A Killer Sequel

Sequels tend to do one of two things: one, act as a method by which a developer can lean on past works and positive critical acclaim to drive quick, easy sales for fast cash, or two, allow developers a chance to soften up the rough edges of a title and see their initial vision through to a better, more polished end the second time around.

The former, much like in Hollywood, is abused far too often and really gives sequels as a whole a bad wrap, to the point that even talking about anticipation of an upcoming sequel draws snappy comments and glaring looks from those smug, thumb-your-nose types who like to ramble on about how sequels are cop-outs that ruin creative thinking and are instead developer cash-ins on an old idea gone stale because they couldn't do something new and exciting. Yeah, we both know the types. But in a world where developers like EA can crank out an entirely "new" sports game every 9 months, or a market that will actually accept (and gladly support) eleven different Mario Party games - not even copy cats, mind you - since 1999, can you blame them?

The answer is no, especially since for every Mario Party or Madden (well, maybe every 2-3) there is instead a fresh, new, interesting concept that just needs a few adjustments to really shine or perhaps has a new tale to tell outside of its original one. Can you imagine what gaming would be like if we didn't have sequels? We'd never have Half-Life 2. You would never know of the wonders of Hyrule in 3-D (or reimagined 2-D for that matter). There would be no Final Fantasy 7 to spark the JRPG craze, no Grand Theft Auto 3 to practically define 'sandbox' gaming as we know it. And of course, more recently, we wouldn't have an Assassin's Creed 2. And that would be a real shame.

Granted, I'm not one of those people that really had that big of a problem with the first game. Yes I could see some small flaws but as a whole - and especially for a new IP trying to broaden or even change the definition of an entire genre - it was a near masterpiece of technical execution and a driving force in defining this generation of console's interactive entertainment. Sure there were some glitches, yeah not everything was totally polished and if you really forced yourself to be a completionist but didn't like it you would easily get frustrated, but as far as first passes go it was really a tour de force. But at that point I'm really reaching for reasons to fault the game aside from just admiting that even the best things aren't perfect.

That is, of course, until now. Assassin's Creed 2 is so much more vast, detailed, immersive and open-ended that it makes the first game look like a tech demo by comparison. I will not lie when I say that this was easily my most anticipated game of the year and I went in expecting great things, only to be blown away by how much more improved and built up everything was. Does it still have flaws? Definitely. Is it better in every way than the original? Absolutely. Is it "Game of the Year"? Well I don't remember exactly everything that came out this year (I should probably do a retrospective and comment on that) but it is easily up there with the rest of them, and likely leading. If you liked the first one even a little bit - if some small bit got you pulled in but you got frustrated, or maybe you liked it but thought it was a bit bland, or were aggrivated with the glitchy PS3 version, or just never really got all that into it, just close this window right now and go get a copy because I can almost guarantee this game will convince you that Ubisoft knows what it is doing, and doing it well.

Story wise the premise is the same - you go back in time (kinda) to become an Assassin and learn more about his life and the ultimate part you (the 'present day' character) play in this story. Except that the sequel picks up almost immediately where the first one left off and does not lazily walk you through the tutorial. From the first second you power on the game you are thrown into a hostile situation and you must learn (or relearn) many of the basic moves by means of actively using, not passively learning and copying. It is, in my opinion, a much more captivating way to familiarize the player to the controls that keeps them interested and doesn't make them feel like they have to have their hands held the entire time. The way they explain the concept of the control method, "puppeteering" (where the 4 buttons each represent a part of the body at all times) is especially neat and I think conveys the system's intent much better than the first game.
 
The first thing you will notice, though, as things cool down is that this time the story is not so much about the 'Assassin' of the past as it is the person. You spend a fair amount of time living out Ezio Auditore's (our new Assassin) early adult life, meeting his family and setting the stage for his eventual transition into the role of the Assassin and how he gets involved in all this. In the first game, Altair was not exactly a mute but he often was merely a tool used by Ubisoft to tell the story or give it more of a central point. You never really learn much about him, he's not even really all that likeable (he gets demoted for basically being a self centered know-it-all) and he really never is that relatable for a few breif moments near the end of the game. It is clear that Ubisoft spent more of it's time developing and crafting a world around Ezio (who you play as 95% of the time anyway) instead of throwing the part away as a gameplay device and trying to focus as much on the present time, and it shows. It helps make the game feel like it can stand on it's own more because you at least complete Ezio's part in the game (save the soon-to-be-released DLC), making the now famous cliffhanger endings that much more bearable. With more time spent on characters in that world as well, it gives many more unique and powerful supporting roles that really helps bring Italy alive as you play and explore. The world feels bigger, yet less vacant. There are more people but they aren't just more empty faces in a crowd. And there's more story of the character you actually play and get invested in, not of the one you rarely see. Overall, the presentation is improved in nearly every way and it really shows.
 
Gameplay wise, again, nearly the same, but with noted improvements to fix what was seen as 'bad' with the first one or just to make things a bit more intriguing or fun. Your arsenal grows substantially, and while you still have your staples in the hidden blade, short sword and sword, you can now pick custom weapons that have different strengths and weaknesses (ability to deflect, damage dealt, etc) as well as a slew of new (and wicked deadly) methods to choose from. Try the poison, which you can use on an unsuspecting guard to send them flailing around in a beserk rage at those around him before he expires. Or the smoke bombs, to quickly get out of sticky situations without having to be constantly chased down and knocked over by guards. There are many more incredibly useful new toys to play with, but I'll do my best to save you the surprises for yourself in case you ever pick up the game. Suffice it to say that if you ever found yourself thinking that the fighting in the first game was too boring and repetitive, there are so many new weapons and gadgets to choose from that you'll be hard pressed to go even 10 minutes killing every guard the same way.
 
And, ironically enough, you hardly even have to fight if you don't want to. New gameplay options like blending and hiring helpers can get you much farther much faster than just brute force slayings ever could. Need some guards distracted? Hire some courtesans to flirt with them while you sneak past. How about need some guards moved so you can go for the kill on the guy they are guarding? Call over some theives and have them steal from one of the guards and they will give chase. Maybe you just want to get through a crowded, guarded area without being seen. Blend in with crowds and even walk with them undetected (and not just select people like the first game - pretty much any group of peope). Of course, if you prefer the brute force method, round up a few mercenary friends to fight by your side as you take down a large group of enemies. There are many ways to help keep the pressure off you so you don't have to fight 40 guards between you and your next true victim.
 
Speaking of victims, the story plays out much more like a story now and much less like a list of chores you need to accomplish before you are given your allowance. No more choosing from a list of side missions that are available and being forced to complete some number of them before you are allowed to proceed. Everything you do plays its part in the story and helps to set up the next kill in a very linear, easy to follow fashion. Side missions are still there - races make a still-aggrivating comeback, as well as do small-fry assassinations and new events like "beat ups" - but they are entirely optional and usually only give money and completion. Many of the hired, non-story assassinations end up being quite challening and fun, and there are so many that if you do every side mission between 'real' ones that you could easily go 3-5 hours between story bits just exploring and completing things that have recently opened up to you. Even more OCD things - like feather collecting - make an appearance, but even they are more well organized and better executed than the first.
 
The main storyline offers enough different gameplay to really show off the new system and keep you interested while not becoming too monotonous (with one notable exception being the 'fetch' quest at the end, but even then that's probably not too bad unless you just ignored every side item available to you ever), all the while improved and expanded on with a better story and characters to really help it along. At this point if you honestly think the game is still "repetitive" you either need to be doing something different every 5 seconds, in which case you need professional help for some supercharged ADHD, or you just have a vendetta against the game and like to use popular buzzwords to slap it down. Between your new toys, the new missions and the much better story and characters, there is really no reason for you to go around doing the same thing every time except your own laziness.
 
Graphically the game is a marvel of the raw power of this generation of devices (just like the last), but is even more pleasing because instead of harsh, bland desert to see for miles around you get things like green mountainsides, vast oceans or bustling cities. Somehow the facial animations and lip-synching seem to have taken a bizzare step in the backwards direction, often being difficult or awkward to look in close ups but otherwise fine at long distance, but otherwise animation is generally smooth and impressive. The new kills and counter kills are incredibly brutal (and an absolute joy to watch) although the occasional hiccup/glitch can sometimes leave you stealing money from out of the air or breaking the 'knee' of a wall but considering all the incredible things it tries to accomplish I can almost say that I'm amazed it doesn't happen more. All together it's significantly more polished than the first ever was, but it leaves me wondering if perhaps they are capping out the raw throughput of current-gen tech and are just having to find weird or different ways to hide it in the world as it grows and evolves.
 
When all is said and done, Assassin's Creed 2 is everything done right in a sequel: Improvements across the board in almost every possible way while really expanding the scope of the game and helping cement it's style in place. It is extremely difficult to think of a reason NOT to recommend this game as I believe even people who strongly disliked the first have a good reason to give this one a try, and people who loved the first have no excuse for not already owning it. A few minor flaws aside, Assassin's Creed 2 helps Ubisoft prove it has a winner in it's newest franchise that only left me wanting more, which I will get in the form of DLC in January and Feburary. After that, well, it's probably another 2 years of wondering exactly where the next game will take place and patiently waiting for even the smallest hints of news about it. After seeing how much they improved between #1 and #2, I can't wait to see what they can do with the third iteration.

It'll leave you wishing for an apocalypse...

A friend of mine recently reminded me (read: chided me) for not reviewing recently, and after looking here and realizing I haven't written anything since early September, I have to completely agree with him. I've been lazy and should really fix that. So, here we go, the completion of  something I started in September (although I don't feel bad because the game is over a year old at this point) and promise of attempting to be more diligent in the future (we're heard that one before though, right?).

I actually had someone request two reviews of me: one was for World of Goo, which I was more than happy to do, and Fallout 3. While it looks like I'm merely doing these because I was requested to (more requests are certainly appreciated, hint hint), the fact that I just very recently finished it is equally as good of an excuse to write a review for it. So, while the game is not exactly new, my experience of definitely it is.

I will honestly say that, besides being aware of the Fallout franchise, I was otherwise completely oblivious to anything about it. I haven't played the first two games, nor any of the spinoffs associated with it, so I was completely oblivious of its history and roots. The first time I actually even saw a Fallout game was at PAX08, watching the Bethesda team show off their demos on the expo floor and going to the Fallout 3 panel to watch them more fully explain/show off what the game could do. The game looked impressive visually, but I had one small problem with it that I couldn't overcome that prevented me from getting hyped about it. Ironically, that problem is freedom.

You see, I am one of those people that still has nightmares about Morrowind. I can not even begin to tell you how many times I have started Morrowind, only to get so engrossed and so involved in the game that I completely forgot where I was, what I was doing or where I was attempting to go. The freedom offered by those games actually paralyzes me to the point that I no longer find interest in the game because I cannot keep focused on anything and get overwhelmed at what I've gotten myself into. Case in point: on one play though, I was playing through Morrowind and had gotten about as far as I'd ever gotten. I'd done my best to try and stay focused on ONLY the main story and to give it my best shot at "beating" the game, if it's even possible to call it that. I played off and on for several weeks, not devoting my full attention to it but simply attempting to continue to move through the game. I got to a quest in the game that required me to retrieve a special book of some kind, I don't exactly remember what, but I had (apparently) already gone and picked up this book... and promptly lost it. I looked around the town to see if I had sold it somewhere, or perhaps placed it down in one of my impromptu "houses" but it was completely lost. My freedom to steal, sell, and place absolutely anything anywhere had found a way to block my progress yet again, and to this day I've never gotten farther than that.

So when people talked about Fallout being "like Oblivion" (which I had never picked up for much the same reasons), and it was being created by pretty much the exact same team, I was instantly turned off. Another open world game that I'm going to get completely lost in? Yeah, no thanks. So I managed to survive the hype, watching as Bethesda released the game to huge critical and commercial success, pushed out a truckload of extra DLC goodies, and maintain a constant stream of coverage in gaming news and commentary articles everywhere. But eventually, as I tend to do, I caved. Too many people just said too many good things about this game for me to ignore it anymore. I just had to play the final copy for myself to see if it was actually something I can get into.

100 hours later, I think I can safely say that was a good decision (if not a really, really long one).

The game has a very interesting way of starting you off in a sort of glorified tutorial, letting you see your own birth, determining what you would look like in the future, using your baby years to determine your stats, and your teenage years to determine your skills or style of play. It does a pretty good job of catering to both newcomers and replayers alike, allowing you to skip the test parts to determine your own stats directly without requiring you to know the specific answers you need to choose. It is always nice when a developer takes the boring (yet often necessary) tutorial and spends time working it into their world. Certainly much more friendly, intuitive and fun to do than sitting through screen after screen of character creation options like I did in Morrowind.It really helps add to that sense of being involved in the story and a part of the world.

After your story really begins, well, you step out into one of the most expansive and marvelous spans of desolation and destruction I've seen in a while. Yes, it suffers from your standard "realistic graphics" problems - lots of greys and browns with nothing really stylized or colorful to speak of - and the post apocalyptic setting does absolutely nothing to help this. Most of what you'll see in the world is little more than an eerily empty wasteland, occasionally inhabited by wild creatures or bandits. But that doesn't mean the entire world suffers for it. It may be hard to have the drab, boring landscapes take you in, but that style really does capture the state of the world quite well and help make the few inhabited areas of the world feel a little bit more lively. Despite not being much to look at aesthetically, some areas really will catch your attention. Maybe it's the skyscraper that stands tall over the otherwise ruined buildings, the luscious trees clumped together in the middle of the barren world, or just the shock of seeing the more iconic monuments of Washington D.C. partially destroyed and overrun with mutants. It may be somewhat bland and dark, but the game presents itself quite well and uses what it has to full effect.

Unfortunately, that means both the good with the bad. People still look and 'feel' more like robots than they do humans, shuffling stiffly from area to area and never really looking 'normal' doing so. Dialogue and facial animations are even worse, never quite selling you on what is being said and the emotion being portrayed, which is sad because the voice acting in the game is rather top-notch. The radio personality "Three Dog" (or is it "dawg"?) has a very powerful and interesting personality over the radio, made even stronger by the fact he is often your last connection to humanity as you traverse the empty wastes in your quest, but in person the mystique and personality is just ruined by clunky animations and awful facial expressions. Maybe Valve has really spoiled us with the amazing work they did on Half Life 2, but it has been very hard of late to find games that can truly overcome the stiff, robotic feel of physical movement and speech.

Fortunately for you, very little of that matters because you will be so busy lapping up the detailed world and all of the things you can do in it that you'll hardly notice (or care) all that much about those things. While Fallout 3 is probably as expansive (if not more so) than Morrowind, it solves many of the problems I had with it through better gameplay decisions and UI choices. While there are many missions you may choose to go on at any time, they are all noted, collected and organized directly with your map in a way that leaves absolutely no question as to where you need to go or what you need to do. Even notes or speech that triggered the objective are kept around in case you would like to listen again or might need a specific piece of information to guide you in the right direction. This is especially true of the main story, where it is most needed, and really helps because often times you will spend 8-10 hours doing side tasks and completely forget what you were doing and where you needed to go.

There are still some small quests that have no formal means of tracking, but these are usually side quests that have no real bearing on the story (or your character) and are more for the rewards, back story, or just to add general flavor to the world. While it is easy to get lost or forget what you were doing on those, I'm personally OK with that because it did not hinder me from 'beating' the game and allows those who are interested in doing so they chance to really explore the world on their own. Despite being so adamant about wanting to make sure I always have a firm grasp of where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do next in a game, I still believe that there should be some reward and sense of accomplishment for just exploring, as that is something that many people still like to do.

Fast travel is an amazing addition, letting you quickly travel to any place you've been to before, from anywhere in the world, so long as you aren't near enemies or in an area where you shouldn't be able to do so. Some may argue that it ruins the size of the world by being able to do that, but very rarely do I want to spend 20-30 minutes trekking back to a town just to buy or sell something. I get a good enough idea of the size and scope of the world as I am uncovering new places and going new areas. I don't want to be reminded of how big it is when the game tells me I need to go halfway across the map for my next quest, I just want to get back to the action!

Like any good Bethesda RPG, you can customize your character in any number of ways - from hair to shape to stats and abilities - and can play the game multiple different ways and still succeed. I chose to play as a sneaky, small arms type but you could just as easily be a tough, big arms type or a quick, melee weapon fighter (or even a more dialogue and bartering type, although there are parts where combat is difficult if not impossible to avoid). How you interact with the populace and complete missions can effect your karma score, making you and angel or a devil in the eyes of the world and changing how they interact and deal with you in other ways. Maybe as an evil character, good NPCs might be more wary of you or unwilling to co-operate, or as a good player you are showered with gifts and adoration from the ones that you have saved from the harsh realities of the wasteland.

There is nothing terribly fancy that occurs based on your alignment (with a few notable exceptions), and typically it is just another "stat" that you can customize that affects what your character has access to, but the system is well implemented throughout and would make a second playthrough as the opposite type feel and play very different. Unfortunately it is extremely easy to become evil and very difficult and time consuming to go back to good, and occasionally you will perform actions that have consequences you did not expect or intend, but overall it does help make you feel like you are having a real impact on the world around you and the lives you are affecting (for good or ill).

The combat is generally fun and entertaining - especially as you crit and blow off limbs or the like - and the VATS system helps break it up a little bit by letting you aim for weak spots and take down enemies faster. Of course, there is so much to do in the world and so many different places to explore that eventually it can start to feel very repetitive and boring regardless of how fun or interesting it was, especially on enemies to whom you are not well equipped (or built) to handle. For instance, my small arms character had a very difficult time with many of the robotic enemies because few (if any) of my weapons did significant damage to them and they tend to have very large health pools to go with their very high damage resistance. The combat is just no longer very interesting when you have to dump 5-6 entire clips worth of ammunition into something and continuously heal hoping that you can kill it before it kills you. I suppose that, when playing as a character that focused on bigger, more powerful weapons, those types of mobs might not be very tedious, but then you couldn't sneak past many fights like I could, so it seems like every playstyle might have a few aggravating moments to it. Not that 'a few moments' are enough to ruin a 100 hour experience, but they are still worth noting.

Occasionally, combat bugs out and will shoot areas you did not intend or otherwise not perform as expected, but this is a rare (and unfortunate) occurrence that is just one part of a much larger problem the game suffers from: bugs. And I don't mean the radscorpions that hunt you down in game. I mean the "whoops my game froze and I haven't saved in a while", "I'm being attacked but can't see my enemy", " I'm looking for an NPC who hasn't spawned or is walking the wasteland for no apparent reason" kind. You would be hard pressed to play 2-3 hours of the game without running into some kind of bug, although most of them are small and not huge deal breakers. There are enough big ones to really give you a headache, and in fact I stopped playing after nearly 100 hours due to a bug that prevented me from collecting all of the bobble heads, so the game is far from perfect on that. I feel bad even mentioning it, considering what a monumental task it must be to expect someone to actually be able to test, find, and fix every single bug in a game as massive as Fallout 3, but just because I understand the amount of time it would take to find and fix it does not assuage me when I fall victim to one myself. If I had one *real* complaint about the game it would be the number of bugs that still exist, even after all of the patches.

Despite this, the game maintains a very nice level of overall polish that really helps it stand out. The individual portions of the game might not be incredible on their own - the story is good but not exceptional, the voices are well done but the characters are poorly animated, etc - but the way that Bethesda has weaved them all together and just the sheer amount of love and detail that has gone into creating this world is more than enough reason to give this game a shot. Not only does the disc itself have enough content to last you 60+ hours, but there are 5 downloadable expansions that can easily extend the game into the 100 hour range (note: I only downloaded and played Broken Steel, which I thought was very good), and if that's not enough you could always play through again as a different combat style or alignment for an almost completely new experience. If you are the kind of person that hates buying games for a 6 hour campaign only to then shelf it for life, you do not need worry here. This game will be with you a long, long time.

So what are you waiting for? Post Apocalyptic America is calling your name.