Saturday Morning Gaming: Deeper into Assassin’s Creed 2
There are a lot of games that don’t hold up.
Some of them are due to technical contraints that games had in the past that just don’t apply anymore… like, for example, point and click games. I don’t think that I could go back and finish a game like Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle now. (I keep thinking that I should go back and beat The Secret of Monkey Island but… dang. That interface works a *LOT* differently in 2024 than it did in 1990.)
So it was with light trepidation that I started to play Assassin’s Creed 2: The Ezio Collection. I remember *LOVING* Assassin’s Creed back in 2007 and thinking that Assassin’s Creed 2 fixed a lot of the stuff that was clunky from the first one… but, hey. It’s been a while.
So I booted it up on my Playstation and started getting back into it. Okay, yeah. There’s a lot of parkour where you’re running across roofs or bouchot poles or fences or whathaveyou. You’re doing a lot of free climbing various buildings to get up to various vantage points. You’re assassinating your various targets while running around Renaissance Italy and saying “holy cow, that’s the Basilica di San Lorenzo!” or “holy cow, that’s the Torre del Diavolo!”
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(Eagle-eyed viewers will see that I’m wearing the Auditore Cape in that shot.)
I’m pleased to say that the gameplay holds up. The combat is clunky when compared to the absolutely sublime Arkham series but, once I got past the fact that the combat isn’t downright perfect, I was delighted to find that the game is still good and the story is still intriguing. The parkour is a fun little test of dexterity and it’s satisfying when you get it right… and frustrating as heck when you are off by 5 degrees and jump to your death (or, more precisely, your desynchronization). I remember thinking that Prince of Persia’s climbing was better, but the story behind Assassin’s Creed was more engaging by leaps and bounds.
You’re Desmond. You’re just this guy who happens to be the descendant of multiple famous assassins throughout history and you’ve been entangled into this massive conspiracy and your team of helpers plugs you into this genetic memory machine that allows you to go back and relive the memories of your ancestors. The first game involved you going back and reliving part of the Third Crusade. In this one, you’re reliving the memories of Ezio Auditore and you’re smack dab in the middle of all of the various political machinations going on in Italy between 1476 to 1499 and so you’re running around shanking members of the Pazzi family and the Barbarigo family and witnessing major events like The Bonfire of the Vanities and doing what you can to Forrest Gump your way through the period.
I found myself thinking stuff like “where the heck did *THIS* guy come from?” a couple of times, thinking that it was bad form to just throw a new character into the fifth act but, no… it turns out that history is like that sometimes… sometimes Girolamo Savonarola comes out of nowhere and people just start burning paintings.
You make friends with Leonard da Vinci and hang around his workshop in Florence and help him during the fifteen minutes that he works in Venice and you fly one of his dohickeys to help you take out one of the Grimaldis (a made-up one, just for the story… probably trying to avoid lawsuits) and the story ends with you establishing that Rodrigo Borgia is going to be your nemesis for the series. (Rodrigo was very much a real person and, given all the stories about him, it makes sense that he’d be the overarching bad guy and the only people who’d be bringing a lawsuit are the same people who wouldn’t want to effectively provide free advertising for the game).
I’ve beaten the first game in the collection and am now wandering around Rome in the first of the sequels and boggling at how much they improved between these two games.
Fast travel has gone from this:
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to this:
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And when it comes to upgrading shops, you go from just upgrading your villa:
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To upgrading *EVERY* shop in the city:
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(Note: You have to walk up to each individual shop shown on that map to upgrade it.)
On top of that, they really start to explore the relationship of Desmond to the larger conspiracy in this game. Like, you can get out of the Animus and read your email:
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I even find myself wondering if I shouldn’t dig up my Assassin’s Creed 3 and 4 games from the back catalogue and see how they’re doing.
All in all, I find myself downright *THRILLED* with this collection of games from 15 years ago. Hey… they hold up.
So… what are you playing?
(Screenshot is a picture of me right before I go visit Lucretia Borgia. All screenshots taken by the author.)
I would love to hear how you think AC 4 holds up.
That game was such a good time.Report
From what I recall, Assassin’s Creed 3 was a bit of a drag because they seriously leaned away from the whole overarching global conspiracy thing and leaned into wanting to give mini-sermons about America.
But maybe, if I were Italian, I’d feel the same way about Assassin’s Creed 2. “Alexander VI wasn’t *THAT* bad! Most of those stories were from his enemies!”
Assassin’s Creed 4, however, has nothing but awesome memories. Cannons! Forts! Sea shanties!
Yeah, I’ll probably dig them out.Report
I played through the whole series for the first time back in 2021-22, and I think they held up…well…well enough for me to play through the whole series. Even the black sheep like Unity and Syndicate were pretty good. The first one was the only one that felt like a bit of a slog.
Didn’t care much for the management mini-games, which felt like a bit of a chore. For me, the appeal of AC is exploration, stealth, and (if you screw up the stealth) combat, not menu-based mobile games.Report
“Menu-based mobile games”
Holy cow. That’s exactly what these things are. But they’re that in 2010. Before we even had them.
In any case, in Brotherhood, I’ve just unlocked hiring assassins and, holy cow, these guys are needy.Report
Back in the mid 90s, when Sierra was having its last hurrah, I got King’s Quest VII. It was no King’s Quest VI, but IMO it’s better than its reputation. I especially liked the background design. There was one particular area, the forest area at the bottom of this map, that really captured my imagination, especially the scene with the maiden statues.
A few years ago, I replayed it, and thought I might enjoy an open-world game with environments like that. So I got to wondering if there was an open-world game set in Ancient Greece. Sure enough, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey had been released a year or two earlier, and that’s how I got into the AC series. I liked Odyssey a lot, but it wasn’t quite what I had been looking for. It was (mostly) a realistic, or at least realistic-looking depiction of ancient Greece. What I had really wanted was kind of a cartoonish, fantasy version rooted in Greek Mythology.
And then like a year later Ubisoft made that game, too, and it was great! Immortals: Fenyx Rising was exactly what I had been looking for: A cartoonish, fantasy version of ancient Greece, full of marble statues, pink-leafed trees (well, in one area), and minotaurs, all narrated vaudeville-style by Zeus and Prometheus. I didn’t know that I wanted that last part, but it turns out that I did.
It’s clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild, which I still haven’t played, so I can’t compare and contrast, but in addition to the standard Ubisoft open-world formula, it has a bunch of environmental puzzles both out in the open world and in self-contained underworld areas. The puzzles were a bit easy, IMO, but there’s a whole DLC full of harder puzzles. The approach they took to DLC was interesting. Instead of just doing more of the same, they had three very different DLCs:
1. Oops! All Puzzles!
2. Chinese knock-off.
3. Top-down brawler.
Overall, I don’t think the DLCs lived up to the standard set by the base game, but it was a pretty high bar. They were all right.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have sold well enough for a sequel in a high-interest-rate environment; the sequel was a casualty of Ubisoft’s decision to focus on its core properties.Report
Steam has it for 80% off!Report
Mixed reviews. Seems like people like the game but hate the launcher.
I didn’t love the launcher. But I only remember the game.
I also remember a lot of people complaining about the wall of separation between base game and DLC. It’s not like Fallout or the Witcher, where you can find gear in the DLC and bring it back to the main game. You play the base game, and then you play the DLC, and you don’t get any “rewards” for beating the DLC.
I guess I get it, but it doesn’t really bother me. The journey is the reward.Report
There are new versions of the first 2 Monkey Island games. I think they are faithful to the originals, but with better UI and updated graphics. If you do want to check them out, that might be the best way to do it.
I finished Shin Megami Tensei V yesterday. I got the Order ending, which is the side of God and the angels, but it’s not necessarily a “good” ending. I guess it depends on how you feel about free will. I have an unfinished game of SMT III sitting on my 2DS. I will probably try to get that one finished before too long.
With SMT V done, I am checking out the current Season of Diablo IV for a bit before I get back to Elden Ring. I wanted to play something mindless for a bit, and I heard positive things about the season.Report