Preview: Assassin's Creed II

Assassin's Creed was that rarest of objects: a game with an intellectual agenda, of sorts.

Casting you as Altair, an assassin, it engaged in mild didacticism concerning the Middle East during the Crusades, and won plaudits and awards for originality and graphics. But ultimately, it promised more than it could deliver, proving to be dogged by repetitive and often frustratingly slow-paced gameplay.

Developer Ubisoft Montreal is adamant that it won't make the same mistakes in Assassin's Creed II, and an initial hands-on suggests it isn't mistaken.

Assassin's Creed II has an even more mouth-watering backdrop than its predecessor: Renaissance Italy. Its action, therefore, spans such cities as Florence (and its Tuscan surroundings), Venice and Sant'Emiliano.

The game has a new hero: Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a rich young Florentine who was a bit of a womaniser before something terrible happened to his family and he turned assassin. He is much more flamboyant than Altair, the warrior monk.

As in the first Assassin's Creed, Ezio must carry out a number of assassinations. This time around, he has a knife concealed at each wrist, so he can take out two within-reach enemies in one lunge. Leonardo da Vinci features in the game, too - Ezio gets to use some of his inventions, such as a glider.

The plot explores the way in which Italy was, at the time, a collection of city-states run by powerful families with a penchant for feuding, striking alliances and shifting allegiances. The infamous Borgia and Medici families feature.

What else is new?
Game director Benoit Lambert maintains that pretty much every system from Assassin's Creed has either been beefed up or replaced - and that the fighting engine has received particular attention.

Ezio can disarm enemies and use their weapons. When in a melee, timed countering is a key skill - although the developers are keen to add that fighting is more tactical than before: enemies of varying ranks fight differently.

Ezio, unlike Altair, can swim - pretty essential when a substantial amount of action takes place in Venice. He can also perform air-assassinations: jumping down on enemies from above and taking them out before they know what is going on. Conversely, he can hang below a ledge and pull an enemy standing above it to his death.

Assassin's Creed II has a full economy system (mainly fuelled by chests of money you find during missions), allowing you to trick Ezio out with all manner of armour and weaponry. We visited a blacksmith for armour, and it was a distinctly educational experience - each minute element of Renaissance armour could be bought individually, although the end result was to increase your life-bar.

We also visited a tailor, purchasing clothes to cover the armour and choosing what colour we wanted them dyed. It looks as though Ubisoft Montreal has gone even further than it did in the original game, as far as letting you live a vicarious life in a particular period of history is concerned. Free-roaming, clearly, will be much more fun in Assassin's Creed II than it was in its predecessor. There is also a full night and day system, although the game will force one or the other as appropriate when you take on a mission.

Gameplay diversity
In a bid to banish any lingering suspicions that Assassin's Creed II might turn out to be another one-trick pony, Lambert demonstrated a type of mission new to Assassin's Creed II. He explained that "there are a number of secret locations within the game, which are linear maps inside cities; one map is on the main path, but the others aren't." Promising that completing those missions would bring valuable rewards for the player, he jumped into one entitled Novella's Secret.

Its back-story concerned infiltrating the catacombs below Santa Maria Novella, a church, in order to eavesdrop on a Templar meeting. Strikingly, its gameplay resembled that of Prince of Persia (much of the Assassin's Creed II team worked on the last Prince of Persia game), specifically the fluid wall-running, jumping and climbing for which Prince of Persia is renowned. To maintain fluidity of movement, you just have to keep one button pressed to tell Ezio he is in free-running mode, so jumping, for example, is automatic.

After much platform-style play, Novella's Secret segued into a sequence introducing a new concept: Archetypes. Archetypes are characters which will challenge you to perform a specific skill. Lambert spoke about three: Agiles, who will test your free-running, Seekers, who are all about stealth and Brutes, who will give you a combat workout. Meeting an Agile, Lambert had to engage in a free-running race, with the Agile laying traps by destroying the most obvious paths as he progressed. Catching and dealing with him removed the threat of the Agile making others aware of Ezio's presence.

Hands-on
We played through a classic assassination mission in Venice, and the first aspect to become apparent was that Assassin's Creed II's missions place much more emphasis on action than the rather tedious planning you had to endure in the first game. A cut-scene meeting comprised the planning stage, but it was apparent that the missions will retain their complexity - in this case, we had to clamber over rooftops and take out a number of archers before dropping back to street-level and gaining access to the palazzo in which our target waited.

A diversion was required before we could sneak past the guards on the gate - which was provided by paying a handy group of suitably buxom courtesans to distract them. Then it was a case of taking out waves of guards, mainly by stealth, before dispatching the target.

Overall impressions
All of Assassin's Creed's fabled attention to detail - just walking the streets eavesdropping conversations or randomly pick-pocketing is fun - was present and correct, and the level design and graphics were simply breathtaking. What we saw suggests that Ubisoft has managed to eliminate the elements of its gameplay which were tedious, without compromising the impression that you are traversing a living, breathing piece of history.

Lambert claims the game contains 130 missions, which span 50 mission types (although we suspect that that claim takes advantage of some very fine distinctions) and that the main missions will provide 25 hours' gameplay, with secret missions adding another five, plus side-missions another five hours.

If he's right, Assassin's Creed II will be seriously good value for money. But even if he's exaggerating, any gamers who fancy themselves on the cerebral side will surely find it an irresistible purchase.

Assassin's Creed II is out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 from November 20.