The box art for Assassin’s Creed 2

Assassin’s Creed II is the sequel to Ubisoft’s hit Assassin’s Creed (obviously). We pick up where AC1 left off, with Desmond still under the control of Abstergo, and having some crazy visions around his room and the office. We start off breaking out of Abstergo and fleeing to a group of other Assassins and settling in to training. This game follows Ezio Auditore, the son of an Italian assassin, and his growth and development as an Assassin. The main plot follows the betrayal of the Auditore family, and Ezio’s quest for revenge. Back in the real world, this exercise is to teach Desmond the ways of the Assassins by having him learn while watching his ancestor learn the same things.

People had quite a few problems with the first game, most of which have been fixed in the second with the addition of a few new gameplay elements and an extension of old ones. There is still quite a bit of repetition in the “do X task Y times, then you can kill the guy you came for” area, but there are more tasks to complete. There are a lot more smaller assassination missions to accomplish and they keep the races from the first game, which I enjoyed immensely. They also added in a letter delivery task, which seems a little contrived but they are fun nonetheless. I am a little dissapointed that they got rid of the “save citizen” tasks, but to be fair there were too many of them in AC1.

The new menu system for AC2

Ubisoft has also added in an economic system, where completing missions, tasks, and other objectives earn you money which you can use to upgrade your weapons and armor. They have also added many more weapons to the system, and allow you to choose your loadout and even to steal weapons from people you fight. You can also hire groups of people to fight or distract guards to allow you to get into places, or to escape. They also integrate the three groups you can hire: cortesans, thieves, and mercenaries, into the story and Ezio’s development as an Assassin.

They also include a collection and improvement system for your country villa which you can use to earn even more money. You collect things like art, weapons, armor, and can upgrade and improve pieces of your city which allow for even more unlockable content. As you complete more of the missions and sidequests, your villa make more and more money for you, allowing you to purchsae some of th emost expensive items in the game. This is an intersting feature, especially if you like RPGs, but is also a little unneccessary. By the end of the game I had so much money I had no idea what to do with it, and I just kept getting more from my villa.

A smith’s shop, one of the new markets
available in AC2

Now on the the meaty part, the actual assassinations. Like in the first game, in AC2 you travel from city to city finding your enemies and eliminating them. You travel to locations like Venice, Rome, Florence, and a couple other Italian regions to take your revenge. The envrionments are absolutely amazing, keeping the awesome views from the first game, and expanding what they do with the city’s layout and organization. To complete your assassination, you again must complete a couple side missions, but you can move on to the actual target more quickly. With AC2 you are also forced to plan your route more, and be more patient since it is harder to outrun guards and escape.

They have added three new types of guards to mix up combat and escape. They have added Seekers, who prod and look in hide spots to find you. Ubisoft also added fast guards, who are much better at chasing you across rooftops, as well as heavy guards who are slow, but do massive damage. The hiding system and crowd system has been updated as well, and now allows you to blend with any group of people just by staying near them. The blend system is really intuitive, and makes getting away easier in some cases. Ezio can also swim, and use water as a way of breaking line of sight to guards.

The new blend system allows you to blend
with any group of people.

I really enjoyed this game, but I also didn’t have as many problems with the first one as some people. The missions can still get a little repetitive, especially if you go for a 100% playthough like I did. The market system could have been improved, as well as the balance of weapons you can choose. It would have been nice to see war hammers do more damage to armored guards than a sword.

Overall ACII was awesome and I am looking forward to the next installment (there was some more really blatant foreshadowing again) with as much rabid fervor as I was for this one. My biggest complaint is probably the DRM that came with the PC version, but that can be excused since it is not as bad as it could be.

The Mass Effect 2 Splash Screen

As I said, I liked Mass Effect 2, and joins Assassin’s Creed II and Half-Life 2 in my top 3 games. The graphics are stunning, the story intricate and immersive, and the gameplay solid and fun. I will start with the graphics upgrade. The first game looked alright for a 2007 game designed for the console market. I wasn’t super impressed, but they certainly weren’t detrimental to the game. When I first started ME2, I was astounded by how much more realistic everything was. All of the textures had been increased in resolution, everything was bump and normal mapped, and reflections and shadows were abound. My fairly high-end rig was struggling to get 40 FPS in areas with lots of shadows until I turned off dynamic shadows which increased the framerate to 60 (but no higher for some reason even though VSync was off) without really dropping the quality.

A comparison of the graphics and squad
screens for Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2
Click to enlarge

For me as a really technical person, the graphics really add something to the game, whether they are super realistic or cartoony, so long as whatever you are using works well, and it works fantastically for ME2. Places like the tech lab and armory felt real, even if they vomit bloom into your face. That is one thing I don’t understand about many games. Why must everything be surrounded in bloom? You made all these awesome models and textures just cover them with flat white light so we can’t see them? I understand your quest for realism, and there is some bloom in the real world, but not that much.

Anyway, on to the story. Picking up where Mass Effect left off, you take on the role of _______ Shepard, continuing the fight against the giant evil. Some events occur, which I won’t describe due to spoilers, but it ends up being two years after the events of the first game, and you are now working for a radical pro-Human group. You are now tracking down missing human colonies which have been disappearing at an alarming rate, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. This leads to the largest part of the game which is assembling your team of 10-11 (one character is part of some DLC) and gaining their loyalty. You don’t need to get their loyalty, but it really helps during the final battle.

All of the loyalty missions involve some personal history for the individual, from revenge to criminal defense, and you must carefully navigate the situation to gain the team member’s trust. This can be quite difficult, and I thought I had messed up on one, but got the loyalty anyway and was very confused as to how. Some people have said it is really hard to gain everyone’s loyalty, but if you are careful in your decision making, and are heavily leaned toward Paragon or Renegade, it isn’t very difficult, but you can mess up if you don’t start early.

The squad info screen from Mass Effect 2. Click to enlarge

Finally, to the gameplay. ME2 continues the third person action view of the first game, and makes many improvements to the system as a whole. There is now no longer the micromanagement of your weapons and ammo, nor is leveling as challenging to make decisions as to where points go. As you can see in the comparison above, the number of skills has been reduced drastically, and is easier to understand what each skill does. The leveling system has also changed, with experience only really being given when a mission is completed, but with more regular missions to do. While this reduction in complexity makes the game more accessible, I liked the old system to a certain extent. I did like the skills division, but not as much the weapon management. An achievements system has been added, and is liked to your gamerscore for the Xbox version, but it is only an in-game system for the PC.

Again, I thought ME2 was a fantastic game overall, and it is well within my top 3 games. I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first game, as well as an intro for people into the RPG space.

Look for a review of Assassin’s Creed II soon! I finished it the same week as ME2, but want to take some more time to write the review.

Splash screen for the PC version of Mass Effect

Mass Effect is an RPG by the EA subsidiary, BioWare. BioWare has made a few other big RPGs, namely Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, another game I have heard good things about, but have not played. As I said, I am usually not an RPG person, liking my fast paced first person shooters and other more action based games. The only real RPGs I have really played up until now have been 2D handheld games like the Golden Sun series for the GameBoy.

Mass Effect really live up the the expectations I had for its story and gameplay. RPGs really ride on their story, and Mass Effect’s writers really came through with an intriguing and immersive story and universe to play in. You play Commander _______ Shepard (you get to pick your first name), a human officer in the Alliance Fleet. Humanity has recently bounded on to the Galactic scene, and is angling for a position on the Galactic Council, currently composed of three of the oldest races in the galaxy. The plot revolves around an ancient evil, and a cycle of genocide and destruction that is your destiny to break. I won’t go in too deep to avoid spoilers, but the story will keep you coming back to see what happens next, and wait twists and turns await along the way.

Going along with the story is the conversation options that BioWare has integrated into driving it forward. Like many newer games, Mass Effect has a moral choice system, allowing you to make decisions on a Paragon / Renegade scale, where good actions get you paragon points, and selfish or “bad” actions give you renegade points. This affects interactions with NPCs, but not so much the story as a whole, which was somewhat disappointing. My first playthrough I played as a paragon, and I am planning do to a renegade character the next time I play. BioWare’s choice system is also intersting since it is one of the few that allows for a sliding scale of how good or evil your character is. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really affect the main plot very much, only your interactions with NPCs. I hope more is put on this in ME2, which I plan to play in the next couple months.

The one big complaint I have about Mass Effect is that the inventory system is not very well designed. It is great that I have 150 item slots, and I only ran close to that cap twice, but they are poorly organized. Each item has a name and a level, but they are shown to you in the order you picked them up, rather than by level or by name, and this cannot be changed. Also, the purchasing system is great, but again, no sorting is really done on your options so it can be a task just to buy new equipment from a merchant.

In all, Mass Effect easily makes it in to my top ten games, possibly even my top 5, and is an excellent game, even for those who are used to faster paced games. It takes a little getting used to, but the pacing is well worth the excellent story and you eventually get very immersed in the game and want to continue playing to see where it goes.

Psychonauts is the first game by Double Fine Productions and was launched for the PC, Xbox, and PS2. The story revolves around Razputin, know as Raz, and his desire to become a Psychic agent or Psychonaut. In the opening cutscene, Raz is discovered when he sneaks into a summer camp for psychics and is discovered. He is allowed to stay only until his parents come to pick him up, and isn’t allowed to participate in any training. When Coach Oleander allows Raz to complete Basic Braining, Raz is allowed to participate and uncovers a heinous scheme to take over the world.

Each level is based on the mind of a different character, with the environments varying from a battlefield, to a party, to a theater stage. Great care was taken in making each level unique, with each having a different quirk to game play and new challenges and obstacles. In one level, you help a man play a board game with his mental image of Napoleon Bonaparte to help him regain his sanity while in another, you have to impersonate government spies to locate the Milkman. Double Fine did an excellent job mixing up themes and challenges throughout the game. I was hooked as soon as I started each level, and each level was long enough, but not too long as to make it monotonous.

The first few levels are geared around getting Raz his merit badges, which allow him to use new psychic powers such as levitation, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and invisibility. Let me tell you, it is endless fun setting squirrels on fire with your mind and beating up cats which can light you on fire. Each power has a use, and you will end up using all the skills, but more care could have been put into balancing them. I pretty much used the same 4 or 5 out of the 9 skills throughout the game. There would occasionally be a section where you had to use one particular skill, and sometimes you wouldn’t use it again for a few levels.

The story as a whole is very dark and not kid friendly despite the setting and art style. Some of the concepts they touch on are very heavy topics and very dark topics. The mood is lightened by some comedic lines, but this is certainly not a children’s game, which is also reflected in the T rating. I quite enjoyed the mix up to the usual game story elements of “bad guys over there, kill them,” and it was executed superbly.

Great care was also taken in creating each character and their relationships, giving them all a unique personality and quirks. Even the quick throwaway characters were given their own style and mannerisms.

Overall Psychonauts was an excellent game which drew me in with interesting graphics, gameplay, story, and all the the elements which make a game great. I finished it in less than 2 days, but spent 10 hours playing through. I didn’t spend as much time as I could collecting everything, but the story was too intriguing to let just sit around. I would highly recommend it as something to break up the usual games anyone plays.