Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Ok, it’s official. I’m woefully behind the curve when it comes to videogames. I’ve only just finished playing Assassin’s Creed 2, but not only has its sequel Brotherhood been released, even the next game after that Revelations has been announced. My only defense is that Ubisoft has a habit of significantly delaying the release of the PC versions of their games. The PC version of Brotherhood after all was released only last March, some four months after the console versions.

Fortunately one by-product of almost all modern PC games being ports of the console versions is that since the original versions still need to be run on hardware that are now over five years old, there’s no significant difference in graphics between a 2011 game and one released two to three years ago. This means Assassin’s Creed 2 still looks pretty modern and I don’t expect Brotherhood to look much better than it.

My thoughts starting with the good stuff:

• I really liked the first game but at times it felt more like a tech demo (which it was) than a complete game. That’s certainly not the case with this sequel. This is a fully-developed game with tons of content that takes a long time to plow through. It’s really an impressive package.
• Everything about this game is better in every way. The day-night cycle makes the world feel much more immersive. There are more enemy types and they fight in different ways, forcing the player to adapt tactic for each one. Side-activities are no longer generic. Each of them offers unique content and at times the gameplay in them is actually better than that in the main storyline missions. You can also earn and spend money now, so you have more of an inventory of items to manage.

• The rural areas that were so tedious to travel through in the first game is now much more abbreviated in this game and the focus is squarely on the cities. Venice is huge! Plus its canals add an additional layer of complexity to navigating it. It’s also cool that you can buy maps for the treasure chests now and you can refill your health and repair your armor at doctors and blacksmiths at many points throughout the map.
• Social stealth is now much more viable. Not only can you blend into any crowd instead of just the scripted scholars, you can make your own crowd by hiring courtesans. You can also hire thieves who will lure guards away from their posts and mercenaries who will fight for you. If all else fails, you can just throw cash onto the ground and the people around you will grab at the money, creating an instant distraction.
• There are now some pretty huge battles with soldiers from two different sides fighting each other. Sometimes it feels like you’re more of a general than a stealthy assassin but it feels great to look down upon a pitched battle from a high vantage point and decide where to swoop down to the enemy for maximum effect.

Then we move on to the less good stuff:

• It’s still easier to just fight through hordes of guards than to actually use social stealth. Between armor, health upgrades from codex pages and a huge supply of medicine on hand, Ezio Auditore is pretty much invulnerable in combat. Even if tougher enemies like brutes and seekers show up, you only have to switch to disarming mode to get rid of them. One of the side missions has you assassinating like ten brutes within one minute, which just goes to show how much of a combat monster Ezio is.
• The animations are still great and the combat model is enjoyable enough but there’s still too much of the feeling that the enemies are just queuing up to be chopped up by Ezio one by one. There’s no sense of danger at all. I kept wishing that it had combat like Batman: Arkham Asylum.

• Ezio gets a number of new toys throughout the game but I didn’t feel that the game put you into enough interesting situations in which these toys are useful. All I used the vast majority of the time  were the the hidden blades and the sword.
• I’m bewildered at the color palettes they use. The game just looks so grey even when it’s carnival in Venice. It’s not like the engine isn’t capable of looking good. The warm colors used in Monteriggioni makes it the best looking place in the game. Why couldn’t they use more vibrant colors elsewhere?

Finally we move on to the story stuff:

• I really liked how the game likes to open dialogues with a few words or a whole phrase in Italian, with the English translation in brackets in the subtitles, just to add flavor. I have no idea how accurate the pronunciation is of course, but they tried to do all the voice acting with an Italian accent, and it really works. I now have the phrase “requiescat in pace” burned into my brain. Okay, that one is actually a Latin phrase.
• I enjoyed the story a lot more than I thought at first, cheese and all. I especially love how they tied popular conspiracy theories into the war between the Templars and the Assassins throughout history as indicated in the puzzles used in finding out The Truth.
• Ezio Auditore is a great character to play. He starts out as a clueless teenager with no idea of what’s going on and grows into one of the best assassins in the order. Yet he never quite loses his cockiness and his playful eye for women.
• I loved the cameos from historical characters. The buddy relationship between Ezio and Leonardo da Vinci is fantastic. Playing this also led me to realize how little I know of Italian history and I spent a lot of time reading about the Pazzi conspiracy, Caterina Sforza, Rodrigo Borgia etc.

• Unlike the first game, this one takes place across a significant slice of Ezio’s life, from around 1476 to 1500, which I thought was a great touch. It’s too bad that the designers made too little effort to have the different characters look older as time passes. Still, it tacitly implies that Ezio slowly gains his skills over time and that the hunt for the Templars involved more than just what we see on the screen.
• I was surprised by how atheistic the game’s message is. I guess that explains the “please don’t us, religious fundamentalists” disclaimer at the beginning of the game. The game explicitly states that all religions were created for the sole purpose of enslaving the masses. The main antagonist of the game is actually the Pope who outright scorns the idea of believing in God and boasts that he’s just in it for the power. It’s a pretty ballsy turn of the plot.
• The assassins’ maxim “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” seems a lot deeper with that in mind. It’s a call towards individualism and the sanctity of free will. It’s a very libertarian sentiment that seems out of step with mainstream thought of the moment.

I spent a lot of time with this game and enjoyed every moment of it. But at this point I can’t really summon much enthusiasm for the sequels. I’m actually more interested in playing as Desmond now than other assassin from the past and I’m very curious how they would make the assassin abilities work in a world with modern firearms. Even in this game, the really annoying enemies are the archers whose arrows can knock you off walls while you’re climbing and against which you have basically no defense other than closing with them as quickly as possible.

I’ll probably skip Brotherhood and pick up Revelations if it has extensive Desmond parts. As fun as it was to climb guard towers and cathedrals, what I really want to climb now are office buildings and skyscrapers. So get cracking Ubisoft.