So anyway, yeah just played this in the last 48 hours. Managed to do it with an hour to spare before I have to be at work! word! A short nap is in order.
Basically, it's way better than game 1. Much less mucking about in fields, almost the whole thing takes place in cities. The Assassin's Tombs are easily the best parts of the game, especially since they do throw more than just crazy platforming at you in them. I kept waiting for Ezio to say "Ah, Venice" when he popped out of one of the sewers.
The story arc was what I expected out of game 1. It's soooo long and drawn out because of trilogy status. If they had compressed this shit down to one game, made it 30 hours, and had a resolution as Desmond in the present it'd probably be way up there on my games list, but no, we've got to sit through three of these motherfuckers.
I can't remember much of why this game is better than 1 besides the lack of countryside. The building your villa up is pretty incidental, as is getting money, as is hunting for treasure, and climbing the same carbon copy building 10 times to get a viewpoint gets boring by the end. There are like 5-10 super unique structures that are mad fun to climb, and challenging, and the rest are like 6 cookie cutter buildings. I liked the setpieces in 1 better, I think, at the assassin hideout.
Combat seems almost exactly the same. Different weapons within the subtypes all feel almost exactly the same. I wish I could buy a spear. Those kills are fucking great. I spent most of the game running around unarmed. Very hard to die. If this game married Batman's combat system it'd be so much fucking radder. Chase missions are fun, should have had more of those. The assassinations are all pretty fun and the game scales pretty well and gives you a decent amount of variety/new shit to keep you entertained through the story.
I think...I dunno if it's kind of lame that there's very little outside the story, or a good thing. It almost feels like a free-running GTA except there's nothing interesting to do outside of the main missions really. The side missions are still pretty repetitive and you don't get much out of it. Like I said earlier, the best shit going is the Assassin's Tombs, and the armor you get from completing that is pretty worth it, least of all because you finally look like a badass in it.
Annoyed that I have to wait til part 3 to finish Desmond's story.
I think a slightly different implementation would have really propelled this game into the upper echelons. Imagine if you had all the conspirators and then had to track them down not via cutscenes but by side missions/snooping and you could decide who to go after first. It could even change event paths, as long as they all came together in the end. Like, take a little bit of Crackdown, or a little bit of GTA's concurrent storylines, and mix that in. Right now this game is so Batman:AA, and Batman did it better imo, despite how much fun the freerunning is.
In fact even the freerunning around the world gets boring. By the end, I guess because I was hurrying, I was just running along all the roads to get everywhere. Climbing buildings often wastes time unless one of the designed-in routes happens to be going your way, and there's no reason to not be on the street since it's stupid easy to keep your notoriety down all the damn time. AND, there are ARCHERS on the rooftops, all the time, so the streets are just fucking safer. Unless you enjoy doing low-profile kills every twenty steps. Or you can do high-profile kills, but then you've gotta tear down a poster or two eventually. Annoying.
