In a statement to G4, the French publisher said that unlike the original Wii game and its sequel No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise shan’t carry the Ubisoft logo on these shores. No reason given, apparently, but here’s to hoping Grasshopper Manufacture can find a friend for those of use interested in experiencing “Very Sweet Mode” stateside.

Ubisoft Not Publishing No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise (Aka No More Heroes HD) [G4's The Feed]

Remember, for one of the shortest jumps in the original (Dome of the Rock), we calculated Altair would need a pile three times as high and 41 times as large to stop the fall without Altair crashing through the cart and into the bricks below. So, “slightly larger” won’t cut it, unless for some reason Ezio is “vastly lighter”.

Assassin’s Creed II picks up where the first game left off, with assassin descendent Desmond Miles once again delving into his genetic memories to explore the life of another white-clad killer. It’s bigger, deeper and more ambitious than the original game by far, but those aren’t always good things, are they?

Let’s see how the Templar game critics feel.

Giant Bomb
Assassin’s Creed II has a bit more to offer those already familiar with the high-concept intricacies of the original, where you played as a bold and highly serious young assassin named Altair living in the Holy Land during the Crusades. Although, really you were playing as Desmond Miles, an average every-man strapped into a genetic memory machine called the Animus. Locked-up in a high-security facility, Desmond was forced to play through this whole Altair scenario by a high-tech, ultramodern, and exceedingly diabolical order of Templars, who are searching through history for clues concerning some ancient artifacts of supernatural power that they hope to use to end their centuries-spanning war with those do-gooder Assassins. If all this premise is just whizzing clean over your head, you may want to read up before jumping in here. Assassin’s Creed II makes some token effort to catch up new players, but after a quick summary reel, it picks right back up from the final shot of the first Assassin’s Creed and doesn’t look back.

VideoGamer.com
As in the 2007 game, Assassin’s Creed 2 takes place in numerous open cities, with large swathes of countryside to explore in-between. Being set in Italy, you’ve obviously got brand new locations to visit, including Venice (complete with row-able boats), Florence, Romagna and Tuscany. Each is stunningly reproduced here, with even more attention to detail than in the still beautiful original. Hundreds of civilians go about their business, guards patrol the streets and roof tops, and, more importantly, each place is packed with things to do. There is a core series of storyline missions to play through, but these only represent a portion of what’s on offer. Ezio is even more nimble than Altair, so he’s more than up to the job of climbing the numerous towering buildings scattered about each city. Reaching the top of marked ‘viewpoints’ will reveal a hidden part of the map, simultaneously unlocking new missions.

PSM3
In all this game is 30 hours long and (unlike the original) very little of it feels like filler. Even the traditionally mundane side-quests, like letter deliveries, are spiced up by AC2’s characters and scenarios. Want an example? One of the first courier missions sees you delivering letters for Casanova (who looks like an old letch) to rich ladies who have been put under armed guard by their fathers. Again, these little incidentals really give you the feeling that everything in Assassin’s Creed 2 is there for a reason. There’s no sloppiness or dead weight. In fact, there’s often more going on than might first meet the eye.

Game Informer
Combat features strong new additions like disarming techniques and an expanded array of weapons. Countering and special kills remain a blast, and the new techniques and weapons make defensive fighting more enjoyable than ever. However, enemy AI is often questionable; guards will stand and stare without attacking for too long or ignore you completely when they’re fighting your allies. In addition, I’d love to see a more engaging way to handle attacks initiated by the player. Most enemies auto-block any frontal assaults, so it’s hard to bust out into a flurry of motion to take them down. The combat is still thrilling, but it needs some work to stand toe-to-toe with the best action games.

Games Radar

Kotaku
The level of craft and care evident in the creation of Assassin’s Creed 2 – to say nothing of the level of obsession with conspiracy – is on par with those of the creators of the Metal Gear Solid series. This is big budget with polish. This is technology put in the service of artistry. Climbing and killing might wear thin by the end of the next game if the current formula of Assassin’s Creed is maintained, but given the willingness of the series’ creators to think and execute boldly that is evident in this sequel, complacency and obviousness are two things for which Assassin’s Creed is little at risk.

Right on target

Well, never mind. I don’t think it rates a spoiler alert, as no major plot devices or gameplay features are revealed. Here it is, courtesy of MTV Multiplayer.

MTV Shows Super Mario Cameo In ‘Assassin’s Creed 2′ [MTV Multiplayer]

Yves Guillemot, the head of the Ubisoft, described Uplay at an event in New York last week as a “frequent flyer” program for gamers. The effort that resembles Disney’s DGamer program an EA’s attempts to unify its sports games some years ago.

The Ubisoft service is free to join, and rewards gamers who complete feats in a Ubisoft game with points that can be spent on unlockable content in the same or other Ubisoft games.

I registered for my account over the weekend and, in the course of completing Assassin’s Creed II, accomplished the four in-game “actions” that Uplay could recognise. They each involved simple progression through the game’s adventure. I also was rewarded for logging onto Uplay from my PS3 and from a PC, for six actions in all. Each earned me Uplay “units”.

I could spend my Uplay points through an interface in Assassin’s Creed II on some unlocks for the game. But, according to what I found on the Uplay website today, I can also spend those points on unlocks for the upcoming games Splinter Cell Conviction and R.U.S.E. For Assassin’s, the unlocks include a PS3 dashboard theme, a new outfit for Ezio Auditore, the game’s hero, the ability to hold more throwing knives or, most notably, access to a family crypt.

(I’m running Splinter Cell Uplay pics here instead of Assassin’s Creed ones to lessen the spoiling of Assassin’s; unlocks for Splinter Cell seem to be the same across the Xbox 360 and PC.)

I’ve earned 120 Units. I’ve spent 40 of them, on the Auditore crypt of course.

I got more than I was expecting. Clearly hoping to motivate players to connect, Ubisoft is offering what feels like a key piece of Assassin’s Creed content in the form of that crypt. The crypt is actually a “secret location”, a classification used for the game’s platforming-centric enclosed challenge levels. This one requires some crafty jumping and climbing. More importantly, it provides access to writings about the Auditore family history, which greatly elaborates biographical details hinted at during one cut-scene of the game. Want to know how the Auditore’s got to Italy — actually, want to know why, in story terms, you’re even playing this adventure in Italy rather than in another country? — then get the Uplay crypt.

I am certain that I did not download the new content for the game. It was unlocked. That may produce complaints that Ubisoft is withholding content, but it is, at least free.

Both the PS3 and PC interfaces of Uplay indicate that the service will also host cheats and community sharing options, including leaderboard comparisons and user screenshot galleries, on a case by case basis.

1.5 GB worth of Ubisoft-developed James Cameron goodness is now available for your download and play at several fine PC demo downloading establishments, including FileFront and WorthPlaying. I’m still downloading the file myself, so I couldn’t begin to tell you what the demo entails, but it’s a pretty safe bet there will be giant blue people and a fantastical alien world. Just a hunch.

Download it and give it a try for yourself, while I savour the irony of the location I discovered the demo links at.

Avatar Gets a PC Demo [Evil Avatar]

Two years ago, the first Assassin’s Creed sold millions while evoking grumbles that its free-running, pickpocketing, killing and escaping routine was too, well, routine, repeating a formula with little variation from the first slice of hero Altair’s sword to the last. What some saw as a shallow game, I described as a short-session game masquerading as an epic, a game that discouraged lengthy play sessions but rewarded the occasional indulgence of its strong core gameplay loop. It was more of a Pac-Man than a Zelda.

Two years later, Assassin’s Creed 2 appears as a marvel, occurring mostly in 15th century Italy, starring the amateur assassin Ezio Auditore — he, like Altair, an ancestor of true series hero Desmond Miles — and embarrassing its predecessor as if it had been little more than a tech demo. What was tested and tamed in the first game is tweaked and topped in a new one that spans a playable cities, countryside and decade of the Italian Renaissance. Killing is done in new and interesting ways. Extraordinary buildings are climbed. Tactics are evolved. Mysteries upon mysteries are introduced and sometimes solved. And, by the end, the series earns as its peers not Pac-Man but Metal Gear, The Da Vinci Code and Lost, as Ubisoft and Ezio alike take their stab at greatness.

Loved
The Adventure Evolved: It may be an odd point to start on, before mentioning how this game looks or even how it plays, but the best achievement of Assassin’s Creed 2 may be how it flows. This is a game with a specific story to tell about Ezio, the son of Italian nobility. He is a man whose family and life is demolished before the player’s eyes as events force him to become an assassin who scours Italy for conspiracy clues and rightful victims of his vengeance. It’s an adventure that is told through a weave of exposition and gameplay that defies the usual frayed conventions of story taking turns with interactivity. In Assassin’s Creed 2 you are most definitely playing the story, the mechanics of the first game and those introduced in the new, propelling an adventure that is full of changes and surprises. For example: The game’s fifth chapter contains nine missions, which introduce Ezio and friend Leonardo Da Vinci to Venice in a walking tour, leading to a mission that involves rushing a wounded new character from corrupt guards, indoctrinating ones’ self into the wounded persons’ guild of thieves through a series of trials, learning new moves, and then returning to the scene of the wounding to assassinate a corrupt official. It’s all story. It’s almost all played.

History Made Virtually Real: For those of us who can’t recall when the Covenant first invaded, why Ganon keeps getting angry or any of gaming’s other major made-up narratives, Assassin’s Creed 2 offers the hooks of real historical places and people. I’ve been to Florence but not climbed the magnificent Duomo until in Assassin’s Creed. I’ve heard of Da Vinci and read about Lorenzo De’Medici but not met them until in Assassin’s Creed. The ability to both encounter historical figures and, for those of us who stayed awake in history class, predict who might appear next, adds both intrigue to the series and the excitement of being able to trace and guess where this adventure will wind up. Let World War II no longer being the beginning and end of gaming’s exploration of historical fiction.

The Killing And The Climbing: For those who don’t care about story flow, yawn at history or think that’s all nice but still demand that their game play well, AC2 thankfully satisfies. Ezio is a deadlier assassin than Altair, capable of killing two men at once with the retractable blades hidden in his wrist-guards, able to more nimbly and swiftly scale buildings and descend from them like a bird of prey. Combat on the ground, once the enemy is alerted, typically consists of Ezio surrounded by eight or so angry guards who politely take turns to attack while the player waits for counter-kill moments, or, better yet, opportunities to wrench a weapon away and turn it on its owner. Neither the climbing or killing is all that complex, but both are easily executed, fun and rendered beautifully.

The Structure: Assassin’s Creed creative director Patrice Desilets has already admitted that the first game in his series was too conventional, that it introduced a gameplay formula that it never tweaked. He promised to play with it in AC2 and his team of over 200 developers has delivered. The main flow of the game consists of the aforementioned memory chapters, covering different years of Ezio’s life and divided into mandatory missions that are activated from within the game’s open environments and advance the story. They seldom follow formula, as one rooftop assault on archers feels nothing like the participation required in a carnival or the visiting of a prisoner that are the subjects of other objectives. Off the critical path, there is a bevy of diversions: Optional assassination missions, optional free-running races, hundreds of collectibles to gather, classic art to buy and more. Even those side-challenges that do repeat themselves do so with flair, such as the handful of “beat -up” missions that always wind up having the player punch a cheating husband. And best of all, are the tombs, mostly optional missions heavy on platforming and relevant to the series in a way I can’t bring myself to ruin here.

Tactical Variety: One of the game’s best attributes is its redundancy of options. Many games offer little more tactical choice than to kill with an axe, a fist or a fire spell. Assassin’s Creed 2 builds upon its predecessor by presenting a more interesting choice of approaches: Will you pursue your goal by free-running across rooftops and risking the attention of archers? Why not barrel through the pedestrian-clogged streets instead? Or walk through them, blending in with the crowd (and pickpocketing the crowd at the same time)? How about breaking off from the flow of the crowd and hiring a group of prostitutes to lure some guards away? Or maybe poison those guards? Or swim past everyone? Etc.

Mysteries And More Mysteries: Assassin’s Creed 2 appears to have been made by people who share The Da Vinci Code novelist Dan Brown’s fascination with secret societies and centuries-spanning conspiracies that involve dozens of historical figures. They also are probably fans of Lost, given how effectively they pepper their game with mysteries that, when solved, typically reveal even more tantalising mysteries. Through an unexpected puzzle-gameplay twist that I won’t spoil here, a player of Assassin’s Creed 2 can begin to discover some of the secrets of the series’ lore, injecting a nice amount of mystery and sleuthing to a game that already was doing action and adventuring so well.

The Teases: The finale of the first Assassin’s Creed has nothing on the entirety of Assassin’s Creed 2 in terms of hinting at possible subject matter for sequels and spin-offs. You may finish this game, like me, eager for Ubisoft to consider pulling an Activision and exploiting every possible future release. Because, given what’s discovered in various parts of the new game, it’s hard not to want the developers to bring to video game systems the adventures they hint at involving everyone from Marco Polo or Cleopatra to, well, some people from way back in the day.

Desmond Miles: Like the first game, this sequel takes place in the interactive, buried memories of Desmond Miles, a man living just a couple of years ahead of us and whose ancestors were the assassins Altair and Ezio. The first game interrupted Altair’s adventures several times to subject the player to locked-room barely-interactive Desmond sequences. First-game Desmond could do little but walk and talk. New-game Desmond is capable of more but is also playable less frequently. Perhaps he too could be an assassin, the game suggests. And perhaps Ubisoft could pull a Kojima Productions, as it seems set to turn its Raiden — its unpopular alternative to the action stars of its series — into a protagonist gamers want to be. Not quite there, but getting closer.

Hated
Touchy: There is little to complain about with Assassin’s Creed 2 other than the touchiness of its controls. The game often requests that the player climb and leap from windowsill to ledge to brick outcropping to wooden post with grace and speed. That happens best when players treat the free-running flow of the game as if it is a racing game, but all the steering and speeding up sometimes, strangely, sends Ezio leaping in the opposite direction you pushed, ruining everything. It’s hard to tell if the controls are too sensitive, too smart or if the player is in error, but the sophistication of so much of the rest of the game is sometimes undone when the great assassin clambers not to the roof but falls from a facade to plunk into the water below.

Assassin’s Creed 2 looks great, plays great and avoids all of the pitfalls of its predecessor, which might be enough praise for some. But its finest achievement is to present one of gaming’s most mature adventures, a game that can be played and tell a story at the same time, a game that assumes its players are educated and curious, and willing to be teased and willing to test its limits.

The level of craft and care evident in the creation of Assassin’s Creed 2 — to say nothing of the level of obsession with conspiracy — is on par with those of the creators of the Metal Gear Solid series. This is big budget with polish. This is technology put in the service of artistry. Climbing and killing might wear thin by the end of the next game if the current formula of Assassin’s Creed is maintained, but given the willingness of the series’ creators to think and execute boldly that is evident in this sequel, complacency and obviousness are two things for which Assassin’s Creed is little at risk.

Assassin’s Creed 2 was developed by Ubisoft Montreal (and affiliated studios) and published by Ubisoft for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 17. Retails for $US59.99/$AU109.95. A PS3 copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the campaign, including one, freely downloaded bonus mission, in 24 hours, 14 minutes, for about an amusingly specific 82.4% completion rate, with about a third of the side-tasks left undone. Laughed at the game’s Super Mario reference.

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My chat with Patrice begins with me relating how at E3 this year I’d asked fellow Ubisoft Montreal creative director Maxime Béland to describe his game, Splinter Cell: Conviction, in just one word.

“Panther,” Maxime had said back then, without pausing to think.

I tell Patrice I thought that one word encapsulated everything that was different about Conviction, compared to the previous games. So I ask Patrice if he had one word for Assassin’s Creed II. At first, he looks a little surprised.

“Two,” he says, after a few moments.

Two? I repeat.

“No, really. Two. Because for me it’s my first sequel.”

I was surprised to learn that, after serving as creative director on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Patrice did not work on any of that game’s successors. After Sands of Time shipped he went straight to work on the first Assassin’s Creed. So how did he approach making a sequel for the very first time?

“Everything that was in the first one is still there,” said Patrice. “We wanted worked on the pillars of the game, making them better, getting rid of the frustration, and we wanted to change the main character. It’s the real sequel; it’s not 1.5, it’s not more of the same.

“It really is Assassin’s Creed TWO,” he says, emphasising that word again, before smiling. “I’m sorry I don’t have as good a word as Max.”

Patrice then shoots down my suggestion that perhaps Assassin’s Creed II is everything he wanted the first game to be.

“No,” he says, firmly. “The first game was a game about a warrior monk during the Crusades, and that was the game we wanted to make. Going to Italy is not something we wanted to do in the first game. Did we learn? Did we come back with some ideas for which we didn’t have the time? For sure. But it’s not the game I wanted to make in the first place.”

The games industry can have a strange attitude towards sequel, and so can the fans. We see developers deliberately changing the mood or tone between sequels, as Ubisoft themselves did with the choice to make the Prince darker and carry more attitude in Warrior Within. Yet at other times, we see sequels arrive where, really, very little seems to have changed.

“Sometimes we react in the games industry a lot,” says Patrice. “You give the game to the world and you take the feedback. I wanted to do a sequel and so I said to the team, ‘Look, we’re going to change a lot of stuff, but it still has to be part of the overall [Assassin's Creed series].’

“I don’t know why in the games industry, we change so much between sequels. But not all of us do it. You look at the Japanese, once they establish something they like to repeat it. Look at someting like Metal Gear Solid and you can feel pretty confident about the pillars, but it is the story that will change.

“Here it is like that too,” he says. “The story will change, but the pillars are pretty much the same. The character moves the same, we kept the control scheme. We kept this idea of having an ancestor and we kept Desmond as the guy in the present. We kept the basic core mechanic of the fights, the free-running, the climbing. But we did put some stuff aside.”

Patrice wasn’t shy when it came to changing major aspects of the first, such as the entire structure. The first game was all about numbers, he tells me. There were three cities divided into three districts where you had to do six investigations and eventually carry out nine assassinations. It was all very regimented and predictable, exposing the bare framework of the game and pulling you out of the experience.

“The structure of the first game is gone,” confirms Patrice. “We went for a more organic, more narratively driven game structure.”

In large part, this is because the new assassin, Ezio, is a very different person to Altair, the original game’s protagonist. Where Altair remained apart from society, Ezio is very much a part of his. As such, his story weaves through the cities he travels to and people he meets along the way.

“In the first one it was this monk warrior who had no life at all except killing people and the creed was really important to him,” says Patrice, explaining the difference between the two characters. “Now, Ezio, he’s got a life. He knows people, he is part of society.

“The first one was very serious, maybe too much. But here we’re making jokes, there is some comic relief. For example, in the relationship between Ezio and Leonardo Da Vinci, they’re friends, they act like friends. It’s not like [adopts serious voice] ‘Oh, you’re Ezio the assassin and you’re Leonardo, the most intelligent person on earth.’ No. One time Ezio is pissed off at Leo and he’ll say ‘Oh, look, he’s trying to invent some piece of shit!’ You know, they’re real people… except he doesn’t say ‘piece of shit’ because all the swearing is in Italian!”

“When you see it,” he continues, “you’ll feel that maybe we went in a different direction. But I think it’s because we’re not talking about the same guy. So, for sure, that different guy in that different period of time has given us different ideas. It has nothing to do with a reaction to the first one; it’s just that Ezio is not Altair, and Altair is not Ezio.

“But it’s still an Assassin’s Creed game. You’ll still do viewpoints… there’s a bunch of stuff like that that repeats, that are good. You’ll still do the ‘leap of faith’ because it’s fun. Ezio is not Altair, but he’s got it in his blood.”

It appears that Patrice and his team have really taken on board criticism of the weaknesses of the first game, while at the same time amplifying its strengths. The outward appearance may seem different, but underneath that Assassin’s Creed blood still flows. Isn’t that what we really want from a sequel?