Requiescat in Pace

If you put the Assassin's Creed 2 disc in your Xbox 360 and don't touch it for a while it plays a cinematic intro video that acts as sort of a trailer for the game. It shows Ezio sneaking into a masquerade in Venice and assassinating a rich dude in the midst of a crowd of people. It looks fantastic and gets you ready to play the game. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't look quite as good, even in cutscenes. Faces especially, looked a bit off in the actual game. But never mind that, this game is all about moving around the city undetected and dropping in for the kill.

This sequel picks and chooses elements from the first game to abandon or include. The excellent terrain traversal animations are still around. You just push the control stick in a direction and Ezio figures out how to get there for the most part. The same four or five types of tasks that you had to do over and over in the first game are gone. Because of this, I never got bored playing through the game. But the story missions that replace them aren't that impressive. I often found myself running off to kill a dude on the other side of town just because somebody told me to. The story wasn't really engaging enough for me to remember why I was doing this. I just liked traversing and killing.

Honestly, I waited too long between finishing the game and writing about it, but I have in my notes that there are "lots of new features, some work, some don't." None of the new techniques will hold you up. Meaning I didn't run into a situation where I wanted to stop playing because of some stupid unskippable task that made me mad.

One annoying thing that stuck around from the first game is that you walk by default. To run, you have to hold down the right trigger. Since I was running 90% of the time it was really annoying (and eventually painful) to have to hold it down all the time. Luckily I remembered my trick from the last game. I posted this on Twitter about it:
The only way to play Assassin's Creed 2: always running.

So I liked the game overall. I complained about the forgettable story earlier, but that's just the day to day missions. The whole story of Ezio losing his family, seeking revenge and looking for answers is sort of neat. Especially the ending.