They had it, in their hands. They had an opportunity to merge three of the greatest game series of all times. They could have made a game that would have rivaled the stealth of Thief, the assassinations of Hitman (Which I ranked an AWSESOME), and the over-arching, global conspiracy storyline of Deus Ex. What they got was a shoddy attempt to grab some extra money from the success of their first terrible game.

Assassin's Creed 1 was damaged. The free-running portions were buggy, the missions were repetitive, the townsfolk were annoying, and the combat was bland. Assassin's Creed 2 makes me pine for the glory days of Assassin's Creed 1.

The one good point of the first game was that the assassinations themselves were very complex. You spent the entire time in the city running around stealing secrets, plans, guard positions, blueprints, and anything else you can find that would allow you the right information to secretly sneak into your target's base and kill him without the guards noticing. Unfortunately, this has all been scrapped in Assassin's Creed 2. You no longer make plans, get deployment schedules, find weak points, or anything else. Your missions now consist of "go into this building I've marked with an X, and kill the guy highlighted in gold." That's all. Sure, you can use smoke bombs, poisoned blades, coins, whores, and sellswords to distract the guards, but when you're already a consummate badass to begin with, all those things really exist in case you're getting bored of simply walking through a crowd of enemies and hearing them drop to the ground behind you.

There are a number of major problems with the game still. I'll try to enumerate them:
1) Free-run: The same problem as the first game. Free-running just plain doesn't work sometimes. I spent minutes at a time screaming "UP! UP YOU BASTARD! UP! IT'S A GODDAMN LADDER! UP!!!" Ezio, meanwhile, was prancing back and forth between the ladder and a ledge, oblivious to the purpose of LADDERS. It's making me mad just to write about. Ezio shares the same suicidal tendencies of Altair, too. Your character will still sometimes approach a very easy jump, from one beam to another, and instead fling himself madly off to one side, plunging to his death. At one point Ezio approached a 2ft drop from one roof to another, and instead of stepping down took a flying leap, completely clearing the next roof and falling straight down a 4 story alley. It's also still entirely possible to get stuck on various parts of the environment. Super-fail.

2) Beggar women: These women are gone, but they've been replaced by the only thing more annoying than the homeless: MINSTRELS. Now, whenever you pass through a public place, 4-5 identically dressed fops immediately swarm your position, flourishing their feathers and other fine foppery in your face, completely obscuring your vision. Luckily in Assassin's Creed 2 you can throw coins to distract the populace. You can also murder a select few citizens before becoming desynchronized, which helps when you're furious at the minstrels for screwing up your tailing mission for the 4th time. However, now that citizens are valid targets, that means that when you walk up to your intended assassination target in a crowd and press X, it's possible for Ezio to simply murder two innocent bystanders and watch as his target flees in terror.

3) Money: The money system sounds good on paper (much like the rest of the game), you collect money from almost every in-game action, and there are treasure chests strewn about. Plus, you eventually gain control of a villa and a small town, which produces tax revenue for you. You can improve the villa to improve its tax revenue, and you gain revenue from everything from shops to fortifications, from your personal gear to the number of missions you've already completed. You use that money either to improve the villa, or to buy yourself more equipment. Sounds great, right? Sadly, no. I ended up with so much money I didn't know what to do with it. I bought every single item in the game, improved every square inch of my villa, and still had tens of thousands of gold pieces weighing me down.

4) Weapons/Equipment: The weapons and equipment are a mixed bag, for me, but they lean toward FAIL. First, you have multiple weapons. You can purchase a "primary weapon" consisting of swords, falchions, warhammers, and others. You can also purchase a "secondary weapon" consisting of various forms of daggers. These weapons all have a damage, speed, and block rating. However, it's not clear what any of that actually does. It's obvious that some enemies (like the knights in shining armor) cannot be killed by a regular sword, but there's no telling WHY that is. I eventually ended up buying a well-balanced sword, and if that didn't work I either fled, or used the hidden blade. The rest of the equipment is very awesome, but only if you get sick of the "walk up and stab him in the face" style of assassinations. You get poisoned blades, smoke bombs, throwing knives, and even a fistful of coins you can scatter on the ground to cause a disturbance. However, they all feel completely optional. I would have actually welcomed a contrived section where you NEEDED to use smoke bombs, for instance.

5) Assassinations: The murders in Assassin's Creed 2 are more personally motivated, so they're no longer "missions." I said before that the assassinations are no longer linked to all the sub-missions in the area. This means that now there's NOTHING that absolutely needs to be done in the areas. Sure, you need to collect the codex pages, and the extra money from the miscellaneous missions is nice, but there's nothing that's required for the storyline to progress. What you get is a mixed bag of missions that sounded like they would be fun in a free-running game. You have rooftop races, small assassinations, deliveries, pickpockets, couriers, beat-em-ups, and the omnipresent viewpoints.

Rooftop Races: In rooftop races, you speak to a person who claims to be the fastest person in the neighborhood, then you set off on the race. The race is a series of white glowing markers that you must touch around the city. Each marker appears on the screen and on your radar the instant you touch the previous marker. Unfortunately, the game developers have chosen the "washed out" version of 15th century Italy, so a swirling white mark on a white building awash in sunlight is hardly easy to find. Also, the free-running is so absolutely god-awful, you can barely finish each rooftop race without Ezio flinging himself off a tower or spending a full minute refusing to climb a ladder.

Small Assassinations: In addition to the main story, there are co-conspirators that you can kill for money. (Why you would get paid to kill someone in order to help yourself is beyond the scope of this article). These assassinations are actually pretty fun when you get the assignments. It will be "find this guy without being seen," or "poison this guy," or "kill these 5 guards without using any weapons." It seems like a fun little challenge, a nice way to break up the drudgery of your sneak-and-stab lifestyle, right? Wrong. Those extra mission parameters like "no weapons" or "no detection" aren't real. You can complete every sub-assassination simply by running full-tilt at your target and pressing X, hoping there's no citizens in the way.

Deliveries: Just like they sound: deliver this letter/package/whatever to the recipient(s). You cannot decline a mission once the target is revealed, so never take a delivery mission if you don't want to be trekking throughout the area. Luckily there aren't any delivery missions that require you to travel between zones.

Pickpockets/Couriers: I will say this: the pickpockets and couriers were a good touch. As you go about your business in the city, you may see a regular citizen running for his life. This is either a pickpocket, or a city courier. Either way, run him down and tackle (or murder) him, then help yourself to the contents of his pockets. It's fun to chase him around, even if the money is essentially worthless.

Beat-em-ups: In a beat-em-up mission you're asked to...beat someone up. Normally the target is a cheating husband, and you'll find him conversing normally with a female. You never actually see him doing anything, you just have to trust his harping, paranoid wife. Anyway, since this is ostensibly a BEAT mission, you cannot KILL this person, despite the fact that he commonly is wielding one or more very scary weapons. You must disarm him, run away, drop the weapon, run back, and THEN defeat him. Dumb.

Viewpoints: Yeah yeah, climb the viewpoint, get a great view of Washed-Out-Sicily, jump down. Hooray.

But wait, it's not all bad! There are some good things about this game. First of all, if you're not furiously angry at Ezio, it's hilarious to watch him hurl himself to his death for no reason. Secondly, the new assassination moves are really pretty cool. You can grab people and throw them off buildings, you can assassinate two people at once, you can assassinate from an elevated position, you can assassinate from inside cover, and you can poison people, causing them to go nuts and create a distraction before they die. All good things, and all pretty fun when they work. Unfortunately, the game only "works" in small doses in between gigantic gouts of frustrating failure.