio and his friends do nothing for ten years. The game is trying to be somewhat historically accurate and fit into the timeline of Italian history, but the game was at an urgent moment and the developers should have thought of something more impressive for Ezio to do for a decade than nothing. Anybody who bought Assassin’s Creed II will have to download the extra material online if they want to find out what happened, but it is not fair that the player has to pay for something like that.
The rest of the game’s story is okay. Neither Desmond nor Ezio’s stories are memorable, but it is interesting to learn more about the Templar’s secret history and how they have affected the rest of the world.
Assassin’s Creed II has a few minor problems near the end, but for the most part it is a very fun game.
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