The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Assassin’s Creed 2 was pretty great except when it wasn’t great.

I mean, it had a neat setting. Great graphics. You had this great side mission where you were upgrading this base town, which is always a lot of fun and they did that pretty well. You could collect lots of weapons and such. Seems like a great game, right?

Except, you know, the combat is awful. It is slow, tedious, and doesn’t feel satisfying in any way. It doesn’t help that the best way to fight is to have someone else distract the enemies and one-stab-kill them all in the back. You just stand there and guard until you counterattack, but eventually all the enemies take like 30 counterattacks to kill, so the combat just takes long and longer for no reason. It’s just really painful.

There’s also free-running, which is also kind of shitty. So often I felt like I had absolutely no control over what I was doing. Ezio would jump off of buildings to his death, and refuse to climb up the simplest of climbs without me babysitting him all the time. Sometimes, he simply wouldn’t do something I knew he could do, because he had done in a million times before. Case in point, there’s a sequence where you flash back to being Altair, and you climb a tower. At some point, there is a beam jutting out of the tower over the balcony, and you need to climb onto this beam. He simply will not do it. It took me literally like 20 minutes to do this, and even awhile after I looked up how to do it. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have grabbed that beam immediately. It was frustrating.

Moving in towns? Besides the control issues with the free-running, it’s also annoying because the towns are huge, there’s only fast-travel between the towns, and if you run, people get mad at you, and you have to get into more bullshit combat. So you’ll waste half the game walking around slowly, being bored out of your mind. Maybe you’ll pickpocket every person you pass, to try to make it less boring, but then you’ll just be attacked more often, and it’ll take you even longer to get to the next mission.

For some reason, which I understand that I’m probably not making this clear, I played this game for a long time. It was oddly compelling, if very slow to start, even though it constantly annoyed me. Then, I hit the last memory, and it’s like “Oh, you don’t have all the Codex pages? Go find them.” Fuck you, game. All you told me is that that increases my health. I didn’t need more health. I could never die. I didn’t waste my time with them, and now I need to go find 13 of those fuckers?

Needless to say, it immediately went back to Gamefly at that point.

I can see how people would like this game. Apparently a lot of people didn’t struggle with the controls like me, and maybe that made it worthwhile. I have really mixed feelings about it, and it probably ends up being negative feelings. There’s no way this was game of the year. No way. The fact that it was even discussed in that context shocks me, now that I’ve played it. That’s why I wanted to try it, and man, it just didn’t live up to the hype. At. All.
Bleh.