2/5 ★ – Altair57's review of Assassin's Creed II.

This game has aged terribly. It mostly doesn't respect the player's time, it's super repetitive and grows stale very quickly. Mission design is poor, all missions are shallow and almost always turn into mindless button mashing in needlessly long skirmishes or trailing someone and then killing them in the same fashion. The mandatory DLC in the Ezio Collection derail the already bad story pacing and momentum even more and are just terrible. Lots of baffling design decisions regarding gameplay. Enemies that are dying (during their stealth kill animation) can "detect" you and cause you to fail missions. Armored enemies can parkour just as good as Ezio and are faster at sprinting than him. Some mission come up with completely arbitrary and illogical rules like "kill X target while undetected" when during some of the story missions it's fine to kill the target however you want despite the circumstances would suggest otherwise. No, this time all guards are telepathically connected (or Ezio will suffer a stroke when detected?) and you have to stay undetected or else. There are tons and tons of guards everywhere in the cities to the point that there are surely more guards than citizens. There are also way too many guards on rooftops that make rooftop parkour tedious. Combat has got to be the worst part of the game easily I think. Mindless button mashing or counter fishing. That's it. It never evolves past that and it never gets better. Mid game and late game has you fighting hordes of enemies and it's mindnumbingly boring. I wouldn't recommend revisiting this game and it's best to leave it as a good memory.