|
King of the Dead
United States
Portland
Oregon
-
This review contains adult language.
To cut to the chase, the answer to the subject line question is YES to both.
I was very excited to play this game. I had heard that the repetitive nature of the first game had been done away with and this one was supposed to be a much better experience. On the whole those things are true.
However, some key decisions about how the game plays ultimately makes this a disappointment for me. I realize I am in the minority with these views but I think they are valid concerns.
There's a whole lot to actually love about this game.
It looks wonderful. Jumping around on buildings and finding the freaking thousands of feathers and treasures and codex pages and all the other bits of shit strewn all over the place is really really fun.
Hiding from street buskers or throwing money for distractions, or hiring thugs and mercenaries to distract or fight basic guards so you can get to objectives is really really fun.
Saving up money and upgrading your villa is really really fun.
Finding the glyphs hidden all over the place and deciphering the puzzles for "The Truth" is really really fun (some kind of suck with old or small TVs though as the images are pretty small and detailed).
Buying and upgrading your equipment and buying new outfits. Always a good time.
Pretty much everything about this game rocks except for the MAIN CORE GAME.
It's really cool to walk around very slowly and meld in with crowds and climbing on roof tops and all of that. But there's far, far far too many times when the angle of your jump is just a bit off and instead of catching that ledge or hanging scaffold right in front of you after climbing upwards for ten minutes you fall to your death. And, yes, if you fall to your death while going for an Assassin's tomb you can start back at your last checkpoint.
But if you fall and have even one health remaining you don't have the option to go back to the checkpoint.
You have to climb back high enough to jump down and die again to start at the checkpoint or entirely exit the memory. Why the fuck didn't they just include a menu option to restart from last checkpoint? Every other game with checkpoints allows this. That's what the fucking things are for!
Combat is MUCH improved over the first one.
Mostly...
The weapons have different stats and actually feel like it. There's a lot of really cool moves you can use to take people out pretty much instantly with the properly timed button press. It feels right in that you do a super cool looking and very satisfying finishing move after dodging or deflecting an attack.
You're an assassin, of course you wouldn't stand toe to toe with soldiers. It can get frustrating when you have to go up against guys in full plate with huge axes as they kick your ass pretty bad. But there's ways around that.
You can stealthily walk up behind them and take out two of them at once with your double hidden blades.
You can throw knives at unarmored guys from on high first.
Then when there's only one heavy you can try to get in under his defenses and do a finishing move on him quickly.
It's all very satisfying really. As with everything about this game the crappy parts come when they force stupid restrictions on you about the situation of the fight.
Coming back to the misaligned jumping thing above, it's very frustrating to fight guards on the rooftops.
This likely sounds strange and it should. You're an assassin. You're trained to jump around in light armor like a medieval superhero. The rooftops are your home. YOU are the master and monster up there.
But when fighting these idiot low level thugs they never miss a step. They cling to the damn tiles like they're glued. They never accidentally fall off the roof when they wanted to simply step around you.
All of these things happen to you when fighting on the roof because you're trying to deal with the sketchy system of staying on the damn roof and dealing with guys that want to kill you all at the same time.
Quite often when fighting only four guys up there, you will try to grab one or sidestep behind a guy and you're wobbling on the edge or falling to grab the ledge, neither of which you wanted to do, then the assholes stab or shoot you and you fall to the street, losing massive health or dying.
It's very frustrating. Imagine a Batman story where the thugs that broke into the liquor store bound up to the rooftops faster than him and proceed to kick his ass because he can't balance on a crenelation or stovepipe to release his wonderful toys.
Again, bullshit.
Assassinating people is pretty cool as long as it's of the slow moving stealthy sort. Any part where you are supposed to chase after people in any capacity just falls to shit for the reasons mentioned above about climbing stuff.
The person you're chasing hits every single ledge perfectly every time while you're falling off buildings because the CPU thought you wanted to jump 10 degrees to the left instead of what looks to be straight ahead.
I've even caught up with people when they were jumping on a sign or something but since they were on it I couldn't "fit" and so fell to the street allowing them to get away. Fucking bullshit! Then you have to start the whole damn memory over again and again....
There's totally bullshit restrictions on what awesome toys you can use as well. Early on they go through this whole thing about learning to use your throwing knives to kill low level guards. Awesome. " These will be really cool," you think.
Then right after that they shove you in this underground section with a low level guard who's running away from you. As you chase him there's a couple of places where he "rubber bands" in front of you if you happen to take a shortcut and actually catch up to him. The distance you could normally make a jumping kill doesn't offer you the button prompt at all. Ok. So you try targeting him and throwing a knife at him like you were just trained to do. Nope! You pull up your radial menu and the throwing knives are greyed out so you can't use them.
Fuck you guys.
It's kind of like Grand Theft Auto for me. I love putzing around collecting stuff and seeing the sights and generally having fun. Then I get to a point that's closed off to me until I complete the next part of the main story. At which point all of the horrible, idiotic just plain bad decisions that were made in creating the game come right to the front of the stage.
These games are about free flowing game play. "Creating your own story" they like to say often. But when you have to play the story they wrote for you they shove you on rails and restrict what you can do despite the sandbox right behind you where you honed all of these awesome skills playing the way you wanted to play.
If you give me a game where I can only play the way you want me to then that's fine so long as that game is good. I like games on rails when done well.
If you give me a game where I can play any way I want to that's great too. I love sandbox games when there's enough interesting things to do.
So many of these games fall apart when the two are mixed together and Assassin's Creed 2 is definitely one of them. It's jarring, annoying and frustrating to have to switch back to an on rails section after having such freedom. Perhaps it's because I've been immersed in pen and paper RPGs for the past few months but the restrictions put upon me after being given a taste of freedom are a bitter pill to swallow.
And the idiotic choices about checkpoints and when you can and can't use them, forcing you to restart entire memories or continue forward with very little resources.... I just don't understand those decisions. It's one of those situations that makes you think, "Did anyone actually play this before they released it?" Very frustrating.
So, again, I really wanted to love this game. I started out loving it. The more I got into it the larger and more obnoxious the flaws became for me.
I'm very disappointed.
-
Aswin Agastya
Indonesia
Semarang
Jawa Tengah
-
The very frustrating thing is that control often fails me at the most critical moments...
And the ending rather... blows...  I can take silly fantasy/sci fi mish mash in Might & Magic or cryptic stories like Super Robot Taisens'... but somehow this one... blows...
I have no problem with combat though... as long as they're not timed 
But all in all, it's pretty good (rated it 3/5).
EDIT: I've never felt anything scarce though. Once the game's going, buying map and then collecting treasures, plus the money from the palace coffers never puts me in such a situation. Those healing potions are just too good... I rarely die. But running out of time and escaping targets are another matter entirely... 
-
Anthony DuLac
United States
Minnesota
-
Pictures?
-
King of the Dead
United States
Portland
Oregon
-
As you can see I don't have any. My review has nothing to say about the graphical quality of the game.
In this case you can assume that the quality of graphics is at least passable if not fantastic.
Most big games by big publishers are going to have the money and know how behind them to make damn fine looking games. For a franchise such as Assassin's Creed put out by Ubisoft this is definitely an assumption you can make.
I do not have anything to get a screen-cap of the precise situations I was talking about in the review and there are none in the gallery that show these situations either. I am not going to steal images from other websites for the purposes of a review especially when images would not really add anything to the understanding of my main points.
I am not really understanding the recent(?) push from everyone to include images in reviews that have nothing to say about the graphics quality of the game. It really doesn't add anything to the discussions being proposed about the game play and simply adds noise.
-
|
|
