Obviously only read this if you're interested in my thoughts on AC II. If you don't care or are too illiterate to keep up with multi-sentenced paragraphs, kindly take your tl,dr elsewhere.

Just completed AC II, all in all it was what was to be expected as the sequel to the original AC. You play as an assassin who is basically Spider Man minus the webbing, performing impossible acts of agility and finger-strength as you scale the heights of buildings you really have no business being on top of. The story goes as the first one did: gotta kill thoses sons'a bitchin' Templars, who are yet again after a Piece of Eden in an attempt to gain enough power to rule the world. There are some neat things that they added in this one, for instance the use of a second hidden blade, a wrist-mounted pistol, and my favorite was the trump card: a smoke bomb which can be used in a group of enemies to blind them, allowing you to flee or (as was in most cases with me) switch to you hidden blades and start assassinating them to thin out their numbers. One of my favorite things about this game is that you actually stay in the assassin world pretty much the whole time, with an "intermission" so to speak about half-way through the missions where you return to the real world, do some stuff, and promptly return to the assassin world.

On the negative side, I found that a lot of the assassination missions seemed to be easier than the ones in AC. It has been a while since I've played the first one, having loaned it to my brother and never got it back, but I recall having to carefully plot out and execute my assassinations of major targets more carefully. That's not to say that in this one you can just walk right up and shank'em, but I just seem to remember the first game being more challenging. Also, while cool in setting the mood and because it's such a passionate language, all the Italian words and accents can at times get confusing, making it easy to get lost in the conversation and have no real clue what the fuck people are talking about, only to come out of the conversation with "Alright, uhhh...guess I gotta kill that bastard now. Will do." This was referenced in a "recent' Penny Arcade comic in which the main character, having just assassinated his target, is speaking with him using a bunch of random, generic Italian words...mostly food dishes. Lastly, I can easily say that the main boss was much easier than the one in the first one...literally all you gotta do is beat the piss outta him twice and then watch the ending. The first one, if you recall, involved fighting a multi-man main boss who, at certain points in the fight, reduced your health to 1, and could easily kill you afterwords if you didn't know what you're doing.

All in all, the conspiracies continue to mount. One of the side quests in the game involves unlocking snip-its of a video left behind by a previous test-subject. While unlocking these snip-its, the game shows stuff that makes it seems as though the Templars have been running the world since recorded history, orchestrating such major events as WWII, the Moon Landing, and even Tesla's fall to give rise to Edison's harnessing of electricity. Finally, the ending is just as confusing as the first one, and really, you don't learn much about the story line as of yet, only that there will indeed be an AC III, and perhaps IV depending on what they do with III.

One thing I want to share that is a minor spoiler:









































































































When you fight the main boss, you have a Piece of Eden with you, and you use it to create 4 clones of yourself as the main boss in the first AC had done.