Assassin's Creed 2

Yeah, an(other) old one. What can I say, I guess I'm one of those guys that really gets his TODO Stack done. :)

I've never played an Assassin's Creed game so this was my first one in the series. The storyline is relatively captivating and slowly exposes the gameplay elements as you go. As for the storyline theme, I don't buy that Templar/Assassin shit in the first place so it's kind of a "Immerse Player Spell - Fail", but the game offers plenty of gameplay to compensate.

The Old Cities are very well translated into the game world, I looked it up a huge part of the buildings actually resemble the monuments that exist in the real world ( 10 points to Italy for monument conservation ), and I must add they look pretty awesome.

The gameplay offers a standard rogue scenario - Infiltrate, assassinate and in several occasions fight. What the game really shines is the usability of the interface. It's my first game of this kind and in 30 minutes I was already feeling like home. Excellent mapping of buttons-actions, extremely user friendly which is essential in this stealth like games that demand split-second actions. The equipment upgrade is also well done, though I didn't notice some drastical improvement over the initial weapon/armor sets in the actual gameplay.

The variety of missions tends to get repetitive, especially if you are a nitpicker and you finish every sidequest (like I am), but it's not to the extent of let's say Prototype.

All in all, it's fun and I asume it's more if you're into that Templar lore.

7.8