Game Review: Assassin's Creed II

This morning I got up early and figured I'd play a little bit more of my latest PS3 game, Assassin's Creed II.  The game has 14 chapters (called sequences) and as I had just finished Sequence 11 yesterday, I figured I would try sequence 12 today and finish the game up next week.

Interesting note about Assassin's Creed II, Sequences 12 and 13 are downloadable content, not part of the main game, so when you finish Sequence 11 you go straight to Sequence 14, the end of the game.

Luckily for me, I wasn't quite finished my latest book for review, so I can now do a game review.

Assassin's Creed II continues both right where Assassin's Creed left off and a few hundred years later.  You still play Desmond Miles, but instead of inhabiting an Assassin during the Crusades, you instead inhabit an Assassin during the Renaissance in Florence, Venice and ultimately the Vatican.

Like the previous game the set up is that you are a guy in the near-future who has been kidnapped and put in a machine (kind of like The Matrix in reverse) and are living the life of an Assassin in the past to discover stuff about the future.

The game is sandbox style, which means that while there is a main story line to follow, it has a large number of side quests and areas to explore.  It feels kind of like the Grand Theft Auto games in that way.

The visuals are great, the music is fun, and in one particularly interesting set of side quests you have to make your way through a number of ancient tombs to find secret seals (items not mammals) which feels an awful lot like Tomb Raider or Uncharted.


In the end the game was fun, worked for me for about a month and a half (remember, I only play on weekends) and definitely has me interested in continuing through the series if I can find the discs for a good price ($20 or less).