Having finally finished the storyline of GTA4, it was time for me to move onto another heavyweight release. I started playing AC2 about five days ago. And to be honest, it has left me wondering if there’s something wrong with me. You know, mentally.

It came out in November of 2009, and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the sequel to Assassin’s Creed 1. I haven’t played that, so don’t expect me to bollock on about how much of an improvement it is over the original. Instead, I’m going to bollock on about how the reviews and generally accepted brilliance of the game bear very little resemblance to my own experience.

Ok, cards on the table. I haven’t finished it. In fact, I’ve probably racked up no more than 7 or 8 hours of total game play time. Is that enough to form a proper opinion? Well if it isn’t, it fucking well ought to be. Because I don’t want to have to play anything that requires 30+ hours of sitting on my arse in front of the telly before I feel able to decide whether or not it’s any good. I can accept that some games are slow burners, and it wouldn’t bother me if I was playing an RPG. But a game that revolves around legging it over rooftops and killing people? I expect (and need) that to grab me firmly by the bollocks after an hour, maximum.

It didn’t.

Things don’t start well. Having not played the first one, the initial sequence (where you play briefly as the famous 90s West Indian barber, Desmond) didn’t mean a lot to me. But it’s hardly David Lynch, and therefore pretty straightforward for my tiny brain to pick up on the plot. Anyway, it’s mercifully brief and you are quickly dumped into a virtual version of Renaissance-era Florence.

And so begins the most tedious in-game tutorial in the history of mankind.

Jesus, it drags. On and on and fucking on. The controls themselves are pretty straightforward, but the developers are intent on showing you the minutia of the environment they’ve created, and it’s boring. So I can sit on benches? Boring. I can buy armour? Boring. I can visit a doctor? Boring. And I can even walk amongst a small group of people and remain undetected by the various baddies that are out to get me? It’s boring, but it’s also really stupid. For a start, your walking pace is always slightly quicker than that of the people around you, meaning you are constantly bumping into them and are forced to stop and then start again. Then bump into them again. I don’t know what the Italian is for “will you watch where you’re going you fucking idiot?” but it definitely should have been included here.

Things barely improve even when the game proper starts. The missions are basically a riff on GTA4: go here, pick something up, bring it back here, kill this guy and so on. But somehow I just seemed to connect more with the environment in GTA4. Maybe it’s because it was set in the present day in a city with cars and guns and that. As opposed to 15th Century Florence with, well, a lot of rooftops.

Ah, the rooftops. One of the central attractions of the game is your character’s ability to climb up just about anything, monkey style. It is never explained quite how or why so many of Florence’s citizens are able to scale walls better than fucking Spiderman. They just can. You can also ‘free run’. Or ‘run and jump’ to give it a less hip, but far more accurate description. To complete these complex maneuvers, one has to really concentrate. Except of course you don’t, not really. You just hold down two buttons and point Ezio where you want him to go and the game mechanics take care of the rest. There is an element of having to think a few step ahead to plan your route, but it’s not very hard. And yet, because I am essentially a mong, I still usually manage to leap gracefully off a rooftop and go plummeting to the ground below. But that doesn’t matter either, because it seems Ezio can fall about five stories before he does himself a serious mischief.

And then there’s the fighty bits. Admittedly, it can be fun when you’re assassinating NPCs, but no more so than any other stealth-type game you’ve ever played. The sword fighting is naff. No doubt there will be more and varied weapons added as the game goes on, but quite frankly unless these include a sniper rifle and an M4 Carbine, I’m not interested. The counter-attack move works pretty well, but takes all of about three seconds to master. And the enemy AI is non-existent. When fighting a group of soldiers (or whatever), half of them just sort of stand about until you actually go somewhere near them, at which point they then seem to remember that they’re supposed to be killing you. Move away a bit and they forget again. The cretins.

AC2 is meant to be a stealth game. It isn’t. Well, sometimes it is. It largely depends on whether your target is the kind of idiot that wouldn’t notice a large man approaching them with two big fuck off knives up his sleeves, or so perceptive that he’ll spot you from a rooftop half a mile away and start slinging fucking arrows at you. How can you tell which he is? You can’t!

Another thing that irritates me about AC2 is its insistence on actually trying to educate you about Renaissance-era Italy. NOT FUCKING INTERESTED. I’ve actually been to Florence. Admittedly there was no way for the developers to know that, and I’m not suggesting they tailor their games to meet my exact needs. (Except I am, obviously.) But the point is, if I want to know about something, I’ll find out about it under my own steam. In the same way that I don’t watch films based on actual events to get an accurate view of history, neither do I play games to read about THE FUCKING BANKING SYSTEM IN 15TH CENTURY ITALY.

So, there we go. That gives you an idea of where I’m coming from with Assassin’s Creed II. But now things start getting weird. Before I wrote this, I decided to have a quick look on Metacritic to get an idea of how the game was received when it came out.

Holy shit.

Seven, that is SEVEN reviewers gave it 100%.

100%

That is, seven people on earth actually thought that AC2 was perfect and could not be bettered in any way. You have to wade through SIXTY-SIX reviews before you hit one under 90%! Sixty-fucking-six! What the Christing fuck?! Here’s some choice comments made by people that apparently know much more about what makes a good game than I do:

“None of the scenes drag out too long…” You’re taking the piss.

“The writers should also be commended for preventing the script from ever descending into melodrama…” You’ve got shit for brains.

“For all its pomp and Renaissance-themed grandeur, the game’s true artistry is revealed in its tiny details, and in its creators’ willingness to turn the focus away from the sheer scale of the thing, and allow individual brief moments to really shine.” Oh fuck off.

“…there’s never a sense of any kind of grind…” This actually made me check the disc in my machine to make sure I was playing the right game. But I was, which means the person that wrote that is a massive bell end.

Actually, all those comments came from the same review. I can’t be arsed to add any more, but they’re all along roughly the same lines. Idiots falling over themselves to offer a celebratory hand shandy to Ubisoft for creating a game that is average at best.

And as pointed out at That Guy’s A Maniac, a lot of the characters do look a bit Joey Deacon.

Balls to it.