Games I Don't Like... Assassin's Creed 2

Yeah, I know we have bad game of the week, but you know what? There are a lot of bad games out there, and I don't think we can cover them all on the air, that plus the off chance that I might play a game and not get the chance to share it with Starstorm, and vice versa.

Let me set the scene real quick...

It's September 14th, and I'm bored out of my mind. I need a game to play. I want a character that wears a hood and looks cool, so I explore my options for a short time until I find Assassin's Creed 2. I played the original AC from beginning to end, and it was mediocre at best, and most reviewers agreed with that. However, I heard good things about AC2, and that people who didn't like the original liked this one, so I figured why not give it a try? I buy a used copy from GameStop and take it home and pop that sucker in there.

I will admit, it's a bit different, and did improve on some stuff from the first game. Unfortunately they are all very small improvements. You can purchase weapons and armor now, you own a Villa which you can upgrade and use to make money, and the missions have a bit more variety to them now. You know what though? At the end of the day, the game is still that some one trick pony that it was originally. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop while putting a knife into someone's head can only be fun for so long, and again I think that's why AC2 fails. The storyline is better this time around, Ezio is a much better character than Altair as well, but still... it's hard to save such a boring game.

In my opinion, the best parts of the game are when you go into the Assassin's tombs to recover these assassin key's needed to unlock a special armor, and I probably like them so much because they are like little linear stages instead of the boring open world that the game uses. I think AC would be much better as a linear game, but then again there's no point in doing that because Prince of Persia games already exist. However, I can't just say that about AC2, this is pretty much a problem in all open world games. There's plenty to look at and explore, but nothing to do in it. At least its a step in the right direction though, one day hopefully there will be a good open world game that has linear stages in them. I think No More Heroes was the first game to do this, but the open world sucked way too much, and shouldn't have even been in it.

Then there's the combat system. It's so boring, it always goes like this:

1. Enemies surround you
2. One enemy out of six attack you
3. You counter or disarm
4. Kill said enemy
5. Repeat until all opposition is dead

Granted, you can use smoke bombs if you want, or go through the trouble to spice things up a bit, but why bother when this is like... the tried and proven method to get through all rabble encounters?

I also must say this game is beyond ugly. It has some of the worst clipping I've ever seen, and everyone aside from Ezio just looks plain stupid. I can't stand it...

Metacritic has this game at 90/100 "Critical Acclaim."

More like 50/100... "Critically Mediocre."

I am also happy to report that I managed to return the game for a full refund to GameStop before my 7 days expired! And the money was put towards Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals! Good causes indeed.