Just have been in an Italian/Renaissance mood lately, and thought it would be nice to give a shot (I never really played the series).
How good is it by today standards? I know that the late episodes of the series have been criticized for being quite repetitive and just filled with low-value artefact gathering, is it the case for this one to?
I just finished it a few weeks ago and enjoyed my time with it. The movement can be frustrating, as you would get the random jumping in the wrong direction, etc. Some people say it is your fault as the player and that it is very solid if you know how to play it, but I disagree. I slowed down on some of the “puzzle bits” and would still randomly end up in some strange direction. Some of it was due to camera placement (camera moves from free to a static shot for a specific part), but it wasn’t just that.
That being said, I enjoyed it. I’d started it quite a few times, but played it through the Sequence 13: Bonfire of the Vanities, which apparently was DLC that is now wedged into the main game. I didn’t have the patience for it, so I just watched a video of the ending.
Outside of those few issues, I enjoyed it and would recommend it.
I started playing through the series a few years ago, having never played them before (I finished Origins a while ago and am now on a break).
AC2 is quite playable still - in fact all of them are. But there are some things that I would’ve liked to know beforehand.
The keyboard and mouse controls are bad. Unity is the worst here: I’d try to run from an enemy and suddenly the character would decide to jump onto a fountain and run around on top of it. AC2 has less of this, but the parkour can feel clunky.
There are too many collectibles, and they all get icons on the map. It’s hard to ignore these, but in trying to collect everything I started to resent the games. To a lesser extent, the same is true for trying to get perfect scores on missions, or doing all side content. The problem is that some of the side content is actually good, but some is just filler and you can’t really know in advance.
Something that bothered me a lot: often you’d get a new mechanic thrown at you looong before the main story introduced that mechanic.
Overall my advice is to play the game - and others in the series - by picking and choosing what you want to do, not by trying to do or see everything.
AC2 will always have a special place in my heart. If you’re in a renaissance mood, you should definitly try it. I loved to roam around florence and venice while experiencing Ezios adventures. It was also fun to witness Ezio maturing over the span of three games from a rather dumb young man to an old veteran assassin. When the series ended it felt like saying goodbye to an old friend.
The first game has a weird gameplay loop where you get to a city that is very similar to the previous one, have to do a some filler missions (often with no story at all) to unlock the story mission, then do the story mission and move on.
2-Syndicate are much more continuously story-driven. They all have quite a few collectables, but they aren’t important to experiencing the game.
The 2 family is mostly set inside cities, while 3 and after have more world around the cities. They also lose some focus on stealth over time, though it still exists in all of them.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla become much more RPG-lite, combat focused, and require you to do quite a bit to keep up with enemy level scaling.
Looping back to the root of your question, the 2 family is often seen as the peak of the core series, with 4 (Black Flag) being up with it but different.
The only downside of the 2 family is that there isn’t much evolution between the three games to make moving to the next game feel like a jump to a new game, but progression is lost each time. It feels like one massive game with weird break points.
For what it’s worth, I got into the series a bit late myself and didn’t play AC1 until probably 2012 or 2013. I asked people at the time whether it was worth it to play AC1 or if I should just skip ahead, and everyone told me to skip ahead for a lot of the same reasons you said.
I’m not sure why I bothered asking because I decided to just play AC1 first anyways and still managed to enjoy it.
If you’re new to the series, it’s still fun just to run around and climb things and kill people. The story was actually interesting and the Animus was a really cool concept. The occasional shift to present day gameplay helped keep the historical stuff fresh. It doesn’t have the overwhelming volume of useless collectibles strewn about everywhere like later games have.
I haven’t played it since so maybe it’s aged worse than I remember. It doesn’t have dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay and side quests in a huge open world. But for a dozen hours in a game focused on a linear main story it was pretty good. Like if you took down the walls of the hallways in Uncharted.
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