In the 2 years that have passed since my Assassin’s Creed review Ubisoft have been working on a sequel that should address many of drawbacks to the first game. It’s not like Assassin’s Creed was that bad. I really liked it, so much so I could forgive the crushingly repetitive nature of the missions and the long, and boring monologues. Oh, yeah, those drawbacks.

So what’s changed in Assassin’s Creed II? Well, the cites are much more detailed and are positively heaving people to interact (kill, bribe or buy stuff from) with. Ubisoft has done a great job optimising the Anvil game engine used in the first game. I just love the whole look and the feel of the game. It’s perfect. Wandering around Venice during carnival is just spectacular. Venice really thrives with people, fireworks, costumes and face masks. Your character, Ezio is also a joy to control. After a few hours (even if you’ve never played the first game) you will be running around rooftops and killing people like a pro! This all helps really pull you into the game.

Assassin’s Creed II has a better plot, shorter more meaningful cut scenes (thankfully!!!!) and characters in the form of Ezio and your best mate Leonardo Da Vinci that are not total arseholes. There is even more variety in the missions. Admittedly, you either kill, follow, fedex an item from A to B, chase or beat people up in these missions so there isn’t a hug amount of variety, but it is a very welcome and much needed improvement. Such is the improvement, Assassin’s Creed II becomes even more of a time killer than the first game. Entire afternoon’s will disappear playing this game. I promise you.

The music in Assassin’s Creed II is just awesome. All the tracks that Jesper Kyd has composed complement the gameplay perfectly. In fact, I have the official soundtrack on my iPhone it’s so good. My person favourite is the Venice Rooftops track (listen on iTunes).

The missions aren’t the only aspect of the game that has been expanded. Multiple weapons, armour, items, money and property development are all now included. Ezio can earn money from the various missions, or pickpocketing people in order to buy better weapons, and develop his home villa (e.g. fix up shops and buildings). Whilst all this brings another aspect to the gameplay, once you get to about half way through the game money becomes pretty pointless as you have so much of it. Well I did anyway!

The only other thing I can find wrong with Assassin’s Creed II is the clumsy way several “memories” are missing from the game, only to turn up – at cost – as downloadable content (DLC). Will I be buying this particular bit of Assassin’s Creed II DLC, well, no I won’t.

In summary: Assassin’s Creed II fixes many of its predecessor’s faults to produce an excellent game. Highly recommended.

Screenshots:

Assassin’s Creed II is out now on Xbox 360 and PS3.

In part 1 of this review I talked about the plot exposition and death. Here, I’m going to talk about controls and movement.

Movement and Environment

I have to admit, when I first saw the visual style of this game, I thought it looked absolutely bollocks. The characters appear to be 2D cartoon models against 3D backgrounds (okay, yes, just like one of my favourite films, Titan A.E.). It looks so jarring in the screenshots. Surprisingly enough, it actually works well in-game. Great job by the art and animation teams.

The 3D environment itself is, frankly, amazing. Click on the screenshots to see bigger versions. The stuff in the background isn’t background matte-painting-style art. It’s the actual gameworld in the distance and you can run right up to it, for the most part. The only time you’ll see load load screens is during map travel, which isn’t really necessary if you plan where you’re going. The world is technically free-reign but really it follows the standard platformer design with the slight twist of “power plates” that let you fly or run from A to B. Along with Elika’s ability to point you in the right direction it’s pretty much impossible to get lost. All good by my standards.

Game controls are absolutely brilliant. Everything has been carefully designed to streamline the experience. Where moving Altair in Assassins Creed is can be painful, jumping from pole to pole is a joy in this game. The Prince is intelligent enough to automatically swing round to the other side of the pole on landing. You don’t have to jump, rotate 90 degrees, rotate another 90 degrees, jump, rotate, rotate just to proceed in a straight line. It’s jump, jump, jump all the way.

The camera does a nice job of following and if it ever moves when you’re in the middle of lining up a jump, I didn’t notice. You get a good locus of control over it and can look pretty much everywhere that is reasonable for the Prince to see. In other words, when he’s clinging to a rock face, no you can’t see what’s behind him even though it would sometimes be really, really useful. His running speed is suited to the world size as well, which is a nice and unusual touch. I even managed to get all the Time Trial achievements.

Challenge

The one thing that really affected my view of this game was the thinking. It’s wild! There are like, actual puzzles that you have to like, solve… all by yourself and everything. Nothing too mind-boggling – they’re mostly about pulling combinations of levers in the correct order to manipulate some machinery. Still, the sheer novelty of not being able to just open a locker and get a combination was impressive in a console game. Even better, Elika doesn’t nag you if you haven’t solved it within 30 seconds.

The other requirement for thinking was collecting the light seeds. (When you clear an area, glowing balls of light appear in both obvious and almost-inaccessible places. It’s apparently good to collect them, though I’m not really sure why.) Not all the light seeds were near the beaten path and some of them were postively evil to track down. I got all 1001 in the end without any help from the interweb or game guides :) See?

You can unlock the Altair costume by signing up to Ubisoft’s website and linking your account to your gamertag.

The Downside

My only real complaint is that the wall-running routes are too blatantly signposted, which takes most of the early challenge out of working out the route. There are bloody obvious scratch marks across the wall of every major path and a lot of the less-travelled ones as well. This aren’t as much help when you’re collecting light seds later in the game, but I do think they detract more from the game than they add to it.

In Summary

I love this game. You have to think a little and the penalty for failure isn’t the rage-inducing annoyance that it is in so many other games. Prince of Persia is just relaxing and fun. Everyone should buy it.

I love Ubisoft’s new Prince of Persia game. It’s not perfect, but it’s as damn near close as I’ve ever seen.

Story

There’s an actual plot with actual personalities and natural sounding dialogue. It’s like they hired a real writer and everything! Elika is a great female character with her own motivations and while yes, she is the obligatory hourglass shape, she wears clothes and has more purpose in the story than just looking pretty and supporting the hero.

Plot exposition is very well handled. Cut scenes are kept short to give you the bare minimum of information that you need to get on with the game. They haven’t let that destroy the story however – those of us who actually enjoy narrative can continue the conversation whenever we want by pulling the left trigger. Plot points are nicely interspersed with character and relationship-building dialogue. They’ve hired some talented voice actors, too. I love it.

Death

The death cutscene is barely a second long – no frustrated bashing the button to try and speed up the same slow-mo death-panning shot you’ve seen a hundred times before, a la Mass Effect. It’s quick and simple and you’re back on your feet, ready to go again. Best of all, the resume point is the last flat surface you were on which is rarely more than 30 seconds back.

Some people might complain that this makes the game too easy but I completely disagree. I think it opens up the world for experimentation that much more. In the recent Tomb Raider demo I spent more time clinging onto vines being afraid to jump because I knew I’d have to do the whole tedious climb-jump-traverse-jump-climb again and again if I was wrong. Even worse, if the camera popped over to a weird angle just as I was about to jump, it wouldn’t even be my failure but I’d still have to pay the price. In Prince of Persia, you’re not afraid to try risky moves in order to reach that light seed that seems just out of reach because the penalty isn’t so bad after all.

Combat

Battles are… interesting. Well, they were interesting for a while. I was very proud of spending an hour or so working out how to break each of the special defences used by the bosses. Then I flipped through the manual and it was right there on page 14 :| After that, the battles got a bit tedious but then, combat isn’t really the point of this game at all. Prince of Persia is all about exploring the environments, and they are beautiful indeed.

That it for part 1. Come back in a few days to read more about the environment and the sheer joy of moving around in this world.

I play the Ace Attorney games obsessively. I played Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice back-to-back over a couple of month during commutes to work.

I do love this series but there are so many things wrong with it that I find it hard to recommend them to people I don’t know well.

Game Mechanics

The gameplay for Trials and Tribulations is almost exactly the same as Justice For All. This wouldn’t be so bad but for one thing; each chapter has at least one point where there are no hints as to the item you have to present to get the story going. Once you know the story, the item is obvious but that’s the whole problem. You don’t know the story. The only way to figure it out is to present everything at every statement until you finally hit upon the right combo. Sometimes you’ve made the right guess as to the story but picked an item that needs to be shown at a later stage. PENALTY!

Even worse, these two PW games introduced psyche-locks – during the investigation, you have to persuade characters to spill their innermost secrets by presenting them with the right piece of evidence or character profile. I found these incredibly tedious (though I like the animation and sound that went with it). The psyche-lock segments made the investigation chapters feel just like the courtroom with the added bonus of multiplying the number of times you could get stuck. Not a good thing as I enjoyed the change of pace between research and courtroom.

In contrast, Apollo Justice did away with the psyche-locks, if not the actual mystery-inventory-item flaws. Instead, you get to do a bit of forensic investigation in the form of fingerprint analysis and the like. We previously saw this in the final DS-only chapter of the first game and it was bloody good. It’s a pity these moments were underused, and just criminal that the only time you got to try them out was when you knew you were going to find something. Still, it was an enjoyable, if fleeting improvement.

The other big change in Apollo Justice was Perception (for want of a better thing to call it). In Bracelet Perception Mode (don’t ask) you can scrutinise the witness’s body language and looks for a “tell” to indicate that they’re lying. This was almost fun but for the fact that you could only look at a tiny part of the witness at a time. Allowing me to zoom out for less detail would have been less frustrating as each character had roughly five testimony statements, three different “phases” to a statement where they could lie and four different body parts that could have a tell.

Characters

(Teeny spoiler here revealing characters that appear in Trials and Tribulations)
The greatest thing about the Phoenix Wright series is the characters that you meet. They’re all quirky and distinctive. So why does Phoenix not grow at all during the first three games? Even by the end of game three, he’s still a self-doubting rookie who needs a sidekick to kick him into action. This was made all the more obvious in the chapter where you get to play Edgeworth, self-confident and in control. Frankly, Edgeworth was just awesome in that chapter and I really hope that Gyakuten Kenji keeps him that way.
(End of spoiler)

I had hoped that new protagonist Apollo Justice would be less timid but noooooooo. Three games of building up Phoenix’s confidence and now you get dropped right back where you started with a rookie attorney who needs to be taught about the Court Record and presenting evidence all over again. Aaaaargh!

In Summary

Not that different from the original game, really. Great storytelling, crappy gameplay. Not a dealbreaker for me but would be for most people I know.

Screenshots

This week I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft PC demos. Okay yes, one of them was a trial for World of Warcraft. Which I then bought 2 days later and have been playing ever since. But back to the point… this week I played the demos of PC games Mr Robot and Runaway 2: The Dream of The Turtle.

Mr Robot

Mr Robot is a homegrown independent game by Sheffield-based Moonpod. It’s a quirky little puzzler set on a spaceship. The script is engaging, the graphics are nice and the puzzles are reasonable. There’s enough of a story lurking in the background to make you want to play a little further. You want to find out what’s really happening around poor lowly Asimov. Plus, you get to push crates onto annoying zappy robots.
Continue Reading

Age Rating: 7+ (PEGI)

What is it?

A spoooooky mystery.

Is it fun?

No.

Is it worth the money? £24.99

No.

Why not?

It’s another in a plethora of stories masquerading as games. They seem to plague the DS. Unfortunately, this story isn’t very good.

You wander around from room to room poking things until you trigger a 5-minute-long chunk of plot exposition-through-dialogue. And not even the kind you can leave playing while you walk away to do something interesting. You have to keep poking options. On the rare occasions that you actually get to do something, it’s trivial and not at all challenging. One memorable scene had me drawing circles on the screen to simulate cranking a wheel that opened a gate. Another had me scrubbing the stylus across the screen to rub rust off a plaque. Whoop-dee doo.
Continue Reading

Age Rating: 16+ (PEGI)

What is it?
An interactive adventure with a compelling storyline. Also available on Xbox 360.

Is it fun?
It’s… interesting. I wouldn’t say fun.

Is it worth the money? £17.99
No.

Why not?

It’s not a game, it’s an interactive story. And by interactive, I mean that you get the exciting tasks of walking around large areas, carrying objects from one section of the level to another (and back) and, if you’re lucky, the chance to hack into locks through a simple mini-game.
Continue Reading

Age Rating: 12+

What is it?

A bizarre and wacky adventure game from the creator of Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. UK release date of 03/02/2006

Is it fun?

Yes.

Is it worth the money? (£17.99 from play.com)

Yes, definitely worth the price of a large pizza and chicken strippers from Dominos. Mmm… pizza…

Why?

It has quotes like:

“I hope you learned something today”

“Yes! Shooting things is fun. And useful”

“Uuh… no.”

Continue Reading