So what’s up with all this lame sci-fi crap?

Seriously, like the concept of “Metal Gear in Renaissance Italy” isn’t cool enough?

Having never played the first Assassin’s Creed, I feel a little behind the curve on the sequel, which I recently picked up on an Amazon sale. Luckily I know how to use Wikipedia. In the first half-hour of AC2: Italy Folk, you go from a bleak near-future all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci’s time. The game begins with you as Desmond Miles in the year 2012, continuing a cliffhanger from the first game. Desmond is sprung from his Big Brother-style monitor prison and hooked up with an underground group that wields the same tech. Known as the Animus, this technology allows Desmond to access his past lives… in this case, the Renaissance-era assassin Ezio. That’s you.

Ezio is no assassin at first. More of a wild teen with excellent parkour skills. Once you crawl inside Ezio’s memories (beginning with a weird birth scene where you control the baby), you get a terribly explained tutorial. Then Ezio is released to wander the streets and pick up missions, GTA-style. Hopefully, I won’t see Desmond again for a long time.

My beef with the tutorial is that the game doesn’t want to tell you what the buttons do. There’s a onscreen guide, but initially it does a poor job of informing you that holding down a shoulder button modifies those actions. One of the first tutorial sections has Ezio racing his brother Federico from street level to a church rooftop. The game never tells you the subtle difference between jumping off a wall and climbing up a wall… and the race has no room for error. It took me twenty tries to win the race, because I would consistently wall-jump when I wanted to wall-climb, or drop off the roof’s edge because I missed the jumping window. I know I’m new to the franchise, but you’d think the smegging tutorial would leave a little time for exploring the controls, instead of making you complete a perfect rooftop run in under twenty seconds.

Now that I’m past that, it’s clear to me that Ezio’s Italy is exactly where I want to be. I love climbing all over the place, pickpocketing people by jostling them, and diving into hay bales to escape from roving guards. While I imagine the game will flashforward to Desmond’s story at some point, I really hope it doesn’t devolve into some kind of stupid Logan’s Run bland sci-fi adventure. I pretty much want to be Ezio and that’s itsio.

I’m also fascinated by the game’s bizarre facial animation. The main characters veer into almost cartoony expressions, with quirked mouth corners and wide-eyed brow raising. These games that aim for ultra-realistic graphics often end up ironically lifeless, so it is interesting to see Assassin’s Creed II acting weird.