[REVIEW] Assasin's Creed 2

Overall: B+
Gameplay: B+
Main storyline: B+
Side quests: B
Graphics: A-
Voice Acting: A
Music: B
Replay value: C
Appropriate difficulty: B

Quick hits:

-75% running/climbing, 25% fighting. If you don't like platforming, don't even bother looking at this game.

-Combat is surprisingly deep. There are three different "classes" of weapons that are used against you in melee combat and each has different strengths and weaknesses. You have quite a few combat moves available to you, such as disarming, countering and dodging. Even normal attacks requires skill in the form of precisely timed follow up attacks to get combos going.

-The platforming "stickyness" holds up well most of the time, able to tell the difference between when you're trying to jump sideways to a ledge instead of just diving, for example. However, later in the game as the jumps get harder this will break down quite a few times. It wasn't a big deal, but an annoyance when you mess up an easy jump at the end of a five minute long time trial.

-Voice acting is really well done and believable. Whatever they paid the actors, it was worth it.

-All cutscenes were done in game, but the game itself looks really pretty.

-There's really no reason to replay this game again, unlike games like Resident Evil 5 or Devil May Cry. I could see somebody picking up the game again in a year to do the platforming and action sequences again, but there's no "New Game Plus" mode to give you any extra incentive.

-The first ten hours are reasonably difficult, but if you make some smart economic choices (such as improving your villa to get a cash stream, see: Fable) you'll quickly start overwhelming guards. The fact that you can just walk up to guards and use the hidden blade on them right after doing the same to their buddy in front of them makes any group size less than 5 trivial. It only gets kind of tricky with guard groups of about 8, but you really aren't under any real threat with anything under 13 or so, or a large group of elite guards. This was probably done intentionally to reward you for good choices, but I wish I could have changed the difficulty to make it harder still.

-Stealth missions are fairly forgiving. They aren't super hard to do (see: GTA3 tailing cars) and you can still keep a mission going after minor mistakes, but you still need to act differently than you normally would.