NIDZUMI+

Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about flags.

Admittedly, this at first seems like an unabashed admittance of insanity, but bear with me. Flags feature prominently in many games, from the CTF modes of popular multiplayer shooters, to the Japanese obsession with whirling them around, sometimes during combat. But it was Assassin’s Creed that really got my attention when it came to bits of fabric flapping off a metal pole. I gave up on them eventually, but the lack of a full thousand gamerscore haunts me even now.

Around the time of the game’s release, I was thinking about getting back into console gaming. In the previous generation of plastic boxes that ruled my bedroom, I was a Nintendo devotee to the bone, and would only touch a Sony or Microsoft controller if at somebody else’s house during a hot-seat gaming session, a common occurrence during the fiscally-deprived age bracket of the early teen years of my life.

But when I finally gave in and purchased an Xbox, mainly due to a free copy of Halo 3 I’d received two months prior as a reward for playing on the IMAX screen at the game’s première event, the first game I actually bought told the tale of the adventurous, strapping young lad called Altair who ran around playing Spiderman and stabbing people with knives where his web-canister should be.

Transformation is most definitely the overall theme of the sequel

It was an incredible game, graphically, and the narrative was something Dan Brown could only hope to achieve, its pseudo-historical take on the ever-popular twist-a-minute thriller a brilliant change to the endless trudge of Master Chief and the 1.5 million other Master Chiefs online that week. But repetitive gameplay and a shoddy camera let the experience down somewhat, with promises from Ubisoft Montreal that things would be better, more refined, next time around.

They weren’t wrong.

Let me put it simply – Assassin’s Creed 2 doesn’t so much take charge of your gaming-time so much as straps you to a chair in the National Portrait Gallery, speakers blaring with Italian folk music, and glues your eyes open. It doesn’t mess around. It’s clear from the offset – a quicktime event involving a baby’s limbs that is far too surreal and hilarious for my attempt at critical literature to do it justice – that Ubisoft Montreal are taking the reins and riding towards the sun rather than the sunset, with action packed into every possible aspect of the title.

The baby in question is one Ezio Auditore de Firenze – a womanising noble’s son living life in the lap of Italian luxury, who has a penchant for romanticism and the odd bit of parkour with his brother. The game allows you to sink into a false sense of security, this time around. There’s no betrayal from the off, and everything seems rosy.

Then, in true return to form, everything goes to shit.

I won’t spoil the events for you, unlike Eurogamer, IGN and the other journalists who saw fit to divulge a plot point two hours into the narrative. It’s harsh, shocking, and – unlike that level in Modern Warfare 2 – actually serves a purpose in transforming Ezio from a horny twenty-something into a cold, calculating killer of a man driven by vengeance.

Transformation is most definitely the overall theme of the sequel – the game follows Ezio over almost thirty years of his life, each mission around two years apart and set in various areas of Italy. His eyes darken, his scar deepens, and he eventually grows a beard. While these small changes may be of little consequence to those primarily concerned with how much “interaction” they’ll be seeing with the courtesans standing flirtatiously on every street corner, they serve to enhance Ezio as a counterpoint to Desmond, his real-world counterpart living the memory of his ancestor (yet another assassin, as a waiter would’ve been a slightly awkward disappointment) in a mere few days.

Desmond is also far more fleshed out this time around. What was once a man who simply walked from his bed to the Animus and back, occasionally nagging the secretary and stealing pens like an overactive insurance salesman, he is now in need of the skills he practises, using the reinvented Animus 2.0 (see what they did there?) to allow him to absorb the skills of his distant grandfather.

The once boring character, Desmond is also far more fleshed out this time around.

The game deals more deeply with the psychological consequences of living through somebody else, mind, body and soul for extended periods of time. Glitches in Italy in the form of glyphs – symbols hidden on buildings, only revealed with the inspired Eagle Vision mechanic – reveal twenty pieces of a video titled “the truth.” Hidden behind puzzles, codes and riddles, putting it together is almost a separate game in itself. The videos are the efforts of Subject 16, someone who spent far too much time in the digital realm and cracked. Considering Desmond is only Subject 18, it goes to show he’s never too far from the dangers of psychological meltdown himself, reflected in his dialogue and occasional sojourns into the real world throughout the narrative.

Where there was one game before, there are now three. The main body of the game – assassinations, beating up cheating husbands, and racing around rooftops – comprises the meat of the experience. The conspiracy remarked on above represents the second, but it’s the third that really does Ubisoft Montreal justice in their efforts to combine what they’ve learned over the past few years into one, beautifully blended artistic experience.

Scattered around Italy are the tombs of former assassins, whose coffins contain items you’ll need to attain a few attractive goals of your own. Cue six fantastic acrobatic sequences stretched over famous cathedrals, abandoned sewers and guard warehouses. Allowing you to hone your skills and building on the climb-attain-win rush they introduced to their catalogue with the Marmite-experience Prince of Persia, it’s a nice change from charging around city rooftops, usually ruined every forty seconds by a guard with a bow and an inferiority complex.

The cities and towns themselves are a huge improvement on the previous iterations of the open-world historical experience; each street, river and house intricately placed to allow for many criss-crossing parkour routes though each location. For those who found the horseback excursions between every location extremely monotonous, revolution comes in the form of shops offering a drop-off point at all cities for the small price of a hundred florins, Renaissance Italy’s currency of choice.

Money also comes in handy when distracting guards from your less-than-legal activities.

Historically speaking, currency wasn’t an option in the first title, as a coin over trade was a fiscal appeal yet to be introduced to the populace of the Western world. However, the late fifteenth century brought the start of the banking revolution, and with it, Ezio’s pockets get that little bit heavier. With cash obtained by anything from completing missions to opening chests and even pick-pocketing, the player can upgrade not only his weapons and armour, but even the town surrounding the villa in which he resides, post tragedy-come-eviction from his residence in Florence.

Money also comes in handy when distracting guards from your less-than-legal activities on the streets. By hiring courtesans (or “whores” for the FHM readership), thieves or mercenaries, you can send them towards a pack of guards for a momentary lapse in attention that allows Ezio to slip past unnoticed. Whilst this is great for amusement, using them at the right time, in the right place can make the difference between a twenty-minute fight and a messy kill and an expertly-executed assassination.
Alternatively, you could always toss a hundred florins on the floor. Greed’s a wonderful thing.

Whilst we’re talking about greed, let’s talk rewards and collectibles. This time around, there are no flags to collect, which will be met with disdain by a few people with gamerscores higher than the population of Manhattan and parties in the streets by others. There are a hundred feathers sitting around, and a few statues, but the majority of the achievements and trophies you’ll be raking in will be for simply completing the main story. This encourages the idea that the optional side-missions are just that; optional.

With waves of new features, better graphics, and a stronger narrative, this is definitely a step in the right direction for a franchise that desperately needed a better hook to reel back in those disappointed by the repetitive nature of the first.

And come on. Dual hidden blades.