Assassin's Creed 2 is, surprisingly, not game I started the franchise on, that would actually be Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. Bought that when I was with my mum in a game shop having a mild panic over what game to buy with my £20 pocket money and just randomly picked up that like a year after it came out. I instead went back to AC2 when I did a big replay of the series prior to Revelations

Assassin's Creed 2 remaster is... fine. But simple remasters of old games kinda will never get over 3 stars for me, as it's the same clunky and vanilla experience Assassin's Creed 2 still is due to it being FOURTEEN YEARS OLD NOW. Unless you want an HD experience, you may as well play the original if you still have it on disc for the Xbox 360. This version of AC2 isn't like the wonderful Mafia 1 remake, so don't buy it expecting that.

I really don't know why they didn't spend more time smoothing the parkour mechanics, adding Brotherhood's (rather nice for the time) combat and overall polishing the game. I accept that such improvements would probably require remaking the game in some parts, Ubisoft can handle it, surely.

AC2 is a wonderful story that deserves it's own paragraph tho. From Ezio's mother dropping one of the greatest insults ever:

"self expression is vital to understanding and enjoying life. You should find an outlet.
I have plenty of outlets.
I meant besides vagina"

To Ezio becoming the badass Italian thoroughbred he is in Brotherhood and Revelations. A story of a young man having to grow, rebuild and lead an order he didn't know existed and take down the catholic church. Absolutely wonderful. Also that CGI trailer is absolutely BADASS. There's a reason why besides Edward Kenway, Ezio is the most beloved protagonist in the franchise.

But yeah, this was a horrible experience when I went back to this game after like 10 years once I got the Ezio collection. Because it's simply the same game but in HD and some UI changes.

Summary : Assassin’s creed II is a massive step in the right direction for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, as it feels like it developed on the good ideas of the first game, cut back on the repetitiveness and gave the game actual meat on its bones. Still, there is a fair amount of clunk to the game, with missions that kinda all blend in together, controls that feel a bit rough around the edges, and an arsenal that, if more varied than the first game, is vastly useless because of a lack of balance between the different tools handed to the player. The grade may seem low for a game I’m finding so much praise in, but bear in mind that basically every praise I give the game is nuanced by a setback: what the game does well, it doesn’t do very well, much less perfectly, and that really sinks the game.

I will give the devil his due: Ubisoft did a great job at analyzing what worked about the original assassin’s creed game and expanding on those ideas. The parkour is at the core of the experience here, with the game requiring you to run around rooftops way more than in its predecessor. In that game, all the missions, except for maybe the assassinations, had you walking in the streets, slowly trailing people in some way, shape or form. You kinda had to make your own fun with the parkour. The game now exploits the potential of parkour, and the levels are designed accordingly. Wether it be the rooftops of Monterrigionni or Florence, the levels were made to get you running and jumping around. You can now easily gain height thanks to crates, shop signs or balconies among others, and you can from rooftop to rooftop thanks to cables linking them together. Climbing has also been made faster, with Ezio quick-climbing if he has a series of aligned handles to climb, but I will say that I often found myself going at a snail’s pace even though it felt like I had an aligned series of handles. Also, it does feel like getting down can be a bit slow. Opportunities for leaps of faith have been made more common, sure, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I would’ve also appreciated a smoother way to get to a lower-level rooftop than having to press circle once to hang off the ledge, and then press circle a second time to let go, because the animations are a bit slow, and I’m hella impatient. That’s probably just a me thing though.
The game also develops on the interesting pitch of exploring old towns from important time period, this time choosing Renaissance Italy, which is a great choice. All the locations feel different, and most feel great to explore. Venice is a bit of a pain because of its canals, in which I fell way too often, probably thanks to a lack of skill, but for my defense, it does also feel like there isn’t enough ways to get from one rooftop to the next, which makes going down on the street the quickest way to get around in this particular town. It’s a shame, as it feels like the game purposefully hinders its best aspect and forces the player to adapt their play style for the sole purpose of switching things up. The towns are beautiful however, and Ubisoft deserves acclaim for that.
The world also has more things to do, wether that be shops or side-activities, that can be hit or miss. The shops are a wonderful addition, allowing you to change up Ezio’s tunic’s color, with a lot of the color schemes looking wonderful. The painters were pretty whatever, and it’s a shame that the weapon sellers become useless past the halfway point of the game (we’ll get into why later). As for the side-quests, they vary in quality to say the least. The coolest ones are the templar lairs and the Assassins’ tombs, as they have meat on their bones, feel pretty different from one another (except for a few repeated « chase the templar » sections) and exploit the game’s best feature: the parkour). I would’ve appreciated better rewards coming from the templar lairs, something I can’t say about the Assassins’ tomb. The reward being Altaïr’s armor is really cool, it’s a shame that it really doesn’t look like Altaïr’s tunic from the first game though. It still looks good don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t scratch that Altaïr itch. As for the « contracts » they remind me of the original, and that isn’t meant as a compliment. Assassination contracts are whatever, as they basically make you do what you probably do anyway (kill guards on rooftops) without introducing any special conditions (I did have one require me to not use weapons, but even though I accidentally used my hidden blade on the dude, there was no punishment ?). Letter deliveries are timed Fedex quests, they’re fun because they make you use the parkour but they’re not amazing. Beat-up missions suck because they require hand to hand combat, which is ridiculously easy. Races are pretty fun, because they involve parkour, but this time going through a set path. There are still way too many synchronization points, but they feel less copy-paste than the original, with a lot of them being breath-taking sights, and they’re not as big a chore thanks to better climbing speed. 73 is still too much though. Codex pages are very repetitive, and I thank God I picked them up progressively through the game rather than having to backtrack to get them all. Finally « The truth » side-quest is can be hilarious in how other the top its ideas are, as it really evokes conspiracy theories, but I really enjoy the boldness of it, basically framing every major event and character as either an Assassin or a Templar, and breaking down myths and huge scientific advances as the work of the pieces of Eden. Gameplay-wise, they can be a chore though.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Monterrigioni and the whole rebuilding of the villa gimmick. It gives a purpose to doing side quests as they give you money, which you can reinvest in Monterrigionni, which gets you more money. Sometimes, collecting certain things (feathers, codex pages, assassin seals, buying weapons or armor) will even upgrade the villa’s value, it really ties everything together nicely. The surplus of money you gain from the villa somehow doesn’t break the game’s economy either, at least not before the last quarter of the game, which I’m really surprised by, as it seems like it would be the kinda thing to make it really easy to buy everything in the game if you’re smart with it. I will say though, I would’ve enjoyed a « travel to monterrigionni » feature in the pause menu because finding a fast travel point every hour or so to empty the chest (which can get full if you don’t empty it often enough) was on the annoying side.
Lastly, probably why people like this game so much, the story and characters. Ezio is charming from the minute the game starts, and you can feel him mature during the course of the game, which spans 25 years. I will say though, even though you can see Ezio mature (both physically with his beard growing and mentally with him becoming a war leader after being an obnoxious yet charming brat who preferred to flee to protect the ones he loved rather than stand and fight) I would’ve enjoyed for him to have more significant story beats. His family’s tragedy is devastating and catalyst enough for him having to mature, and him not respecting De Pazzi’s body during the first assassination are the only two big character moments that I can think of for him before he grows to be a leader. As for the side cast, Leonardo is a treat, which can be said about pretty much everyone. I enjoyed interacting with this cast, and the story is nothing special, essentially having you go from assassination to assassination. The post-assassination « confessions » were really disappointing though, as I can only remember like two, most of them being nothing more than the templar saying « I don’t want to die / I don’t fear death » and Ezio answering something really cool in Italian followed by the now iconic « Requiescat in pace. » I do feel like the game missed an opportunity to be grander. It is supposed to be a multi-decade spanning story, yet the world doesn’t change, you don’t really understand why Ezio is taking so long to get through the templars. Were it not for the dates at the beginning of memory sequences, you could legitimately believe this game takes place over the course of 6 months tops. Nothing major sure, but it is a shame.

As for « pure » negatives, the combat system is completely broken in this game. In the first game, it was pretty basic, but did the job: most enemies could be one-shotted with parries, and I learnt after my play through that you could one-shot every enemy with a hidden-blade parry, which is harder to pull off, especially because you can’t block anything with the hidden blade: if you don’t parry, you get hit. In AC II, one-shooting through parries is barely a thing past the midway point of the game. This isn’t a problem in of itself, the problem is that the gameplay outside of parking is… lacking. You just mash square, playing unsatisfying animations in which your enemies lose health even though you can visually see them blocking your attacks. It’s especially frustrating because they can counter you too, which is a waste of time and you can’t do anything about it, so the game pretty much encourages you to parry enemy attacks, even though that makes the fights longer. The best option is to use your hidden blades to one-shot everyone, an option which is by far the best as you can now block attacks with the hidden blade: if you mess up the timing of a counter badly enough that Ezio gets back into a counter position before the attack, you won’t get damage. It isn’t a high risk-high rewards situation, it’s a no-risk high reward situation. If you want to use all of your arsenal, and vary up the experience, you’ll have to make your own fun and deliberately use less efficient ways of fighting. I had some fun with disarming opponents, stealing their weapons and one-shooting them thanks to their non-existent guard, especially on bigger enemies where using their weapons to parry lighter guards led to some pretty cool animations. Stealth weapons like poison and the pistol are cool in concept, but pretty useless in practice (poison only makes the guard randomly hit around him, not make a target out of another guard, the pistol is too slow). Smoke bombs and throwing money do work pretty well though.
Also, I do feel like the game is a bit clunky. I often had air assassination’s be interrupted because of geometry, or guards detecting me through walls while I was climbing. It was also really easy to fall from rooftops. It happened multiple times that after assassinating a guard on a rooftop, the guy just slipped off and, because Ezio was standing on him, he would start falling too, or I would bum into a guard instead of assassinating him and that stupid falling animation would play, and even though I was far away from the ledge, Ezio would fall.
And finally, I really don’t like two things about the story : the Abstergo storyline is, like in the first game, interesting on paper but annoying gameplay-wise, as it just pulls you out of the cool Ezio action. The thing is its barely featured in this game, so I should be happy, right ? Wrong. My problem isn’t that the Abstergo sections exist, much to the contrary, I think they make Assassin’s creed as a franchise more coherent as it gives the games a connecting thread. My problem is that their gameplay sucks, and I just wish Ubisoft had fixed it in this game rather than just ignoring the problem by cutting back on the storyline. Secondly, the ending sucks, yet again. Both Ezio and Desmond let their archenemies go because… ? No joke, Ezio says that he doesn’t want revenge because killing Borgia won’t bring his family back, and he’s won anyway now that he has access to the vault and the piece of Eden. BUT THAT’S NOT THE POINT ! NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU EZIO ! Rodrigo Borgia is the head of the Templar order, and the most powerful man not only in Italy, but in Europe, as he’s the Pope: you can’t just let him be, because he will continue to hunt the assassin’s down and use his influence to make the templar’s grow stronger ! I get that they can’t kill Borgia here because it’s only 1499 and that wouldn’t match with his real life death, but I don’t know, find a way for him to escape, give us anything but this ! As for Desmond, he talks to Vidic instead of rushing him and killing him before the truck leaves, which is better than Ezio’s mercy, but still, lame.

To end on a positive note: the music is sublime.