Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’m not sure what possessed me to buy this game. It must have been a moment of weakness during one of the many sales on Steam and I was curious about the development story despite all of the bad things I’d heard about the game. Despite being many years behind the curve, here are my observations for what they are worth:

• The story is truly atrocious. As far as I can tell, the writers were forced to work around real-life historical events but this has the result that the opening moments of this game undoes almost everything that Ezio Auditore accomplished at the end of the last game. After spending so much effort acquiring the Piece of Eden in the last game and sparing Rodrigo Borgia, you lose it at the beginning of this game. So you spend all your time recovering it while fighting off the forces of Rodrigo’s son Cesare. And don’t even talk to me about the weird gap at the end between Ezio’s victory in Rome and his final confrontation with Cesare Borgia in Viana, Spain, no doubt to conform with historical events. And yeah, yeah, big spoiler, I didn’t like the fate of Lucy Stillman at the end either.

• Since this is basically AC2.5, the gameplay is pretty much identical with the second game in most respects. Ezio is now deadlier than ever thanks to kill streaks. Maybe to balance it out, multiple enemies can attack you at the same time so you won’t see ten enemies surrounding you each taking turns to attack. They’re good changes, but ever since I played the Batman games, I’m pretty down on the AC combat system. It’s just so dependent on special kill animations that there’s no point in doing basic attacks. You’re almost always doing a counter kill, a disarm kill or a streak kill.
• If anything, I think Ezio’s arsenal is a bit too big at this point. The crossbow for example is ridiculously overpowered, given the relatively large amount of ammunition you can carry for it. It makes stealth kills too easy. Similarly there are lots of weapons with different stats, but given that most kills come from special attacks, it isn’t clear what difference those stats make. I think many players simply choose weapons based on which animations they like.

• Climbing is pretty challenging in this game, requiring backtracking and dropping down. I remembered them being really easy in previous installments. I especially liked how forcing you to climb truly massive structures made climbing much harder because there are so many places to search for footholds. Puzzles seem harder too. I guess these are good changes. Item collecting is easier with the ability to buy maps. The Desmond sequences were uniformly pretty bad as everyone says. I really expected them to do more and do different things with the modern setting.
• The exciting new stuff are recruiting assassins to the brotherhood and buying and investing in shops in Rome. They’re pretty cool, if shallow, systems and at least the shops make for nice moneysinks, even if it doesn’t make much sense why the assassins are buying up monuments right and left. Actually using the recruits in combat makes fights too easy however, since the ability recharges rather quickly. On the hand achieving the optional objective to get 100% sync can pretty tough in some missions, unfairly so in some cases. I guess it the balance evens out depending on how much you want yourself challenged.
• Unlike previous games, this game is only set in Rome, except for excursions to other places for specific missions. While it feels good to travel around the historical spots, staying in the same city for the entire game does get boring. The city doesn’t even undergo any interesting changes later, as when Venice changed during carnival. The countryside is downright annoying to get around in, thanks to numerous cliffs that are just too high to climb. I do note that the rooftop highway doesn’t seem to work as well in Rome as in other cities, due to the wide boulevards, forcing you to frequently drop to street level to get around.

• The Leonardo da Vinci weapons of war missions make for interesting diversions, but feel too implausible and gimmicky for me to really enjoy them. I also hate how completely disconnected these missions feel. How come it never occurs to Ezio to try to use these incredible contraptions in his fight against the Borgia? The good thing about these though is that they’re all stealth missions, at least for the first portion of each of these missions, you can’t just fight your way through them.
• I really didn’t like how little respect the designers seem to have for the gamer’s time. For example the map will frequently show the locations of various objectives even if they are locked until a certain point in the game. So you can see a viewpoint on the map, follow it to find an aqueduct, waste time trying to climb it only to discover that it is unclimbable until it is renovated and finally realize that you can’t renovate it until you take down the Borgia tower nearby and that tower is locked behind a plot-controlled force field. Similarly, in a mission you can elect to restart a mission from the very beginning but you can’t voluntarily restart from the last checkpoint. If you want to do that, your only option is to get yourself killed. There are many other such annoyances including the difficulty and sometimes impossibility of skipping cutscenes, and the distance you need to travel between the place where you get a mission and where you actually get to start doing something.

Overall I found this to be a pretty mediocre game. The basic gameplay was sound enough for the first two games but too little has changed to make it still gripping now. I also dislike the poor quality of the writing here and the total lack of any interesting new characters. You save Caterina Sforza in this game and then she disappears without ever being seen again, even after you take down the Borgias. Ezio is unaccountably rude to his sister Claudia, surprised to see that she is actually competent and inducts her into the order, but then she does nothing else. It had a good run but I think I won’t be coming back to it, especially since I went to the wiki and spoiled myself on what happens in subsequent games.