I have been playing Assasin's Creed II

Uncle  Bisoft had an idea for a game where you had to punch a super Pope in the face until he dropped his pope-stick. The name of this game would be “Dynamic man Pontiff Puncher” and it was conceived as a spiritual sequel to Monkey Puncher only instead of Monkey’s it featured Super Popes. Studio heads liked the idea but the game soon found itself in development hell. (It was sent there by the Pope because punching popes in the face is blasphemous.) Dynamic Man Pontiff Puncher will probably never be released. Assassins’ Creed II was released ages ago and has a sequel, proof that Super Popes do indeed move in mysterious ways.

I’ve probably given the impression that Assassin’s Creed II is mostly about slapping around religious leaders, in reality this makes up at most 5% of the game. You spend the rest of the game wandering around Romeo and Juliet times wondering why anyone thought that adding an open world to Prince of Persia and then filling it with conspiracy theories would be a good idea. Uncle Bisoft says it’s because people don’t really like Italians so it’s easier to sympathise with the main character if he is actually the memories of a man called Desmond. He also says people don’t really like the olden days so it’s better to put in futuristic things like computers, Stargate style god-aliens and Danny Wallace. Perhaps the biggest conspiracy of all is how Danny Wallace manages to have a career because my DW career chart makes no sense.

The real question is “Why don’t any of my friends write a book about betting me they can find lots of people with the same name as them so that I can become successful and appear in Ubisoft games with the electric woman from Heroes?”  I asked Uncle Bisoft about this and he says that it’s because my friends all have unusual names. This is a lie as we both know I have no friends.

Wallace aside it’s important to note that Assassin’s Creed II would probably have been better if they just actually set it in Italy and the plot was that you had to solve a political conspiracy that doesn’t involve magic apples. Most game plots are stupid but very rarely does a game work so hard do bury a fairly original setting under nonsense. I suggested to Uncle Bisoft that he had shot himself in the foot because eventually they would have to finish the story off with an Assassin’s Creed game set in Desmond times which nobody would buy. He shrugged his shoulders and said that if they can make people think Ezio was a likeable character then they can probably make anyone buy anything.

List of likeable attributes about Ezio

* Punches figureheads of major religions.
* Sleeps with prostitutes.
* Hugs people and then stabs them in the stomach with secret knife.
* Didn’t hug Leonardo Da’Vinci when he put his arms out for a cuddle. (Because it was a cut QTE during a cut scene and I had put the pad down to drink some apple juice.)
* Belongs to a secret order that influence events by killing heads of state.
* Runs along people’s rooftops destroying their hard earned masonry.

Likeable main character aside Assassin’s Creed II has problems, the main problem is that all the missions are boring and a lot of them involve following people very slowly so that you can fail to assassinate them until a later mission. They also involve giving you weapons and abilities that you never need to use because all you have to do is keep pressing X until you stab everyone. I took the opportunity to ask Uncle Bisoft how having a giant metal gauntlet with a knife that pops out on a spring is any different to just owning a knife and keeping it in your pocket – he declined to answer.

Overall I award Assasin’s Creed II a lowly Desmond Miles out of a Miles Prowler.