Assassin’s Creed 2 Review
Graphics
If you did not think about it during the last Prince of Persia iteration, then this time you’ll surely wonder if the creative team members at Ubisoft are descendents of Michelangelo (or some similarly talented artist), because the game surpasses all benchmarks set by its predecessor in bringing historical locations to life. So beautiful is the rendition of all Italian urban and country landscapes that you can forget playing the game for sometime and continue navigating the camera to absorb every co-ordinate of the scenery. The cities, barring Monteggrioni, are huge enough to demand few minutes for a cross geography run and feature crisper buildings and detailed real world landmarks like Santa Maria Novella, Rialto Bridge and St. Marks Basilica amongst others. The countryside, especially around Forli and Manhattan resembling San Gimignano feature long open fields and water bodies with rustic settlements distributed amongst them. The draw distances are so huge that you can view entire cities as well as the countryside in a seamless landscape from the top of any tall structure. Even the long path across Apennine Mountains is filled with elevated locations offering a panoramic view of the surrounding scenery. The icing on the graphical cake is the city of Venice, whose great looks get augmented by amazing reflections in its well rendered water canals.
The game now features a full day and night cycle with superb dusk and dawn transitions and crisper shadows. The daytime sun and cloud effects are almost like Oblivion’s, but great lighting effects during the night turn cities into a sparkling affair. Watching the rising moon from the tallest structure in Venice or standing amongst golden light rays seeping through the tomb of Basilica de San Marco are sights to fall in love with. The lead characters as well as NPCs feature fluent animations and movements. Just watch Ezio climb a building and you’ll be surprised at how his hands and feet are always attached to a ledge; or check out the grace of Carnival performers and dancers. The variety in character motion, coupled with their huge numbers, infuses an element of liveliness in Assassin’s Creed 2 that embraces you into its world in no time.
The detailing is also extended to special effects. From blood splatter during combat to fireworks during Venice’s Carnival to ‘wetness’ after a water dive to slick map navigation and zooming, your mind will utter just one word throughout your stint with Assassin’s Creed 2 – ‘flawless!’ With so much extravaganze on screen at the same time, AC2 plays at an extremely smooth frame-rate on the X360, although the PS3 frame-rate does drops occasionally (especially while running through crowded market areas). I was surprised (and probably you will be too) at the game engine’s ability to render vast scalable landscapes along-with other details without any visible major technical glitches!
Sound
Hitman series veteran Jesper Kyd provides a brilliant oriental soundtrack for the game, ranging from fast music during chases to serene tunes. Voice-work featuring both English and Italian dialogues is spot on and in-game chatter between NPCs (civilians, guards, heralds, performers etc.) is rich in variety.
Gameplay
The core strength of AC2, which makes it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, lies in its ability to provide varied approaches to give shape to your missions. Benefiting from an open-world design, it pays for you to ‘think and plan’ a strategy towards key missions, rather than behave like ‘Conan the barbarian’. A covert approach is always recommended because the options of thoughtful execution are aplenty. You may hire a group of courtesans to blend in, direct thieves to lure guards away, engage mercenaries to aid you in combat or throw money to distract and slow down pursuers. When things get red, you can escape by hiding in haystacks or roof gardens, by diving underwater or outrunning your pursuers. The many possibilities of enjoyable mission execution, along with an engaging and long storyline, is what ensures you willingly traverse the game till the concluding credits screen!
As an assassin, you need to harvest your impressive skill-set completely. You retain the trademark free-running, jumping and climbing abilities to scale the cityscape, but with faster and tighter movement controls compared to AC1. Just attempt a free-run across building edges in any city to realize how you cannot take Ezio’s movement for granted. You can wield not one, but two wrist blades for a twin cool kill and can also use smoke bombs, throwing knives, poison, hammers and later a wrist gun attachment together with the regular swords & daggers during combat. Weapons have their own characteristics towards damage caused, speed of wielding and deflecting abilities. Enhanced moves like snatching weapons from enemies or picking up dropped weapons for quick assaults are also available. Unlike AC1, Ezio is able to blend in with any group of people. Enemies in the game also vary in their skill-sets to pursue, recognize or fight Ezio, though taking them down is no big deal.
Next Page – Gameplay continued…
