Killing in the Name of...
It’s a disappointing world. Even as I write this people are, for example, talking about the X-Factor in a manner that suggests it is possible to care about it, putting on ‘amusing’ fancy dress costumes, or playing Wii Fit with their fat, bucket-faced, pock-marked aunties. For shame.
Shortly, humanity, in all its modern knuckle-dragging, sloping-foreheaded, cud-chewing mass will be clumsily blocking up the pavements and pubs of my life for another night, like obstructive, overamplified zombies. Shirt-wearing, mono-browed idiots will gulp gallons of fatheaded, fizzy-lagered moron-swill, and then attempt to fight, fuck, or fatally bore anyone in sight, before finishing it all off with a kebab. This is Fun: some kind of joylessly inevitable urban cattle-sex massacre.
Mankind’s celebrations of life frequently make me wish they were all dead.
Which is why Assassin’s Creed 2 is, theoretically, A Very Good Thing. After all, what else can brighten up a day of stolid disappointment like a little bit of light, shiny HD murder? And while I’m sure it’s all supposed to be justified by, like, morality, or justice, or saving the world, or some other narrative sop – it is after all a videogame - I frankly couldn’t give a blue stuff about that. Me: knifey-man; You: stabby-puppet; Result: Joy.
Caution: Do Not Hug This Very Stabby Man
Except it isn’t ever that easy. For example, if you turn on this game wanting to lunge blade-first into a splatterpuddle of gory blood-shrapnel, you’re going to be in for a whole other kind of disappointment. Because Assassin’s Creed 2, unlike most of its players, cares about its story. And to demonstrate this, it’s prepared to bore the breath out of you for at least an hour and a half of interminable cut scenes, follow-me-between two-places-of-no-interest ambling, and endless indecipherable twaddle before even beginning to hint at any kind of happy stabby time. Abstergo! Conspiracy! Templars ! Artefacts! Bullshit.
I’m one of the (I suspect) few players who made it all the way through to the underwhelming end of the first game, through grim determination rather than narrative grip. I didn’t particularly care about the story then, and the opening 90 minutes of this one aren’t challenging that opinion. It certainly makes me hungry to kill, but unfortunately I am only itching for a contract to assassinate the department responsible for plot-scripting.
What a strange way to start a game. Immediately alienating your audience is a brave move for any game, let alone for a sequel to a game generally held to have underperformed first time round. At least Metal Gear fans know what to expect – reams and reams of irredeemable ear-toss backed up with solid mechanics. But AC2? I’m not sure you should be betting the house on our patience and goodwill, Ubisoft. Perhaps betting it on immediately demonstrating how you’ve improved the gameplay might be a better idea?
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps an undergraduate English Lit class might get excited about the whole metanarrative of a hidden history within a history. Perhaps they might chuckle knowingly about how postmodern it is to write a game manual that breaks the fourth wall by explicitly referring to flaws in the first game. But I’m guessing not, and that’s partly because, to me, the plot seems to have only one genuine achievement: proving that it is possible to write something less well-thought through than a Dan Brown novel. If anybody else works this out, it’s evidence of how terrifying the future of fiction might turn out to be.
A real tragedy here (beside the baffling popularity of Dan ‘Adjective Noun’ Brown) is that Assassin’s Creed 2 is, in some ways, far better than the plot – it’s the movement within the setting that’s interesting, when it works, rather than the narrative thrust. And as well as HD murder and throwing millions of collectables your way to keep you distracted, there’s a genuinely interesting idea in it. It’s just, like the movement, it’s hampered by the plot rather than contextualised and explored within it.
Without wanting to give too much away, a previous Animus test subject has hacked into the historical data and left a number of clues for you to decipher. So far, so predictable. The game weaves them nicely into the world, giving you hints of the buildings to explore in greater depth. When you find the symbol, a puzzle is unlocked, which generally falls into the Dan Brown/Indiana Jones school of plotting: a terrible mystery has lain unsolved for centuries, yet as soon as Our Hero simply shows up, it practically solves itself.
And that’s a shame because, like Demon’s Souls, the idea here is far better than the delivery of it – a double shame for the best idea AC2 has to offer. The sense that other players have been here before is intriguing, and the idea that there are communications left behind for you to discover (that are far more personal than treasure) suggest something bigger in and outside the game.
Where Demon’s Souls fails is by encouraging you to leave messages but castrating the content leaving you unable to say anything more than ‘Jez woz ‘ere, look out for the big trap (that you can already see)’. AC2’s scripted discoveries are far more controllable and therefore might lead to more: instead, you play spot the ball in a footnote to a terribly dumb conspiracy theory penny-dreadful.
Because Assassin’s Creed 2, for all its gloss, is a desperately conventional game. And this is the paradox at its heart: what compels you to keep playing is also its least interesting aspects. It’s as a platformer, explorer, and a collect-them-aller that you’ll probably feel most drawn to stay up, find just one more treasure chest, explore just one more tower, tick one more box. But that will be happening at the same time as a nagging doubt that you’ve done it all before, and why bother? You’ll finish it both despite and because you’ve been bored for the last 30 hours of play.
AC2 is perfect for playing distractedly while having a conversation with someone else, but not good enough on your own to hold your attention fully and stop the doubts. The collectables are narratively anachronistic, well-worn and structurally ageing, and the get-money-upgrade-villa-get-money-back system is laughable. Old school? You betcha. There’s no guarded door that doesn’t have an obliging gaggle of distracting whores plonked right next to it, and there’s no subtlety whatsoever to the repeated mission types, or mechanical counter-based fighting after the initial thrill of a running kill. Its flying trailer-porn set-piece is an awkward snooze. This is Fun: some kind of joylessly inevitable urban cattle sex massacre.
What this all adds up to, somewhat inevitably for a sandbox game, is a great big cake with clashing ingredients, a lot of stodge and indifference under some very pretty icing.
Caution: Ezio may appear less shallow in screenshots than in actual gameplay.
Yes, the world is beautiful, but it’s also terribly shallow. It never quite escapes from the tremendous jarring crunch as you are wrenched out of the animus and back into the current day, as if it’s the conceit that is crippling the game. But it’s not – it’s the startlingly limited ambition of everything other than the world itself, and the feeling that the game never lives up to the playground it so lovingly wants to give you. The imagination stops where it should really start – at the foundations.
And every time you lose yourself in the world – which is beautiful, right down to its crowds of knuckle-dragging fun-havers clumsily blocking up the pavements of your life for another night, like obstructive, overamplified zombies – you wish that it would go one way or another. Own up to being utterly traditional, aim lower and succeed all the more for it, or just go mental like Farenheit for an ounce of the freedom and involvement that game can – at its fleeting best – provide. Don’t give me old dressed up as new, Dan Brown dressed up as historical drama, low brow tremblingly wanting to mean more.
But this is Ubisoft, and this is a AAA title, calculated to prolong a series and lead to further instalments, even before you’ve worked out whether you like this one. It’s a title with the unfathomable corporate nothing of Uplay bundled in. And so, like a new blockbuster, it’s too involved in its own self-importance, and a little too desperate to make sure it doesn’t alienate anyone with things like new ideas, a difficulty curve, or anything more than that beautifully realised world.
All the set dressing in the world doesn’t give you a good play. And as a result, what we have here is a disappointing world – in fact a world all the more disappointing for not living up to its beauty. Which is a shame, not least because I stayed in to avoid ugliness and am now disappointed by beauty.
But then, it’s a disappointing world even if you’re an assassin, it seems. And thanks to Ubisoft, mankind’s simulations of death have ended up making me wish I had a life. Fancy a kebab?
Assassin's Creed 2, disappointment, review 
Reader Comments (3)
i'm getting the same vibes off of oblivion at the moment, mores the pity. i thought fallout 3 was excellent and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. i'm underwhelmed to say the least. think it may be the setting, and most definitely am not impressed with the missions, which appear to be little more than traditional grind. think i'll stick to driving tanks through houses on the bad company demo. stick that in your cod piece ...
Funnily enough I'm the other way round. I'll grant you I have a ridiculous number of hours of Oblivion logged and I haven't bothered touching the main story, and that a lot of the quests are generic. But it doesn't provoke the same nagging doubt and mild unplaceable resentment that AC2 does. Also: Fallout I just didn't ever take the next step in - I got out of the bunker [spoiler... oh never mind] and just... stopped. Oblivion makes me want to do the traditional things because they're... good fun things.
please please please promise me you will try fallout 3 one more time, just to pop a live grenade in someones pocket. or set off the large nuclear bomb that a town has been built around. or combat shotgun your own dog in the head. i am sorely tempted to buy the game again just to do the stuff i didnt do last time and this is something i have never done in the past. well, not for a single player game anyway.
other than that, would you recommend lost odyssey? i have heard it is meant to be "good".