Wi-Philes

Repetition was what held the first Assassin's Creed back from global acclaim just over two years ago. The game was highly criticised for its repetitive gameplay and lack of any major variety in mission types. Not everyone felt this, and I was one of the people that thoroughly enjoyed it. The game looked beautiful, and the engine used that let the player climb around the cities as an assassin was excellent. That said, Ubisoft took all of the criticism of the first game on board, and upon the recent release of Assassin's Creed II, they've managed to fix practically every problem that was present in the original.

Once you start up a new game, you'll be greeted by an intro movie that covers the major events that transpired in Assassin's Creed. No sooner are you done digesting that video and you're thrown into the first section of gameplay, and this is one of the few times where you'll be playing as Desmond, outside of the Animus. I personally felt this first section of gameplay was incredibly slow and clunky, and whilst it was necessary for story progression, I'd have had no problem having it cut down and shown in a cutscene instead.

After making it past this very slow start, you eventually get into the Animus and take on the role of Ezio, who is instantly much more of a character than Altair was in Assassin's Creed. He has much more personality, he's funny, and he's a bit of a ladies' man. Not only that, but the story of Ezio is much more involved and interesting than Altair's story. Rather than simply gathering some info, tracking a target and assassinating them like Altair does in the original, Ezio's story is much more personal, and overall it's simply more interesting to play through. After being dropped into Ezio's body and having his backstory briefly shown, the first few missions will act as a tutorial for basic gameplay mechanics. Combat, free-running and general exploration are all handled in the same way as they were in the original, so if you didn't get along with them in the first game, there's isn't a whole lot that'll change your mind.

As with the first game, combat revolves around locking on to an enemy, and using different buttons, you can block, dodge or counter their attacks. New additions to the system are well placed though, with my favourite being disarm. The timing is tighter than a normal counter, but if you press the button at the right time, you can counter an enemy and steal his weapon off of him. That said, I was impressed to see that if there's another weapon on the floor, the enemy will do his best to go and pick it up, so make sure you take him out before he can pick it up. Another welcome addition to the combat is being able to use Ezio's hidden blade as an offensive weapon as opposed to only for assassinations. The hidden blade counters in particular are very brutal, and hugely satisfying if you time it right. There are several new weapons and mechanics on top of these, but a very nice addition is smoke bombs. They aren't accessible from the start of the game, but they're very useful, and if anything a bit over-powered. If you're in combat, switch out to your smoke bombs, throw one down, and all enemies within a semi-decent radius will go completely blind and start coughing in the smoke. That gives you the chance for a free getaway, or better yet, assassinate all of them with the hidden blade. Overall the combat is similar enough to the first game, but enough has been added to make it seem fresh, whilst also giving the player many more options in a combat situation.

Exploration and free-running is essentially the same as it was in Assassin's Creed, and it's just as enjoyable too. Simply by holding down two buttons you'll see Ezio running around on rooftops and scaling tall buildings with ease. Controlling Ezio on the whole is simple enough, and aside from one or two hiccups when scaling some buildings and jumping across gaps, the controls work fine. The climbing and controls really come into their own in certain gameplay sections, where you'll uncover an entrance to a tomb and you'll have to navigate your way through some cleverly designed puzzles and climbing areas. These areas are very reminiscent of some sections from Prince of Persia, and in some ways they seem a bit too crafted compared to the general feel of the rest of the game, but they're executed very well and they're great fun to play through.

What's probably one of the most significant additions to Assassin's Creed II is the town of Monteriggioni. Here, you can purchase upgrades and renovations for the area, and build up a revenue that you can collect at regular intervals. When I first heard about this feature, I feared that it would be completely out of place, but in the context of the story and how simple it is to manage the upgrades, it's a welcome addition. Not only that, but the steady stream of money that you begin to accumulate can be spent on better armour and weapons, and the more you buy, the more the value of the town goes up, so you get more money. Luckily, with the addition of fast-travel between cities, getting back to the town is no problem, and you'll end up building up quite a decent revenue in no time.

Luckily there's a lot more to do in Assassin's Creed II compared to the original. Not only are the story missions much more varied, there are also plenty of side quests and collectibles to find. I personally found the main story engaging enough that I only did a handful of the huge amount of side quests. There are four types of side missions, and each of these have to be tackled in their own way to complete the task. There are also 100 feathers and 330 chests to collect, which as you'd expect is quite a lot. You can purchase maps that show you where all of the chests are, but seeing as they only contain money (something that becomes less and less of an issue as you play through the game), there's no real need to collect them. As for the feathers, there's no way to make them show up on your map, so they're more of a traditional collectible in that you just have to look everywhere. In terms of how all of this factors into completion, I'd finished everything I wanted to do in about 19 hours, and that added up to an oddly precise 64.0% completion. That said, having only collected 5/100 feathers, 43/330 chests, and only doing four or five side quests, it's understandable how the number would be that low. The problem is that I have no real inclination to go back to the game, simply because I don't think blitzing through side quests and hunting around for collectibles (with no real reward), would really be worth my time. With all said and done though, the game is genuinely fun throughout, and it's better to have too much to do than not enough.

Not only does Assassin's Creed II play very well, but it performs excellently from a technical standpoint. It's a beautiful game, and running around Italy wouldn't be half as fun if the game didn't flaunt the architecture and design of the game off so much. It's a shame then, that the characters faces seem of a much lower quality. In some situations they just look weird, and thanks to the plentiful cutscenes throughout the story, you'll be seeing plenty of dodgy-looking facial animation. The voice acting is very well done, but quite why the writers decided to have the characters speak in English and Italian makes no sense. There are so many throwaway comments in Italian that are casually thrown in to the dialogue that it makes little sense to have them there at all. Why would a character be speaking in fluent English, say a few words in Italian, then swap back to English? I'm glad I was playing with subtitles on, because it shows the Italian translations in parentheses, and if you have them turned off then you'd be none the wiser.

Thankfully, Assassin's Creed II lived up to its potential and managed to expand on what the first game brought to the table. At a glance the game can seem quite similar, but rather than re-write everything to do with the game, they took everything that was good about the first game and kept it, and took everything that was bad and made it better. Going by that, I'm really interested to see what the third game in the series will bring. With so much being fixed and added to Assassin's Creed II, if the same kind of improvements happen again, the third and final game in the trilogy has the potential to be pretty special.

Having had no past experience with games conventions, I was really interested to see what the Eurogamer Expo would have in store for me. Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised. With two floors packed full of games and another floor where you could book sessions to talk to some games developers, as well as a café-style area where you could try out the PSPgo system, there was plenty to see and do.

The day started with me taking a two hour train ride to London, where I then jumped on the underground to make my way to the venue. Upon arrival, I was greeted with a queue of what must have been nearing 200 people. I wasn't surprised really, but I did manage to find a press line, and I soon found myself inside the huge building with a special "press/trade" band around my wrist. It was a different colour to the bands that those normal people were wearing too, so I felt doubly special.

Following my entrance to the grand venue, I was greeted by a big sign showing the layout of the place and where all of the games were. I carefully studied where everything I wanted to see was located, and as I made my way to the nearest free station to play a game, I promptly forgot everything I'd just read. Still, I had all day to look around, so I figured I'd end up seeing everything anyway.

In terms of playing anything "exclusive", the only game I played that hasn't already been released was God Of War III. I managed to get lucky and jumped straight onto an open station, and I soon found myself controlling the next-gen version of Kratos. After starting it up I realised that this was the same demo from E3 '09, and also the demo that was released to some select PSN users over the weekend. However, as I wasn't at E3, and I wasn't one of the select PSN users, this was a golden opportunity to get my hands on the game.

I just want to clarify that I've never been a huge fan of the God Of War games. Don't get me wrong, they're not bad, I've just never understood the fascination with them and why they've been held in such high esteem. That said, after playing it, I can safely say I'll be buying it on day one. It's an over-the-top, action-packed, crazy-fun and brutal experience - and that's only a demo. It reminded me of Uncharted 2, not in terms of gameplay, but because of the breakneck pace of the action, and how the set-pieces just keep on coming. One thing that did add to the experience though, was that by the time I'd finished the demo, I'd amassed a crowd of about 15 people who were all watching me play. Their reactions to some of the brutal kills and insane combat techniques were great, and it really made it much more fun.

Moving on from there though, I ended up watching some people playing more high-profile games, with stand-outs being: Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed II, Heavy Rain and New Super Mario Bros Wii. I didn't get the chance to play them, probably due to my lack of patience to wait around, but they all looked very impressive in their own way. Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed II both look very good, expanding on the originals in many ways without it just being a case of "more of the same". Heavy Rain looked interesting to say the least, but it was hard to get hyped about it simply because it's not my type of game. Finally, New Super Mario Bros Wii looked just as I thought it would, and some four-played-craziness is bound to ensue when the game releases in the next few weeks.

A lot of my time was spent simply wandering around and looking at games, and I was genuinely surprised at how much time I managed to fill doing just that. The only other game I played was Street Fighter IV, but the difference being that it was in a proper cabinet. One thing that really made me happy was that Street Fighter IV was consistently one of the busiest games at the show, and it was good to see people turning up just to watch, even if they didn't have a go themselves. I'm a huge fan of the game, so I spent a fair bit of time there, but seeing so many different ages of men and women show up to play made me see that, given the right situation, the Street Fighter community is still very much going strong.

After such a great day, I did have one disappointment. Having ventured up to the "PSPgo Café", which is where they were selling food and also had a relaxing area with loads of PSPgo systems, I found out that LittleBigPlanet PSP was playable. At different times of the day I tried 6 of the systems that were available (about 15, I think), and only one of them had the demo on it. That one, sadly, was always in use when I went to have a go, and there ended up being a queue for this particular PSPgo system, which makes no sense to me. All of the systems seemed to have three or so games that were all the same, but they'd also have a couple more that seemed to be different on every system. Still, I did manage to watch one guy play a bit of the demo, and it looked as good as I wanted it to.

As the day came to a close I made my way back to the London underground, then back to the train station, and then took another two hour train ride back home. Not only was the whole event a great experience, it was something I'd never done before. It also makes me wonder just how huge something like E3 must be. Still, we'll see where I am when E3 2010 rolls around, but for now, bring on Eurogamer Expo 2010!

...

Oh, and to make conversation, have any of you ever been to a games convention? What was it? When was it? Did you enjoy it?