Sometimes it takes me awhile to get to a game I want to play due to money and/or time constraints. First thing is first, it took me roughly 15 hours to play through the game. Those 15 hours include getting 80% of the discoverables. That includes finding all the high points in the game, upgrading the town 100%, finding the videos and codexes etc.....
To be clear, I think 15 hours is a pretty good amount of gameplay for most games. You play through the game as an Assassin doing assassin things, ya know, killing and climbing and hanging out with prostitutes. To be honest the story is pretty blah for the most part but I suspect most people are playing this game with the purpose of assassinating and exploring in mind. Prepare for that and not so much the story. The story doesn't really go anywhere until the end. You begin the story in Florence and there are several smaller towns you can go to until you finish the game in Venice, the largest of the areas.
Now to the nitty gritty. I said that I would value this game at $30. Its not a bad game but it suffers the problem that most sandbox and sandbox-like games suffer, repetitiveness. Through the first 10 hours or so the games is pretty fun. And by the that I mean the first hour is so boring it made me want to swallow a Raccoon. Once you slog through the setup the game starts to become more fun. You get your assassin gear and you start a'killing but all of you moves are not unlocked. It seems that the main character, Ezio, can figure out how to pull a man off a roof until he gets further along in the game. In AC 1 you were given more abilities as you were given your equipment back. In AC 2 your character is simply to dumb to figure it out himself. It doesn't really bother me but it seems arbitrary and personally I would have enjoyed all of his skills at once. It seemed to artificial and forced to create this gameplay evolution. Its as if Ubisoft knew games classically have had a similar pattern of increased power with increased progress through a game and implemented it without thinking. However, as I said before, this didn't really bother me.
Your City and You
You get a villa that you can add on to. Its a great element to the game that holds of the seemingly inevitable repetitiveness that will soon over run the meager defenses of the sandbox game. Your villa starts of run down...what ever will you do? Do not fear for you dilapidated home away from killing for you are provided with a full time architect. As you gain money you can improve and add things to your city that in turn raise the income from the city and give you discounts on goods bought there. Along with this you also can collect all of the weapons and art in the game and have them on display in your villa, after you have cleaned all the blood and brains off of course. This gives you a great feeling of "more" to the game outside of the constant killing and while simple and easy (there is no real strategy and you can upgrade the city very fast)it provides a nice change of pace. But like I said (see over run defense comment above) the game gets repetitive and begins to drag on a bit. Ubisoft did a great job of mixing up the levels and making each task a little different. Unfortunately, they all really just boil down to either kill some guards, follow someone or kill a High Value Target.
The game is fun, but if you have limited income like I do then I say rent it. You can beat it in a week with some dedication. If you want to own, you will likely find little reason to replay it anytime soon but my value for it is around $30.
No comments:
Post a Comment