Assassin's Creed the Second
I'm not a fan of open-world games, and I generally feel that the term is a euphemism for lazy game designers asking the player to meet them halfway. I think what saves Assassin's Creed 2 is that it feels less like an open-world game, and more like a bunch of missions set in one of a few really big levels that are strung together by a lot of unnecessary walking. Also, it's a lot of fun to stab dudes.
At its heart, Assassin's creed 2 is a light stealth game with a heavy emphasis on climbing stuff. Although there is a lot of climbing, it's not really a platformer because you have a single parkour button you hold down to switch from normal walking to essentially guiding Ezio around a track of conveniently placed signs and windows. Yes, you can fall off, and yes, you will often jump off into thin air when you wanted to do something entirely different, but in most cases, it's just a quicker and/or cooler way to get around.
I say light stealth, because you're usually only trying to stay hidden from view long enough to shank the guy you're hiding from. This is made more fun by special one-hit-kill assassination moves that you can execute from a hiding spot. If you are seen, it's usually easy enough to fight it out or just run away, so there's no big penalty for a guard turning around at an inopportune time. Plus, the open combat is kind of entertaining, since while you can wail on guys until their health bar depletes (and indeed, for some enemies you will have to), it's usually far more effective to execute properly-timed counterattacks or flanking attacks, either of which will provide a one-hit kill.
One of the most interesting bits of Assassin's Creed 2, though, is the way it tells its story. Don't get me wrong, the story itself is not good, but its told through four separate plotlines that--aside from an exceedingly clumsy bit at the end of Ezio's story--do not at any point intersect, but whose information combines to form a more complete story for the player who is paying even a bit of attention. I'd really like to see this style adopted by a game with a better story.
The Story of Ezio Auditore
Ezio's story is the primary story in Assassin's Creed 2, and follows a young sociopathic mass-murderer in 15th-century Italy who watches a corrupt government official kill his father and brothers. This spurs him to begin a decade-long hunt for revenge against anyone even remotely connected with said official (and every poor city guard in between), during which he somehow convinces himself his bloody rampage is serving some greater good. Now, if you ignore the hundreds of law enforcement officials you murder because this is a video game, and just assume he was really only killing his assassination targets, it's not quite so silly, and is certainly the strongest story of the bunch.
The only problem is that the guard-killing is actually codified in the game mechanics. The game does a good job giving you several ways of avoiding combat in most situations, but since it is a video game, the path of least resistance is always going to involve a long trail of bodies. The problem is that the game doesn't bat an eye if you systematically kill every single guard in the city, when their only "crime" is trying to keep the streets safe from murderers like you. But engage in a little role-play and knife that asshole merchant who without reason or warning sharply turned to run into you when you were walking in a perfectly straight line, causing him to drop is crate of goods and then start yelling at you? Well, then the game admonishes you because "Ezio did not kill civilians!" (he's a good-guy murderer!) and threatens to give you a game over if you do it again.
Really, though, I enjoyed this storyline, less for the story itself than for the setting. Renaissance Italy provides a great backdrop for a game that involves a lot of climbing of stuff and fighting with swords, and it's a nice change of pace from Tolkien Fantasyland and Brown Sci-Fi Planet. Also, everyone sports a pretty boss fake Italian accent that I found myself enjoying from beginning to end. I could have really done without randomly interleaving actual Italian words and phrases into every sentence, though. Either your guys speak actual Italian all the time, or we indulge in the conceit that we're all English-speakers here, so let's throw the accent on there so we know they're supposed to be speaking in Italian. In the words of another fictional Italian, "this mix-and-match shit's gotta go."
The Story of Desmond Miles
This is the actual story of the Assassin's Creed series. It's some dude in the present day sitting in some sort of Matrix-like device called the Animus that lets him relive the memories of his ancestors through the magic of not knowing how DNA really works. I don't really know much of what was going on here, because the game assumes you've played through the first Assassin's Creed, and doesn't make any meaningful concessions to players who are new to the series.
Apparently the guy who originally found Desmond and put him in the Animus was looking for clues to...something...turns out to be a Templar, so he's a bad guy, and now Desmond's escaped and is shacking up with the opposing team, the Assassins. Maybe the first game does a better job of explaining why it's so bad if the Templar finds what he's looking for, but the only hints you get from Assassin's Creed 2 on which shadowy organization trying to influence world events is the good shadowy organization trying to influence world events is that one is a plucky group of 20-somethings, and the other is a middle-aged man, a corporation, and a steady supply of henchmen. That's all the information I need!
I could not care less about this particular story, but it at least provides a clever framework for explaining away a lot of the video-gamey mechanics and limitations of Ezio's world.
The Story of Subject 16
This story presents itself as a bunch of optional puzzles that break the flow of Ezio's story. The idea is that one of the previous Animus subjects stumbled onto some Big Huge Secret (actually referred to as "The Truth"), went crazy, and has broken this secret up into 20 pieces and hidden them within Ezio's memories. What this means in gameplay terms is that you can find hidden symbols on certain landmarks, which allow you to solve some puzzles themed around conspiracy theories, where you are cracking codes or searching pictures for hidden images. There are only 3 puzzle types, so they get old before you're done, but it does a great job of conveying the theme of uncovering a thread of historical conspiracies--probably a better job than the actual DaVinci Code game. (As an aside, I find it an almost criminally wasted opportunity that Ubisoft cast Cam Clarke as Subject 16 in a game that contains Leonardo DaVinci as a major character.)
Your reward for solving all the puzzles is "The Truth," which is a video that actually doesn't explain or reveal anything, but anyone who played through Xenogears will have guessed the meaning behind after about the 4th unlocked segment. That's OK, though, because I think this story was really meant more to work in concert with...
The Assassin's Creed
Throughout Ezio's story you are also collecting pages of the codex of the Assassins' (society? guild?). You have to get these to beat the game, but you don't have to read them. If you do, they are essentially a journal of a previous Assassin, wherein he muses about the goals of the organization, the nature of the "pieces of eden," which are powerful artifacts that are only mentioned by name elsewhere, and generally displays contempt for any kind of authority and religion. Together with the conspiracy snippets in the Subject 16 segments, these codex pages provide the context and history of the conflict between the Templars and Assassins that is conspicuously absent from the character-driven stories of Desmond and Ezio. It's not needlessly obtuse or cryptic, but it does require the player to connect a few of the dots himself, and the story is all the more engaging for it.
I know this write-up is already running pretty long, but I can't wrap it up before addressing the one tangental part of this game that really pissed me off. The entire game basically shits on religion every chance it gets, specifically on Christianity (more specifically on Catholicism, though that's mostly incidental because that's what Christianity was in 15th-century Italy). Seriously, in this game every member of the church (including the Pope!) with a speaking role reveals themselves to not even believe in God (or in the case of the only character in the entire game to actually express belief in God, to be actively subverting the church because they totally know how to worship him better than the church does). This in and of itself is more tiring than offensive, and anyone who spends much time reading gaming forums or comments on gaming websites could easily come to the conclusion they're just playing to their base.
The problem I have is with the glib little "disclaimer" that pops up every time the game loads: "Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs." That's like going to a party and spending the whole night telling a bunch of racist jokes, but then telling everyone they're not allowed to get upset because, like, your cousin is totally black, and your aunt is totally Jewish. They're basically admitting that they're doing something enough people would find offensive that they feel the need to post a disclaimer, but then trying to say it's OK for them to do it because they've got diversity cred. That's bullshit. It's fine if you want to make a game that shits on religion, that's your prerogative. But own it. Don't try to weasel out of what you've done, stand behind it. Either your narrative works, or it doesn't--how many churchgoers you have on your dev team doesn't change that, and it certainly doesn't mean that those who find it offensive no longer have that right.
Insulting disclaimers aside, Assassin's Creed 2 was a fun game that was able to keep me going until the finish. If anything, though, the main game went on a little too long--towards the end I was starting to get tired of a lot of the routines I'd been doing for the previous 20-odd hours, and the upgrades you get along the way stop having a meaningful effect on gameplay before even the halfway point. Anyone else who finds themselves in a similar position should just go ahead and put it down--the last mission is a bit more combat-heavy than the rest of the game, but it's still nothing you haven't done before, and the end of Ezio's story is really, really stupid (and if this entry weren't already way too long I would have discussed it). Bottom line, I enjoyed playing Assassin's Creed 2 to completion, but I'm not really interested in an Assassin's Creed 3.