erastes

Hmmm….

I love this series. I do. Partly because it's been filled with games that I not only finish but am actually pretty damned good at (apart from roof chases, where fall off, wobble around on the edges, go the wrong way and generally panic or behave like a drunken fool). I have really appreciated the way the games have grown, expanded, added elements and got swiftly away from the "do three things to get to the boss section" rigidity of the first game.

But with this game, I really felt that the developers had listened to one person too many, and had done so much to make it as accessible as possible that they had made it too damned accessible and it was so blooming easy that I breezed through it as if... I was going to put "it was SuperMarioLand" here but then realised that I really struggled with that game and it was a hell of lot harder.

Due to the size of the city (Constantinople) I thought I was really going to have an epic game in front of me, so I was disappointed only to have 9 sequences to start with, and the dungeons were laughably simple. (I assume that Ubisoft will want MORE money and produce Download Content in short order to give us more quests and we will pay like idiots) I remember screaming and pulling my hair out with some of the dungeons in previous games, having to do sections over and over again to get the acrobatics right, but although the dungeons were mind-bogglingly-eye-wateringly beautiful in ACR, they again--were far too simple. I actually did the "Chase the Templars in the boat" section in one swift uninterrupted run which is Not Like Me, I assure you. One reviewer I saw on Youtube said it was probably because in previous games the dungeons were optional quests, whereas in this game they are part of the story and have to be done. But all the same, was that any reason to make them so bloody easy?

The balance of the game was off, WAY off. I finished the game but found that I still had one den to free, and I had only converted a fraction of shops - hadn't bought any landmarks. I never had enough money, to buy anything much – not even weapons or upgraded pouched. I never bought the crossbow (which was hugely expensive) and I LOVE the crossbow, as I never had the dosh in my pocket long enough. In Ac2 and in Brotherhood I had time enough and money enough to do this as I went along. I didn't really feel like going back and doing it all AFTER the story had finished, because Ezio was no longer there, and had in fact been banished.

Where were all the side quests? I am assuming they were to be found in the Faction houses or HQs or something, but I never found them—once again the map was very difficult to read unless you blew it up every time and then the directions/distance were hard to judge. There was what looked like an interesting sub-sub-quest where you had to blow open the locked wells so you could use them as hiding places, but you only found them by accident and it was far far easy to escape from any guards who were chasing you and once again you could call in the assassins you had trained to take out anyone who was after you anyway.

I hated that concept, and wish that it was an “opt in” choice. In the first and second game it was all down to you. Finding the right spot, choosing your route, staying out of site, out of trouble, out of the eyeline of the guards and then right at the crucial moment you would strike, change direction and walk away and no-one would be any the wiser. Now all you have to do was find your target then press one button and the assassins do the hard work, I mean – where’s the bloody challenge in that? That’s like getting Solid Snake to sneak into an armed encampment, hide under a truck, press L2 and then the SAS turn up and kill everyone in the vicinity while Snake has a crafty wank. I mean fag.

I also felt - repeating what I said above about the developers listening to everyone - that the Den Defence mini game was irritating in the extreme. It was purely a very pretty "defend the tower" desktop game and I never found the right way to kill the armoured machine things. So what I did was let all the rampaging Templars run past me, screaming and waving their big swords, go “la la la” for a few moments while the required number entered the den (and oddly set fire to it while they were in there) and the den and area fell to Templars. All I had to do then was find the Den Captain, whistle for the Assassins and the area was mine again without all that mucking about with protecting the tower. BORING.

I was surprised there wasn't a version of Angry Birds, to be honest. Throwing pigs at Templars. Now that could have been fun.

As for the ending, I was pretty annoyed about it. When are we going to get ANY answers? All Zeus (or whoever it was) told us was more of What We Already Knew.

Beautiful, fun to play, but far too easy (why can't we have difficulty levels?) and far too short, too.