Assassin's Creed II First Impressions

I hated Assassin's Creed, well maybe that's too strong. I wanted to love Assassin's Creed, it had a neat story based on historical fact, cool setting, great artistic merit, and the combat and running jumping climbing up trees was easy without losing challenge. All that is very difficult to pull of together. But it was so repetitive! You had to go to point A to hear about this guy you gotta kill then do the same six side missions to get information. Well it was the same six missions but you usually only had to do three. Even with that, it was still repetitive and terrible. So what possessed me to buy the sequel, let along pre-order it? Well the videos showed something very important, something that set my soul on fire with a desire to play this game. They showed someone buying poison from a shop.

Now previously on this very blog I talked about Far Cry 2 not fully utilizing it's RPG elements. This game takes those ideas and runs home with them. I'm at about the ten hour mark maybe (being charitable) and I've come to a point where I'm frantically collecting money on side quests in order to build up my stronghold so I can get more money, so I can get better armor, so I can do better in the missions. That's the most interesting thing really, there are all the standard weapons from the other game, sword, knife, throwing knives, hidden blade, and armor upgrades. But you buy them, at stores, scattered around every city. And get this, your armor? It gets damaged so you have to go to the blacksmith and get it repaired. It's never very much but if you're running around with broken armor you get one less life jewel thing.

And how you get that money? Well you can do side missions, you can find treasure boxes scattered around the city, or you can just pick pocket people. And there's lots of statistics to watch but they're not presented as such. Like you have a notoriety meter that slowly fills with red the more you act like a murdering psychopath. When I got the double hidden blades I accidentally preformed unlicensed tracheotomies on two guys walking down the street. I immediately was given away to the guards and had to run away, quick and fast. Speaking of guards, there is both more and less you can do about them now. The limberer ones will follow you atop roofs, so that's not an instant get out of jail card anymore. And some will just block anything you throw at them. There's these big armored gorillas that just knock everything away and then smash you with axes.

That's all I can think of at the moment, I'll wait till my next update to talk about the story.