Firstly achieves the incredible task of passing the torch of the distinctive lead Altair to an apparent nobody like Ezio only to fuel our hearts with a gutteral need for vendetta and secondly marvels you with a toolbox of polished weaponry wonderlands. Takes the gears of parkour and close-combat as building blocks to mystifying freedom complexities. If you felt annoyed beyond-convincing about the first one's parkour, in this one you'll find yourself enamoured of statuette scouting. You'll actively seek to climb towers like they're Rubics Cubes. Side missions are gratifying and skill growth feels rewarding as fawk. Invigorating rennaisance, a bit of a weightless apocalypse closure - it still had no business getting me to spend so many hours punching through it's secondary quests like everyday bread. Requiescat in pace.

Not just the beat-em-up, the stealth oriented preying-upon-armed-goons angle was such an insanely COOKED creative choice to embody the caped crusader. Attractively gothic detectivism that turns into a reverse-survival delight through seismic punchy combos and techno-noir sleuthing. So tonally splendid you'd groove from the ceremonial pacing running from one villain showdown to the next and game over screens down to the badass slow walking, gets a bit formulaic with far too easily readable boss fights to the point of unchallenging linearity, still takes a conceptual blast of comic book roots through amazingly ominous sequencing including a mindbending Scarecrow that toys around videogame metaphysics to amusing effect and a toolbox of crafty sneaking made particularly priceless when seeing the last armed guard running around while panicking helplessly. Solid pacesetter.

Admirable, to a fault. Be highly wary of this: Painstakingly TOUGH detection minefields only achievable through heavy trial-and-error. F5 will be your greatest savior. Makes sneaking in Metal Gear feel like a walk in the park since SC trusts you to cross Fisher through strictly narrow hallways crammed with guards performing little to no-killing. A lot of the challenge comes by design flaws: Guards taking tricky, random turnarounds and horrid gunplay- Drunken accuracy that misdirects your shots ensuring one way to make hell rain all over you. That being said, the burdensome challenge is somewhat adorable for early blueprints of TPS stealth. A quasi-parkour mobility, lock-picking minigame tension and technological lookouts. It's a neat trendsetter of techno-noir. You're gonna shoot more lightbulbs than henchmen, and questioning guards in the dark provokes a badass cold-war dream come true. Charmingly pioneer, whilst feeling truly veteran in back-breaking difficulty even at it's easiest.

Black-handed tomfoolery in three dimensional havok. You see, it's grandly outdated- You can't even shoot a pedestrian through it's invisible windshield and everything SCREAMS prototype hell. But this is an atmospheric witchcraft. Antiquated commonplaces of gaming, floating icons to affordably wreck mayhem and peaks of infuriating, faulty, hair-ripping difficulty rooted to laborious ballistics and open-roam incompetently forcing you to go hell-and-back just to replay a mission before dying stupidly. It's challenging roughness makes it an equally gratifying circus if you brace for it to be a time-consuming maelstrom of jumping through hoops of fire. I just know i grinded my TIME on my PS2 back in the day, some of it i cried out of furious anger, but a sheer lot of it i stood hypnotized by blowing up police cars and driving boats in a fit of a nervous breakdown until achieving meets end. It's gonna drive INSANE anyone accustomed to modern GTA V gameplay. But it's a challenging, gratifying hood classic that comes off as cathartic when you almost seemingly impossibly let it. Also, the simplicity of everything seems funnily fresh for taking place on such a big fictional universe, someone as cryptic as Claude deserves a glorious comeback somehow.

Delivers some of the most flamboyant hand-to-hand. Vigorously punchy, harmoniously arcadey and dynamically satisfying. A kickass Arkham-ization of True Crime's beat-em-up repertoire and frivolous slapstick violence. Comfortably arranged to gunplay and smooth vehicular combat, it's such a groovy playground of punching bags and Hong Kong gangster grittiness. Not everything blends smoothly and perhaps the story is a formulaic one for undercover crime-thrillers, but it's a gnarly sandbox of goofball ferocity and a highly entertaining rumination of a thousand ways to knock someone out. Offers a great lot of enjoyment i don't see in a lot of open-worlds. Underdog, and begs for a sequel.

Falls victim of the early-new gen console control setting abomination, trust me, you have better dexterity by putting yourself to knitting under influence than doing a dive-while-shooting here and guess what? I've beaten this mother like 5 times. It's a sugar rushed Max Payne with a claustrophobic alcohol-poisoned juggling of eccentric and absurdly overboard gunplay, boss fights that sponge-bullets like it's feathers and duct-taped to mindless power meters for a redbull fuelled assembly line of henchmen like a ludicrous weaponholic wetdream. I've round up all my ridiculously demanding power-meter just to shoot dudes in the groin simply for the hilariously dramatic death animation, and the game expects you to multitask the humanely possible mayhem to re-fill these wonders. You must drop chandeliers WHILE moving WHILE jumping on air, and that's so absurdly convoluted for a newfound player but it sounds exactly like a John Woo'ism alright. The Killer is my go-to mindless testosterone action film by default, but this is a childish catnip for fever-dreamy exaggeration in the best, evidently broken and absurdly overkill fashion. Guilty pleasure.

Marvelously written, Sam. Beautiful balancing of idiosyncratic Runyonesque darkly-comedic screenwriting onto hard-hitting, sentimentally drowning Shakesperean tragedy. Every swing hits to the chest in the best-worst way possible for majestic Noir glory. Technologically polished too, added physics and guntotting madness for our trigger-happy amusement which just clicks abundantly satisfying to distract us from the emotional damage. Seems awfully more downing if we say goodbye to Sam Lake's Payne from here onto the Rockstar sendoff. There's no reason for that incredible catharsis that final Poets of the Fall needle drop to hit so tremendously by the end. The witchcraft of evocative storytelling.

Aren't we being a bit too harsh on this one? Futurism sounded like a problem but all this did was inject novelty to the tiresome "Lock, shoot n' reload" formula that staled badly on Ghosts, with novel exo-suit gadgets lending hand for a toolbox of FPS gameplay shapeshifting at your grasp. Wanna go stealth? There's a cloaking device. Wanna breach? There's a riot shield in there with tracking drone grenades. The campaign is a generic runaway plot, but there's a dandy system of upgrades to keep you frivolously improving your game and Spacey's role as the main baddie amuses for a popcorny while. What can i say, Underwood's got a punchable face. And it's a lean, easygoing and mindlessly popcorn underdog title of the franchise. It feels like a stepping stone for BO3 by kickstarting the slide and flying mechanics. Frankly overhated, with a gnarly short campaign to boot and can you tell this one started that " F " to pay respect meme? Seriously, that's an universal achievement.