Assassin's Creed 2 Review page 2

26 Nov 2009 at 13:24:20 by
Systems used to review this title: (PS3, 360)

All of these locations, bar the glyphs and crowds that randomly populate the world, are marked on your map. The map itself not only outlines the aforementioned points, but also hiding spots and Templar lairs. The only thing you might want to spend money on is the treasure boxes maps, which can be bought from any art merchant in the city.

The art merchant is one of four different merchants in this new world, and the addition of RPG elements has given Assassin's a much needed dimension and depth. Of course, how you approach assassinations is personal, but now you can purchase different weapons to use, buy and repair armour (if you haven't got Altair's awesome suit), top up projectile weapons like bullets and throwing knives, smoke bombs and that's just the blacksmith. The medic will heal you and sell you medicine and poison for your poison blade. The tailor offers a dyeing service so that you can change the colour of your outfit, as well as selling pouches to increase your hold capacity for things like medicine, poison and projectile weapons.

The more upgrades and weapons you acquire, the higher the value of your villa gets, and this is something that will probably need a little more explaining.

Instead of having a "Creed" hideout across the cities you have your Uncle Mario's (yes, it's really him, just without his red boiler suit) family villa in Monteriggioni to which you retire after your fathers death. The villa is where all your purchases and upgrades are displayed. It's also the home of Altair's armour chamber, the Codex pages (a selection of scrolls pointing to the location of a particular artefact) gallery, the chest for collected feathers, and your sister and architect which help keep track of your finances and restore the villa and surrounding community. The villa is run down on your arrival, and as you progress through the game getting money and buying art, weapons and the like, you can also spend it on improving the villa and it's surroundings. The villa then attracts paying visitors, in turn increasing your income, meaning more money for you to spend. The only issue with that is that you have to physically go back to the villa every time to collect your money.

But travel isn't so much of a chore in AC2. In fact, it's actually a huge improvement to the original. In this game you can opt to take the tedious horse ridden route from location to location, or you can take the fast travel routes which, for a measly sum of money, can take you to any fast travel location in any city... just not within the same city. An oversight, but presumably deliberate, as I'm sure the dev conversation would have gone a little something like this:

"'Eh, do you sink we shud make za player travil wizin za citeeeee?"
"Eh, non, I don't sink so. We cud make heeem run like za beetch 'e eez. Non, only from wun citeeee to anozer."

A mistake, especially for the later stages of the game when all you really want to do is get from location to location because you've found all the treasure, feathers, viewpoints... you get the idea.

All ...

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