4/5 ★ – Manic_Zucc's review of Assassin's Creed II.

Part 2 of my first time playing the Assassin’s Creed series. Right from the get go you can tell how much better this one is than the first game. While I found Altair in the first game to be a fairly bland protagonist, we are immediately made to like Ezio thanks to the excellent character writing and voice acting present from the first scene. Ezio’s goal of getting revenge against those who killed his family is much more relatable and humanizing than Altair’s goal was. A better story is all well and good, but it doesn’t matter if the game isn’t fun. My biggest complaint with the first game was that you’ve basically done everything there is to go in the first two hours and you simply repeat that over and over again for hours and hours. Assassin’s Creed 2 is far better at providing variety. The side missions have more variety to them (and are entirely optional instead of being forced into the main story for the sake of padding), the combat is more engaging as different enemy types are more vulnerable to different forms of combat, parkour is quicker and more versatile, and different tools like the poisoned blade or smoke bombs lend far more options for kills or stealth. I do still have some complaints. Requiring all 30 of the codex pages to access the final chapter of the story felt like padding, especially when they are all hidden in the exact same way. The parkour controls are improved but still not perfect and you’ll sometimes find yourself running up a wall or jumping from a roof when you weren’t trying to. The assassin’s tombs were also a fun idea but sadly the camera had a tendency to be much more finicky there than in the rest of the game (which wouldn’t bother me if most of the tombs weren’t timed parkour challenges). I was a bit nervous when I made the commitment to play through the early AC games because the first game was a bit rough, but Assassin’s Creed 2 has definitely made me much more willing to keep going and see where Ezio and Desmond’s story goes.