Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Back from a quasi-week in foreign climes, I return to discover Eurogamer has published some writing they recklessly hired me to write. There’s a preview of Assassin’s Creed 2, detailing what I found when I nosed at the first couple of hours of the game, and perhaps more interestingly, there’s my review of Torchlight. In it, I claim that absolutely everything Walker said it about the game here was embarrassingly wrong and that we should all fire cannonballs at his face. Or did I largely agree with him? I forget. Let’s fire cannonballs at him anyway. There was also supposed to be a preview of Avatar up there, but it has mysteriously not arrived. I’ll have a little cry until it does.

We may not get Assassin’s Creed 2 on PC for a few months yet, due to spurious excuses to pretend it’s not about dodging piracy and not giving a monkey’s about the IBM compatible, but there’s no reason we can’t enjoy the promotional run-up. For instance, 15 minutes of live-action footage of a dude being a 15th century Italian assassin, by way of a prequel to the game…
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…but the PC version is delayed! I know! That never happens, right? Ubisoft has just dropped the bomb about the no-longer-November release, claiming it’s so they can “deliver the best quality game”.
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Head south for a sprawling walkthrough of Assassin’s Creed 2, courtesy of Destructoid. As well as detailing some of sprawling renaissance city, it shows loads of interesting mechanistic stuff such as purchasing equipment with the money you’ve earned, exploring secret locations, hiring mercenaries to fight guards for you, distracting people by throwing coins, and so on. There’s also fun-looking chase sequence. So the missions do indeed look more diverse than the original, and I wonder whether the new spread of equipment to be bought on the streets of Florence will make the possibilities for delivering assassinations more varied too? All this and flying machines… The game is out on November 17th.
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“More variety” seems to be the mantra uttered by the Assassin’s Creed II development team, and we get to see some of that variety in this new walkthrough. It’s the bulk of an entire assassination sequence from the game, and possibly one of the high points, so beware spoilers if you’re definitely going to buy into the dude-slaying sequel. Venice certainly looks impressive, and hopefully the new game will give you a little more freedom to make the most of that enormous cityscape. I hope “more variety” somehow also translates into “fewer cutscenes”, but perhaps that’s expecting too much.
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