The two sisters

Imagine you meet a very nice girl... Let's call her "Jade". She's very beautiful, and you just love being around her... but then you start to get bored. You love her conversation, but she always comes back to the same themes, and she repeats the same things. You are even tempted to ask her to shut up. Finally, you can't stand being with her anymore.

But then you meet her younger sister. She's not as beautiful, but her conversation is much more involving. She talks about the same things, but you realize that now you actually care. She's not dull, and you love every minute with her...

Well, that was my experience with the first and the second game of the Assassin's Creed series. The first game looks nice, but runs out of gas very soon, and you even want the game to end as soon as possible because it keeps forcing you to keep killing people for unclear reasons instead of running straight to the main bad guy.

Assassin's Creed II is basically the same game, but now filled with content. Oh, boy, what a surprise... It actually makes you realize how the first one was painfully unfinished and empty. The story is actually involving (a revenge plot), there even are cutscenes with close-ups (and not the floating "select your CCTV camera" long-drawn dialogues), and you even feel your missions are actually useful and not a laundry list of to-be-killed persons.

The developers wisely realized that the gameplay of the first game was good enough, so the basic gameplay hasn't been changed, but only improved on. Now, there are a few indoors platform sections that feel like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time outtakes (which is a good thing!), a couple of vehicle sections and some surprises. There's also a series of weird puzzles which are at times a "clever use of historical figures" and some other times just "ludicrous namedropping", but they are quite atmospheric and feel appropriate to the overall story.

Something that I don't like about this game is that there's too little Desmond in it. It looks like during development somebody said "hey, players hate Desmond", but Assassin's Creed is after all his story. I'm sure players of the first AC hated having Desmond doing nothing in two rooms, but I'm quite interested in the "long battle of assassins vs templars" plot and its repercussions in the present/future. For that reason I'm disappointed that Ubisoft isn't keeping their original "a new character for every game" approach and their next AC game is an "Assassin's Creed 2.5" instead of a true Assassin's Creed 3.

DLC:
My full 36-hour long playthrough (with a 100% synchronization) included all the DLC available for the game, including all the extra locations from the "deluxe" edition, and the family crypt that is made available after spending "Uplay" points. There are also two chapters that were seemingly excised from the game during development, "12: The Battle of Forli" and "13: Bonfire of the Vanities". Well, "The Battle of Forli" is decent enough, because it has flat-out-hilarious lines with Caterina Sforza swearing heavily and the possibility to get a missable achievement (kicking a guard while piloting the flying contraption made by Leonardo Da Vinci), but then this chapter ends with a stupid cliffhanger introducing a villain that is completely unrelated to the main plot.

On the other side, "Bonfire of the Vanities" is truly awful. Just avoid it like the plague, for two reasons: First, there's no story at all. You have to kill nine guys for no reason, and you feel again as if you were playing the first Assassin's Creed again (which is NOT a good thing). Second, this sequence breaks the mechanics of the rest of the game. Normally, you kill people and that's it, the mission ends and you can look for another thing to do. Here, after you kill every target, you have to escape and avoid detection. But if that's not annoying enough, now there are black guards who can outrun you. So during this chapter you "lose your powers", as it were, and you feel unnecessarily frustrated. It just feels like "padding" and it doesn't add anything to the game. The only good thing about this DLC is that they offer a (more expensive) version which includes a few more Prince-of-Persia-like locations taken from the "Black" edition, but if you don't really need them, just steer away from this awful piece of DLC.

Of course, I'm talking about the PS3 version. The DLC is already included in the PC version, which also has the dubious honour of using the worst DRM method to date.

Assassin's Creed II is one of the best games of 2009, no doubt about it. In a way, it's a shame that it's best for you to play the first game to understand fully what is going on, but even without that, the story is great, and the gameplay is solid and really enjoyable. This is a must-play title.