First Impressions : Assassin's Creed 2

Let it firstly be said that I only played Ass Creed 1 for the first time in the last month, and finished it earlier in the week.

Thus my comment are not based on fond, but forgotten memories of a game that I played more than a year ago like many people who will be picking up the sequel, but rather on a very direct comparison with sometimes fond, sometimes frustrating thoughts of the very recent past.

Also it should be noted that I've only spent this evening playing the game, so I'm just over two hours into it, and thus my opinion might change drastically in the coming days/weeks as I delve deeper into Ezio's world.

So in the true Kotaku style...

Loving

Rince and...do something else - It's refreshing that I'm a couple of hours into the game, and so far I have not once repeated exactly the same mission. Quite the contrast to Faffing About Creed 1, where you only really played three different missions a hundred times over...and over...and over again.

Follow the leader - Now many people like sandbox games, that allow them to do whatever they want, and waste their time for hours, without accomplishing anything. I am not one of those people, and don't mind linearity in the slightest. Thus it's quite pleasant that our assassin friend seems to have some direction, and it seems like playing the main story will be a pretty straight forward affair, with no jumping in and out of the map to see what needs to happen next.

The motion, in the ocean - Ezio moves blisteringly fast, up and over building, in contrast with Altaïr who often felt like he was on sleeping pills and didn't quite remember what he has to do next, without a prod from the analog stick. Generally everything just feels a whole lot smoother, and continuously animated, where the first title often had a serious stop motion problem, mostly caused by dodgy collision detection. Even the combat flows a whole lot better than it did before, and using your fists is now actually a fun option and no longer an exercise in frustration.

Rainbows for everyone - Oh my hat, Ubisoft found their colour palette. Although not cartoony by any means, and still highly realistic there are now other colours than different shades of brown in the city. Generally this will be most noticeable in the dresscode of NPC's, but overall it's a much more aesthetically pleasing experience.

Ooh sexy time - Wow! We have real women in this game, with boobs. Let's face it, all the women looked like men in the first game, partly because they were in medieval surroundings, but then that leaves no excuse for Lucy who just looked rubbish. Lucy is however a whole lot sexier this time around, but not in the usual over the top fashion, rather the girl next door kind of way, and although she is still rendered horribly compared to Desmond it's a major improvement. There's also plenty of cleavage in the game world, being Italy and all. The only problem is that now all the men, look like girls. It seems you just can't win, and the shorthand "Ass Creed" is ironically applicable.

Learning the ropes - It's great that this time round you pretty much have all your button skills from the moment you start the game, which means anyone who played the first title can just continue where they left off, without getting n00blified. At the same time, for newcomers it does a much better and more interactive job in the actual game world, instead of the blank animus as was the case before, and you actually progress with the story of the game while learning to play it. I only found myself really struggling with one thing, which was the new manual way of blending with what were previously called Scholars, since it's no longer a case of simply pressing a button...but more on that later.

The sound of music - So far I can't really say that I've heard anything memorable, but then that also means the music blends in well, so it might not be memorable, but it certainly doesn't irritate. As for the voices, they are a great deal better presented, at least as much as you can expect from Italian characters who need to speak English so you can understand them. This is a double-edged sword however...

Hating

The sound of confusion - ...because now the characters speak a mix of Italian and English, completely at random. The problem is that there are no subtitles for the Italian bits, and maybe I'm stupid but it's not always forthcoming enough that you know what they are actually saying. At the same time you often miss the English bits as well, because your brain switched and listens to the Italian (at least mine does) and then when they move over into English I can't pick it up fast enough. Which ultimately means that I had to put subtitles on, just to make sense of most of it.

Spit and polish - Now this is probably most relevant to me, because I just finished Assassins Creed Uno earlier in this week, but the intro sequence, which is in fact just a summary of the first game, was absolutely shocking. Not only is it not rendered in real time, but it is encoded horribly and looks worse than your average bootleg movie. The only reason I can imagine Ubisoft would have done this, is to make AC2 appear a whole lot better than it actually is graphically. If you confuse the memories of your players, so they remember the old game looking that crappy, then the new one appears light years ahead, which it is in fact not. Actually it goes much deeper than simply the intro sequence, the entire game seems to lack a whole lot of polish with odd graphic artifacts everything, and the same screen tearing problems as the first game.

Stickshift or Automatic - You know, the one thing I never used was any kind of stealth of stealth because the game simply didn't punish you enough to make it worth your while. I did however use the blend with scholars option once or twice to enter the cities in the first game, and although it was boring as hell to just Press A and let the auto-pilot do the walking, it worked well enough. This time round however they decided to go for a fully manual approach, no longer can you just press A and cruise right past a guard magically, but instead you need to hook up some whores (well you can use normal civilians, but they don't have boobs) and manually blend with them by keeping your speed just right so that you don't walk out of their magical circle. This works pretty well in the main world, but during the tutorial it seemed like an impossible task as you need to magically blend with random crowd formations who bump into each other, and generally just don't "blend" with your own character at all.

Button bashing - It seems the latest trend to give the player inane functions to perform, just so they feel as if they are interacting more with the game. So instead of just walking up to an item you can pick up, you now have to press a silly button. Same applies to mission, which for some stupid reason aren't automatically accepted but await your confirmation, as if you have a real not to do them. In the end it doesn't feel very interactive at all, but rather breaks the sensation of immersion by simply doing repetitive tasks automatically. Much as the first game, I ask myself why do I need to press Y to Synchronise at the top of a View Point? Surely having gotten there is testament enough to my completion of the task?

In the end

I am left somewhat underwhelmed, quite likely because the first part of this journey is so fresh in my recent memory, and thus the metal taste in my mouth might be perceived quite differently by someone who has never played Assassin's Creed before, or hasn't done so in quite a while.

I cannot help but compare it to the one game the entire world seems to stack it up against, Uncharted 2, and with only the very limited time I spent with that game as a margin I have to say Ezio falls way...way short of Drake.

Not only does Uncharted 2 look absolutely amazing compared to pretty much everything else on the market, it really is that spectacular in comparison, but it just has a superbly polished presentation over Ubisoft's effort. Pretty much every aspect of Uncharted 2 was sent to finishing school, while Assassin's Creed seems to have been booted out the door before it got the final touches.

Although the two games aren't exactly alike, they aren't all that much different either, much like the two different consoles you will find them, so if like me you only have an Xbox360 then you will be more than happy enough with Ezio's adventure, but if you a PS3 instead I would have to ask why haven't you bought Uncharted 2 yet?

Dante's Inferno Demo

Well initial impressions were a little meh, but overall impressions after finishing the demo are pretty good.

Story wise the demo leaves a whole lot to be desired, and if like me you don't follow every single detail of a game pre-release, so as not to spoil it for yourself, then you are left wondering what the hell is going on. Hopefully in the full version it will be somewhat more fleshed out, and the demo isn't simply the start of the game as it would be with the final product, because then I might be a little bit miffed.

The first thing you notice of course is the blistering frame rate, which didn't falter even once throughout the entire demo. Plenty of action happening on screen, but nothing over the top in the usual Japanese fashion, like Bayonetta, where you ask yourself what the hell (lol) is actually going on.

At the beginning I was very worried about the combat, since it felt almost more braindead than God of War. Now I'll be the first to admit that I prefer these games casual, and the likes of Ninja Gaiden and even Devil May Cry sometimes generally put me off, but at the same time God of War feels a little too button bashy at times. When you first encounter death, it's nothing more than a block anything and attack everything affair at which point I was wondering if there even was a countering system.

Fortunately by the time you get to unlocking abilities countering is the first thing that gets introduced, but you have no use for it until you get to your first medium-sized enemies which are unblockable. Up until that point you can pretty much stop anything with a block, which makes the game feel very dumbed down, but that improves very quickly.

I don't particularly like the fact that I need to bash B repeatedly to pick up health, mana and other substances, and this always irritated me in God of War as well, as it seems completely redundant and serves no purpose other than cocking up your controllers in the long run.

Boss and mini-boss battles generally turn into a mini-game affair when their health bars hit rock bottom, but a very cool ability for this genre which I haven't seen before is the chance to hijack beasts and then use them against your enemies. Controlling said beasts could have been better, but it's still pretty good fun in an almost Grand Theft Auto kind of way.

Sound isn't bad either, nothing noteworthy to mention really, but nothing glaringly irritating either. I did find that the video sequences were a whole lot softer than the actual in game sound which could be irritating, but will hopefully be normalised for the retail version of the game.

Overall the demo doesn't quite have the epic feel of God of War. There's no massive Hydra as a first boss, or massive Titans to conquer. Actually, Death, the first boss like character is only about double your size. The trailer videos at the end of the demo do allude to things getting a whole lot more interesting, so it's probably just a case of not giving it all away.

If you happen to own both consoles or a PS3 only, then I can imagine choosing between God of War and Dante's Inferno could become quite troublesome, but as a 360-only owner it's really a no-brainer for me.