Assassin's Creed 2

Someone tell me if the PSP one is worth owning. I kind of really like the series but the reviews have been meh.

Review I saw for the PSP game says it sucks.

I'm about an hour in so far and I'm just getting back into the groove. I have this horrible habit of taking detours everytime I see a glowing treasure chest.

Seems like a bigger game than the first and it feels like Ezio is faster than Alatair. I don't have any gear yet so I can't do anything really bad ass, I think I just got the main story rolling.

The people in the game look really weird, like faded mannequins.

it can't be worse than the ds game

nobody remembers the ds game

I'd have posted earlier, but I've been playing this game nearly nonstop since Tuesday. Assassin's Creed II is everything the first should have been and more. The story is more interesting, the missions are far more varied, and even the collectibles are more rewarding. A lot of the mechanics have been redone, too. There's no pray button that lets you become invisible anymore. Instead, you have to find groups of civilians and blend in with them by moving into the middle. It feels more logical and makes a great deal more sense. Guard awareness has also been redone to more of a Hitman-style suspicion meter, which fills at different amounts depending upon your general notoriety in the city. You gain notoriety by doing high-profile actions like pickpocketing or fighting with guards out in the open, and you can lower it by tearing down posters of yourself, assassinating guards told to look out for you, and bribing heralds. (Who actually say some pretty hilarious stuff about you if you're really notorious) It's a mechanic that works really well and makes perfect sense.

Every single mission in the game is unique, and though a number of them follow the archetypes set up by the first (eavesdrop, pickpocket, eliminate guards), you never do the same thing in quite the same way. The cutscenes before and after each mission also make it feel more like you're working towards a goal and less like AC1's busywork. Even the side missions, which are less varied than the plot missions and involve basic things like running races, assassinating specific people, beating up people, and delivering letters, are still more entertaining than the main investigation missions in AC1.

I'm not going to touch upon the story details, but both plots - Ezio's quest and the present-day story - are handled incredibly well. The latter is arguably even more insane than MGS, but it's never overbearing and far better presented. They've also ditched the past-present-past-present structure of the first game, and (nearly) everything about the present-day story is revealed without taking you out of the animus.

My only gripe so far are some control issues held over from AC1. They've made a few strides towards making control a little more direct with the addition of leaping grabs that require you to time your grab movement, and wall-jumps that require you to leap in a different direction once you've reached the apex, but the control is still mostly automatic, and that's what causes problems. For instance, there's no animation for leaping over a railing and landing on the floor on the other side, so Ezio ends up pausing and perching on top of railings before continuing to move off of them in a fairly awkward-looking drop. The targeting system also needs a little work, as Ezio seems perfectly happy to do leaping attacks on the people nearest to him, not his actual target. I actually failed a mission because Ezio decided to do a double assassination on two random civilians standing next to the actual target.

That actually brings me to my final gripe: AC2 is really easy. It's rare to run into a situation where you're in actual danger, thanks to the ability to hold a lot of medicine and the comparative ease of combat.

Still, though, I'm more than happy with this game. Buy it instantly if you liked the first Assassin's Creed despite its flaws, and seriously consider checking it out even if you didn't like the first despite finding the premise intriguing.

Pretty spot on, there, from what I've played. I fully expected the lack of difficulty (any game with a budget like this is gonna be pretty easy), but they really fixed a lot of the problems in AC1. It's a big step.

I'm gonna agree with bVork so far. The controls get really wacky when there is no animation for the path you may find yourself taking. The architecture changes wildly from place to place, so the climbing/jumping can completely lose it's flow when you try to make a left to go up and over an uneven roof and you end up clipping it and missing or just "popping" onto the surface. Your momentum is gone and it takes some work to get going again.

I can understand why, I mean there is a shit load of animation as there is, I guess they couldn't cover every single movement possibility. Still weird how they skipped the basics like walking up stairs. That's something you do/see a lot but everyone just glides up them.

I'm a fan of the first, so I'm digging this one even more. They added a ton of stuff, I love the story so far (I was really pissed at that first target, I enjoyed going after him) and it feels like this is what the first game should have been. The setting rules too, there's no other game like this.

This game starts out exactly like the first but gets awesome

There are way too many hidden things to find, though, but the story and sidestory are very intriguing. It'll take you 20 hours to get everything

I was about to say, the amount of collectibles is borderline absurd. Viewpoints (66), Feathers (100), Glyphs (20), Treasure chests (300?), and it looks like 10 or so weapons, and I'm not sure how much armor/dyes. And all the side missions (races, Beat Ups, Courier).

It is more like 30something weapons, and you also forgot about the 30 paintings. The nice thing about a lot of the collectibles is that they feed back into each other. Everything you buy and every feather you collect adds value to your villa, which increases your income, which makes it easier to buy more stuff.

So it's similar to GTA hidden packages unlocking weapons at your safehouses? Because that was like the best reason to look for hidden packages.