The industry can do better than this. Why such unanimously positive reviews? If you're skeptical, read this.
Things I liked about the game (and there are a lot of them. I know where quality is and where it isn't):
1. Great story. Even if the gameplay wasn't the greatest for me at least the storyline was compelling! Great ending too.
2. Great graphics. This is to be expected of a game such as this. It seems games with good graphics tend to get positive reviews. Why is this?
3. Pretty good presentation. Good sound, well-paced cutscenes, average voiceacting.
4. Nice mini-games, nice meta-world and conspiracy lore, and great game taste. You get to learn a bit about history too (despite a few small inaccuracies).
Here's my gripes with the game:
1. The gameplay. Why is it that the gameplay seems to be forgotten sometimes? Let it be known in the history books that this game had only average gameplay, probably way below average in my opinion.
a) At NO point in the game did I EVER feel challenged or that I was going to die. You never fought more than about 7 guys at a time, any more and the guys basically just stack up, fall into the background, or run away. In Assassin's Creed 1, you sometimes had to wade through over 25 men in desparation, having to keep an eye on your health bar. You also actually had a motive to run away. If your health was running low and you still had 15 challenging enemies to kill, you might find in yourself in a tight situation, and have to run as fast as you can and hide in a haystack. What about in AC2? You get an absolutely HUGE health bar, and it only grows huger as the game goes on. If your health gets low? No problem! You have a tool belt filled with over 10 medicines that you can take at any time. Each medicine fills your health as high as you will need. If you run out of medicine, there are basically doctors on every street corner who will ensure that your medicine pouch remains bridled.
b) As for the gameplay itself? No problem. All you have to do is mash the X button to attack. Press R1 to block and R1+X to counter. If you want, you can "grab" people with the B button. That's it at this the only thing you will ever have to do in this game!!! For 20+ hours, moving through the game, fighting mediocre-class enemies, you will never at a single point ever feel like your life is in danger. Your enemies pale in comparison to your skills. Even the "boss-like" enemies have no chance. Why is the game so incredibly easy? Why is it that game developers think we want this type of experience. After a while it felt like a chore to wade through this incredibly easy game. You might as well have taken the controller out of the player's hands and labelled it "movie", and let the 20-hour game play itself.
Save for some slightly larger guys you will have to fight later which you will have to press the "A" button to dodge, this is the ultimate sum of all of your fight experiences. If you want to run away? No problem, just exit battle and run away in a linear direction for a couple of moments, and the guards will not be able to catch you. You will eventually become anonymous. There is little incentive to "blend" with your surroundings, because the enemies are so easy to kill. Ripping off posters and bribing heralds to reduce your "notoriety" level feels like a chore afterwards. If a group of enemies begins to rush you you might find yourself sighing in impatience.
So all in all, it is literally impossible to die or fail in AC2. If you do happen to come across the misfortune of dying it is little more than a temporary annoyance to have to come back to life again. (Usually you will have fallen off a building or something.)
2. Minor annoyances with pacing. Every 20 or so seconds, you will encounter a situation where Ezio does something very slowly and you need to sit there and wait for 3-4 seconds. So take every 20 seconds you play, add 4 seconds, and you have a 20% longer gameplay experience just sitting there. Why would they do this? For realism. Annoying situations include: Opening treasure chests (there are 500+ chests that you have to open in the game, one at a time, and each chest takes about 5 seconds to open); situations where you want to drop down a medium distance, but you are forced to watch Ezio hang down from from a ledge and drop down vertically; Ezio climbing up a ledge hand-in-hand as he tries to slog through the city; and just general situations where Ezio just seems to be doing something slowly. You will often have a situation where Ezio bounds off a ledge into a wall or lake, annoyed that the controls aren't tight enough. When the game has sluggish slownesses plaguing every moment of the game I consider that a serious gameplay problem.
3. I know the game tries to be historically accurate, but the cities you get to explore in this game are underwhelming compared to the first game. In AC1, you got to climb mind-bogglingly humongous stone castles, towers and masonries. You could reach as far as 500 feet into the air, experiencing nothing but a faint fog and sound of the wind, and tiny little buildings everywhere. Sure, buildings that high probably never existed in the 400s, but nobody cared, this was a video game. When you're 500 feet in the air, you would say, "Wow, am I really up this high? Are those tiny little things down there actually houses?" Only to fall for 5+ seconds into a conveniently placed haystack.
However, none of that in AC2, at least not on the same scale. The highest buildings are smaller churches and church towers, and they rise little more than about 100-150 feet into the air. You get to climb much less higher buildings, and this was a huge disappointment, because the heights were some of the most exhilarating moments in AC1.In AC2, a lot of what you get to explore are flatter farmlands, and smaller, more realistic cities.
All in all, I would recommend this game as a rental, but it suffers from a problem that has been plaguing so many sequels: the previous game has great gameplay, and the sequel has dumbed-down gameplay; however, the graphics are just as good and they add a few more gimicks and no one seems to notice. Why does no one notice? I don't know, but I do know that I did notice, and I will take the time to report it. If you are a bit skeptical at the unanimously positive reviews that we have been seeing all across the board, then this is the review for you, because in my opinion it explains some truths that other people seemed to have overlooked. In my opinion, if a game has spectacular visuals, a good story, but crappy gameplay and a sluggish design, it is still not a good game. So overall score? Definitely not a 9.0, not even an 8.0. I'm giving it a 6.0, just because of how unchallenged I felt and how boring and sluggish the game became.
EDIT: May 29, 2010
Recommended by 8 of 18 users... seriously guys and gals? You actually like a game as unchallenging and bland as this? If you want good graphics, watch a movie. If you want good story, read a book. If you want good gameplay, don't play this game. I stand by what I say, and I remain convinced that there are many people who agree with me. This game is aimed at young gamers who are experiencing games for the first time, and for that reason, it's easy and simple. But for seasoned veterans who expect a little more out of their games than just mashing 1 button for the entire game, stay away from Assassin's Creed 2.
This is what I honestly think of the game, and I couldn't give it any more than a 6. Thanks.