Assassin's Creed 2 - PC

Let's just say up front, Assassin's Creed 2 is one of the best games I've ever seen, let alone played. The story is immersive, the gameplay is great. The best part though, is the overall feeling of the game. It feels so great to walk the busy streets of Renaissance Italy, and it feels even better to free run across the rooftops. The graphics, atmosphere and animations are amazing, and within these beautifully recreated cities, there's a great game to be played. Now the DRM. I was really frustrated by this at first. I heard it would always be cutting me off, I wouldn't ever be able to connect, and the world would end. However, my time in the game is at least 40 hours now, and I've never had an issue at all, even though my internet isn't even that stable. If you're mostly playing games at home, I wouldn't worry that much honestly. The aspect of the DRM people don't mention is that it allows you to install it an as many PC's as you want, with your saved games synchronized online. What does that mean? It means I can install it on my friends laptop at work, and pick up right where I left off at home. Or at my other friend's home computer. It also means they can make their own profile (you can have 3) and play through the game themselves whenever I'm not playing, all without a disc. I probably sound like a Ubisoft representative, but I was really surprised and pleased with how this system actually worked out. It sounds awful on paper, but it can end up being quite handy. Now, if I regularly played games on my laptop on the train (a believable situation, though if you read the DRM reviews it seems as if the only place anyone EVER plays games is on a train) or some other situation where internet was unavailable, I agree it would be really frustrating. But if you're into gaming enough to boot up your gaming laptop during the commute, you probably have another game that you could pass the time with. It's also probably not the only time you play games, so, trust me, buy Assassin's Creed 2 anyway, because it's one of the best games you'll ever play. That's my take on it. So, more about the game itself. I'm sure you've heard, they really improved the gameplay in the second game. It has big, open cities like the first one, but this time the story and side missions have a lot more variety. There's just a lot more stuff to do, races, side assassination contracts, factions, etc. Though at first glance it seems the same, the fighting in this game has a had a major overhaul from the first. You can fight with your hidden blade(s!) use a ton of different weapons, quick-step around enemies, and of course, disarm and dispatch them; the finishing moves always look sweet. If you're willing to not just smash the attack button, they give you everything you need to create interesting and epic battles. The assassinations themselves are a lot more interesting, Ezio's skills let you come at them from a lot of different ways. From the air, from a hiding place, from below, with a gun, two at a time, it all makes it more fun. So, it's a FANTASTIC game, with an unusual DRM scheme that you can actually find a lot of good in--if you're that kind of person.

Assassin's Creed was for me a mixture of a perfect game and a lackluster game, offering equal parts of both. The world, graphics and basic gameplay were all solid and you really felt like you were in the dark ages, during the crusades, adventuring in the middle east. Unfortunately the game was also repetitive, offered no real mission variety or progression and also lacked some subtle nuances which make games fun to play for longr periods. Assassin's Creed 2 changes ALL of that, thankfully. The world is just as wonderful to look at and interesting to traverse, but now what you do in the world is also entertaining. The missions shake things up, there are more of them and the story really carries you through it all. No more rigid structure, instead there is a greater open world feeling like in a Grand Theft Auto game. Collecting items for your base and improving it through investment is also rewarding and adds to the gameplay, no more mindless searching for flags in AC2, now you search for improvements to your character and your surroundings. It's hard not to recommend AC2 to a fan of the original, it has everything you liked about that game plus a ton of improvements and additions. If you disliked the original game entirely, well, the basic fundemental gameplay is identical, so you should probably steer clear. The important thing to remember is the gameplay is the same, it's what you do with the game that is bigger and better. Note: A lot of the reviews on amazon right now are focused on the DRM (digital rights management) system the game uses, called Uplay. Uplay basically makes AC2 play like an MMO on PC, but without other players in the game. A server connection is required and your saves are on a server, so you can log in and play where you left off from any PC. There are also unlocks and new content delivered through Uplay like an MMO content patch. A lot of consumers have issues with this because of the constant internet connection requirement, which I understand, but as a person with constant internet I can say the DRM has no real impact on gameplay if you have a similar setup. The game logs in in less than 5 seconds and during gameplay you never notice it. I am not rating the DRM, only the game, which is a stellar achievement in game design and a must play for those who can.

This is a very fun game. Not many sequels take the complaints form the previous game as completely to heart as Assasin's Creed II. Sure there are things to nitpick, and things gamer types A and B might prefer from the first game, but the developers made an astounding effort to improve their game rather than make a straight sequel. Free running is smoother, combat is slicker, the world is larger, there are more varied and more side missions and far more varied and again simply more plot related missions. I heard one reviewer of the game mention that the extra assassinations make it ok when you botch an assassination--you don't feel like you are missing out when you fall off the roof and have a loud, messy sword fight with a bunch of guards before legging it after your fleeing, screaming target. You have other chances to feel suave and accomplished. And that gives it a greater reality to the game (not to be confused with realism). You are learning to become an assassin, and you make a hell of a lot of mistakes that the game doens't punish you for them very severely at all. You can experiment, and muck about, and when things go wrong, you don't reload from the last check point to fix it. You let the mistakes lie because there are so many things to do, the one error doesn't matter. Nor would a hundred. The sheer scale of the game allows for a more authentic progression and learning curve. The art of the game is absolutely astounding. The detail and authenticity of the various cities, the photorealisim in the texturing ... it is a gorgeous model of renaissance Italy. Much as in Spiderman 2 for the PS3, this is a game where the most fun happens when you wander around, climb buildings, sprint along the roof of famous buildings, stand where your aunt took a photo of herself while on vacation in Rome. Watch the crowds do what, within a quite reasonable margin of error, crowds DO outside of the game. It is a vibrant game world, and I derive hours of enjoyment tromping through it. This is where we hit something of a snag. The plot is ridiculous. But I think most people are fine with ridiculous plots and the game creators seem aware of their plot and seem to have added in a bit of camp and don't take it quite so seriously as the game does ... but it's rather hard for me to swallow in points and can get very distracting. The digital markers and lines of the animus get especially obnoxious and by the time I finished the game I was absolutely sick of the characters lampshading various gaming interface pieces and gaming conventions through explaining features of the animus.This said, I genuinely cared about the characters no matter how mad-cap their world or cliched it could get. They were lovingly crafted visually and otherwise and it shows even when the plot and characters ought to buckle like a match stick. Returning to the gameplay, it can sometimes seem too easy or too easily distracting to the point where I lose interest in the plot or in the game altogether, ans simply run about on the roof-tops staring at pretty buildings. Or exit the game and play something else. There is nothing in the game that really challenges me as a gamer, as a thinker, as an audience member. The whole thing is a very pretty, very smooth trail ride on a horse that requires occasional nudging but mostly knows the way better than you anyway and follows the horse in front of it. As a whole, I found it thoroughly entertaining, and a vast improvement on the initial game in the series. As a matter of principle, I despise the DRM methods used in Assasin's Creed II. As a matter of practicality, I respect that PC gaming companies lose a lot of money to Piracy. Even the Pay What You Want humble indie bundle servers were hacked by pirating gamers who stole the game rather than paying a penny for several games. It isn't as horrible as many of these reviews claim. Steam uses internet based validation (albeit not constant connection)and MMORPG's require persistant internet connections even for solo play, even in instanced areas. Steam doesn't seem to cause too many people problems, and MMOs are widely successful and MMO players widely content with their games. The problem is, of course, not all gamers want to play such games, and gamers like being able to play wherever and whenever they can--espeically laptop PC gamers. Ubisoft's DRM measures make this impossible. As someone with a large game collection and frequent access to internet, I am not terribly offended by Ubisoft's DRM methods. I can always play something else, use Steam in offline mode, or read a book if I am without internet but need my adventuring fix. Just be aware that you cannot play the game without an internet connection (even a slow one will do), and weigh that before you buy.

I, probably not unlike you, read through the multiple pages of reviews (including all the rants about the horrible DRM) before I made my decision about the purchase. Having a stable cable internet connection, I figured that the constant internet connection would not be a problem, and therefore bought the game. Started playing the game immediately after I got it. After a couple of days, here's what I have to say about it: DO NOT buy this game for pc even if you have a stable internet connection and you wouldn't mind the DRM scheme: I played the game for a couple of hours the first day, and even more on the second day. Even from the limited gameplay experience, I LOVED the game's graphics, the gameplay, the story progression, and the variation from mission to mission (unlike the repetitious AC 1). On the third day, I started the game, went into single player mode and got a little message on the screen saying "Establishing Network Connection. Please Wait.". This had not happened in the previous days, so I made sure that my internet was working, launched the game again and it still showed the same message. I gave up trying after a couple more tries and then went to bed. Hoping that it's a temporary server connection problem or something of the sort, I tried again the next day but received the same results as the previous day. Naturally, I went to ubisoft's forums and found out that many others were having the exact same problem. However, even after searching through many many pages of customer complaints, I failed to see even a single moderator reply to any of the concerns (remember that this is the official ubisoft forums where they urge you to post technical problems) or even acknowledge that there is such a problem. Today is the third day of this mishap, and the game is still out, and there STILL hasn't been any official statements related to the problem or an ETA for a fix. Searching through the forums, I found that many tried to use the ubisoft support system, which simply gave them the generic "We're aware of a problem, and we're trying to fix it" automated reply via email. So far the ubisoft customers who payed to play this game have absolutely no idea what the potential problem is, or when they can expect to play the game that they payed for. Here's a couple of reasons why You should not buy the game, even if you don't mind the DRM scheme: 1. It's the company's right to make us connect to the internet if we want to play the game. However, it is also their responsibility to make sure that a stable system is in place for us to do that. It is also their responsibility to be prepared to fix any problems should they occur. By failing to do this, Ubisoft is failing to provide their customers what they paid for. 2. We're all human. We make mistakes. However, it's considered part of basic manners to at the very least acknowledge that there is a problem. Ubisoft has so far (over three days) failed to have any official acknowledge the problem. Even a simple "We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused you. We are aware of the problem and are trying hard to fix it." post on the official ubisoft forums by a moderator would help put the customer's mind at ease. However, the company seems to not care at all about their customers' rights. As stated before, so far no official has made any statements about the problem. This is a horrible way to treat us (the PAYING customers). 3. This problem has occured before. Searching through the forums, I was able to find that this did happen at least once before, and that they customers were more or less treated the same way then also. As far as I could understand, Ubi made no official comment about the problem or an ETA on the fix until after the whole ordeal was over. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on Ubisoft. Clearly, Ubisoft does not learn from any of their mistakes. I desperately hope that by the time you have read this review, Ubisoft has fixed the problems and will have put an efficient way to counter the problem in the future. But so far, that's just really really wishful thinking and history leads me to believe this will never happen from this company. If however, you are still convinced that you're going to take the chance with the company and buy the game, or if you want to buy this game for a different platform, let me point out a few things (positive and negative) that made me rate "how much fun is this game?" as a full five. 1. Graphics/DirectX: If you have played Assassin's creed 1, you've used DirectX 10. Ubi decided that AC2 will only support directX9. This fact made me very nervous before the purchase, but I can assure you this is not a problem in the game AT ALL. The graphics in the game look absolutely phenomenal. The cutscenes do not lag, and the renaissance era city modeling looks absolutely gorgeous in the game. I have windows 7 and directx 11, and the game runs on full graphic capability and high settings for all available features smoothly. 2. Controls: One of the main complaint's I had in AC1 was the limited control players had over character actions, especially when climbing. Altair would not always respond to our keyboard movements as fast as I wanted to or in the direction I wanted him to. This has been improved drastically in the second game, and as a result, building climbing is simply more fun. However, I do have some minor complaints about the controls that I will address in point number 4. 3. Combat: I wasn't able to get very far in the game due to the above mentioned reason, but what I have experienced so far has thrilled me. Fist fighting has been vastly improved from the first game and combat is much more interesting now. People who have played AC1 will jump right into this game's combat. 4. Ubisoft's laziness: This is the one minor complaint I have about this game. Even though this does not impact the gameplay in a major way, it still causes some nuisances in the game. After some research, I found out that the reason why ubi decided that they would only support DirectX 9 with this game is very simple. What you're purchasing with this game isn't actually a pc game. It's simply the XBOX 360 version that's been patched over here and there. Since the 360 only uses DX9, so does this one. This laziness is more evident in the controls. Instead of saying "press 'shift' to use your unarmed hand", the game shows a red circle with a hand inside where the word "shift" should be. This is because they were too lazy to rewrite the control scheme. So when a new player wants to use Ezio (the protagonist)'s unarmed hand, he has to go into the menu, find out which key is mapped to the red circle with a hand inside it, and then go back into the game and then press that button(set to 'shift' as default). Even thought not a major defect, still a very annoying nuisance. Overall, I would not recommend anyone to buy the pc version of this game. It truly breaks my heart to say this, because game itself is PHENOMENAL. However, No matter how sweet an apple is, you shouldn't eat it if its been poisoned.

While the game is high-qualitied graphic-wise and combat-wise, the game is buggy, and to make matters worse, UBISOFT proves to believe they're playing a zero-sum game with their customers. The company has taken up the policy of purposeful neglect toward all pc players, so if you're concerned with who your money is supporting, or if you think you might need any help beyond "how do I install this game," this is not the game for you. Here is around 1/2 of my bugs lists that I've told UBISOFT about and that UBISOFT HAS PURPOSELY NEGLECTED FIXING EVEN AS OF NOW: 1. Innocent-killing even if you've locked onto an enemy (for those unfamiliar with the game, this means you've specified who you want to kill), if there is but a single innocent citizen standing beside an enemy, your assassin would kill that citizen instead of the guard. This means that you miss your chance to stealth-kill the guard and that you get into a fight. For those who enjoy murdering everyone you see, mark this: if you kill 3 citizens, you die. 2. Jumping the edge in this game, unlike others such as megaman, when your assassin jumps, his projectile movement is final. This means that players rely solely on the computer's calculations for accurate jumps that don't result in you falling to your death. This is all very nice unless your computer miscalculates, which is exactly what UBISOFT has decided to add to "make things difficult." Too often your assassin climbs high and sees a platform to step on on his way down, so he jumps toward the edge, over-jumps, and loses half of his health. 3. Forced camera angles to point out routes to take, UBISOFT adds a forced-camera-angle-change at certain locations. This is very nice if the place to go is placed properly, that is, at either 90-, 45-, or 0-degree to the assassin. However, UBISOFT has decided to put things at 45*1.5 degrees. that is, for example, if you press "right," your assassin jumps behind that thing to grab, and you fall to your death. So you think you're smarter than that, and you press "right-forward." And Your assassin jumps in front of that whatever you're meant to grab, and you still fall to your death. This has proven some missions impossibly hard. (And UBISOFT keeps a Stats table of how many times you die!!) 4. Guards WILL notice you UBISOFT asserts that an amature assassin such as myself (and I haven't assassinated anyone) can run stealthier than their assassin master. That's just stupid, but that's exactly what they're asserting. When your assassin master runs (even if he only jogs) toward a guard from behind, that guard turns around and confronts you 100% of the time. This is a minor bug, unless you consider that in some mandatory missions, you die upon notice. 5. You die if the dead man notices you In stealth missions, you can jump-kill a guard and die because the guard spots you as your blade digs into his throat. This is, again, stupid. 6. Stealth assassinations aren't so stealthy UBISOFT provides 3 advanced assassination techniques, which are meant to be "stealthed." However, your notority rises every time you perform one of them, even if nobody sees you do it. 7. Now for the big one: the stupid DRM if your internet is unstable, or worse, if UBISOFT decides to depart with the money they grab from you, YOU CAN'T PLAY THE GAME ANYMORE! because this ****ing policy of UBISOFT's says that "all players, single-playing or otherwise, are required to report back to us whenever they play." So if your internet crashes, your game stops. If UBISOFT's server dies for half a day (this has happened at least twice) your game stops. If you pay for the game today and tomorrow UBISOFT takes down their server, your game stops. Period. Speak with your money! If you are to buy this game, at least wait until the big holidays when you can buy one at around $10!!

AC2 brought about the same kind of gameplay with very minor changes. It's about twice as long as the first game, with a routine of combing the cities for whatever is left in them, including the eagle feathers, which are basically hard to find gimmick items like flags in the previous game. Finding the feathers unlocks some features, which unfortunately are too negligible to make up for the time wasted. Locations of the feathers are not indicated on the map, which means that finding the whole one hundred of them is the hardest task in this game. You can still climb towers to unlock viewpoints and covered areas on the map as well as points of interest and merchants. There are 3 kinds of merchants: healers, blacksmiths, and art sellers. You can earn and spend money, the renaissance Italy version of money I think although I don't remember it having any particular name. Speaking of money, there are many treasure chests located throughout the game, which can be sought after for the sake of, again, `finding them all' and some spare change, but the money is unfortunately in abundance long before all the treasure chests are found. The story is quite lengthy and includes a number of revelations, either of personal, to the character, or other kind. It's a matter of personal preference whether the story and revelations are interesting or cliche, I personally liked it. At the beginning you're just a young guy in Florence, from a wealthy family albeit a borderline criminal by today's standards and freely running the streets. The bad guys in the story unfortunately are bland and obvious to the point of looking thuggish and serving only as a target practice. The grand story is told primarily through cut scenes and an additional CGI sequence, which is unlocked through deciphering various `glyphs' hidden in the game world. I'll come back to this in a moment. Now, the idea of the revelation unlocked by finding the `glyphs' is a good one, it's the execution of this idea, which is terrible. After finding a glyph you're basically presented with a series of ugly puzzles on a black background completely unrelated to anything else in the game. They include some pictures from history, e.g. a photo of an atomic bomb explosion, a picture of a tank during WW2, as well as primitive Monty Python-style cut-paste animation. The puzzles themselves range from very easy to hard. The biggest travesty of all is that they take you out of the game thus breaking immersion... (there is a stupid `find the apple [of Eden?] in the picture' in half of those puzzles. There is also another kind of `puzzle' in the game, the GOOD one. They are Assassins' Tombs, which are the best part of this game, IMO. They are in a sense puzzles of physical nature in which you are required to get to a particularly hard-to-get and very remote location within a building or a dungeon. These locations contain items used to unlock something that I won't spoil here... Trying to find your way up (or down) to progress in those is fun and most of the time more exciting than the repetitive and "impossible-to-die-in" combat. Combat is repetitive and despite not being able to control your moves correctly most of the time very easy, just how it was in the original AC. There were very few additions if any compared to the original. Regarding killing people, I could relate to being a mercenary assassin in the previous game. Here, they introduced the main character as someone who's killing out of vengeance and ridiculously enough the head count of his victims at the end of the game is many times higher than what the bad guys did (combined). Cut scenes are sometimes interactive as in oftentimes during a scene you are prompted to press a button to perform an additional action like shaking hands, etc. those actions are irrelevant to the outcome of a particular sequence and can be disregarded. As a matter of fact I couldn't do any of them because you only have a few seconds to hit a button after you see a prompt, which together with the horrid control scheme for keyboard and mouse and my bad reflexes made it impossible. While the countryside is very limited, city environments are beautiful and vast. For example imagine Venice at night, when there is a full moon over one of many canals there and you look up at it and an eerie music starts playing and your jaw literally drops. The cities are larger this time. Venice alone is probably as big as the original Damascus and Jerusalem put together and has more variety, too. NPC related annoyances from the original game are here as well: when the guy is running through alleys or streets and runs into people most of the time he trips over and falls down but they don't. Basically he can climb and jump on the rooftops like Spiderman but dodging standing pedestrians while running, quite slowly at that, is beyond his abilities. Adding more "challenge" by hurting realism is a no-no in my book. In the same vain, traveling on the ground is now preferable to running through the rooftops because the rooftop guards "agro" at much longer distance than the ground guards... and are on every roof now. When you're incognito, you can walk side by side with the ground guards without detection but you are always shot-on-sight by the roof guards. Help (in-game prompts) for keyboard and mouse control scheme is nonexistent. In fact the prompts you see are for the controller, which makes it confusing if you're not using one. P.S. It took me around 40 hrs to finish the game.

I just installed this game and it is beautiful. The story, graphics, gameplay are all top notch. The keyboard/mouse controls are easy once you get the hang of it. I ordered an Xbox controller but doubt I'll use it. Jumping from roof to roof is easy and fun. The visuals are fluid and the views of the Italian cities are awesome. Just running around is lots of fun. The music and sound effects are impressive, with tons of voice clips. The interactions with people are realistic. Bump in to someone and they'll cuss at you. Jump around in front of people and they'll make fun of you. You can also pickpocket to gain funds. There are skills to be learned while fighting. You learn combos, grabs, throws, headbutts ect. I haven't learned all that yet or aquired any weapons, but the game will only get better as that happens. I can't wait to go ninja. About the DRM. I'm not a big gamer so I don't care. I've found a very fun game and won't be buying any others for a while. For those who only play at home where there's always a web connection the DRM won't affect you. If you want to play on the go or in the boonies you're SOL. Maybe UBi will release a patch for disconnected play. To all the people complaining and saying that Ubisoft won't be getting thier cash, you're missing out. Big time. Those folks are obviously hard core gamers and they'd love this game. Ubi knew they had a masterpiece, that's why they did what they did. Kinda like Fox with the Avatar dvd. There is a positive side to the AC2 DRM scheme. You don't need the disc to play. And you can install it on as many pcs as you want (with the registration, so don't buy a used copy). Just sign in and play. After buying Just Cause 2 and a Radeon 4350 and having it play like crap, I was nervous about how AC2 would run on my system. I was over the required and just under the recommended specs. I found a new copy for 26 bucks and it was well worth it. Like I said, screw the DRM. Assassins Creed 2 is one of the best games ever made.

Yes yes we've all heard about the DRM issue everywhere, so I'll spare you the big rant. I will say that despite my displeasure with it, the game only cut out on me once to date. So, while I disagree with this type of DRM, it didn't prevent me from playing the game. In terms of gameplay, Assassin's Creed 2 is much better than the first one. The story is great but the gameplay is so much more fun. There are many more things to do in the cities and the new armor/health system coupled with the notoriety system forces you to be more careful with attacking guards all day (which can be fun). I can't say I remember one dull moment in the game, it was a blast to play. It is no longer the repetitive borefest that plagued the first game. Also, you can now fight with your (dual!) hidden blades! There is now a money system that allows you to buy new weapons, armor, and other things, and while that adds an interesting dimension to the game, I found that by halfway through the game I had so much money that I had purchased everything I could and had nothing to do with it. If money was more scarce or there were more things to buy it would have added to the difficulty of the game. I have no regrets getting this game, I got it on sale and had a blast playing it. Don't let the bad DRM prevent you from a great gaming experience.

good

Overall this is a great game worth every penny, graphics are stunning and gameplay is awesome, some camera angles tend to make the game harder but not enough of those to make this epic game a bad game. 5 *

Pour une raison inconnue, il est impossible de compléter l'installation du jeux. L'installation essaie d'accéder un site de ubisoft qui n'existe plus. ☹️

Great game!

This game is excellent.It's a good upgrade from the first Assassin's creed. The only bad side is that a certain moment, the game freeze for 1-2seconds and come back.Even whith a powerfull computer (Core i7 950, 1gb Asus HD6870 and 12gb RAM), this game lag.I've seen that it is because the game doesn't have a good management of the multiple CPU, so you got to have a good overclocked machine to run the game perfectly.