Assasins Creed 2

After ignoring assasins creed for many years, I picked up the original for the PC a few months ago. Couldnt get through it.
Picked up assasins creed 2 on PS3 the other week and have been playing it since. Loved it, after gaming all my life, I was considering this to be one of the better games I had played in the past 10 years.
Then I enter Visitazione's Catacombs for the assains tomb relic.
Holy fuck, holy fucking fuck.
I played lots of puzzle games in my years, but I dont remember any sequence more stupid and fucking frustrating as this concoction of retardation.
Getting enzio to jump from one point to the next, for some reason, in the rest of the game, it almost feel like it helps to aim you, no, not here;I jump left, enzio goes right, I jump right, enzio jumps back, I jump up, enzio dives.
Its a 5 point puzzel where you have to leap from ledge to ledge and land on a beam that acts as a switch, the switch completes part of the puzzle. However, for some stupid reasn, once you trigger each switch, you cant jump ff to the next ledge, you cant swing, you cant do shit. You have to drop into the water and swim all the way back around and start over.....the whole thing for some reason is on a timer, so if you mess up half way through and try to rejump, you run out of time and a vital ledge or beam rotates away and you have to go all the way back and retsrat.
This is lunacy. Its not just hard, its stupid. The whole rest of the game was well made. Every puzzle was challanging, but not pointlessly hard. There is zero, I mean no fucking way anyone enjoyed this part of the game. No matter if you pull it off right without the broken jumping mechanics and make all the switches, each time you need to drop and swim back and start over. If you even did it all 100% right, it would still take you 20min to do.

I just cant believe what the hell they were thinking. I dont rage, I never rage. Games entertain me, I dont let them get under my skin. But after 2 bloody hours, several checks of walkthroughs and shit, I yanked this potentially great game out of the drive, and smashed it against the concrete in my garage.
Fuck you Visitazione's Catacombs!

/end rage

The catacombs were a pain at points but I got through them eventually. That was a great game.

Its been a while since i played Assassin's Creed 2 but I didnt have any problems like this with any of the puzzles. Im pretty sure I would have remembered something that frustrating.

Mr_Wrong said:

Its been a while since i played Assassin's Creed 2 but I didnt have any problems like this with any of the puzzles. Im pretty sure I would have remembered something that frustrating.

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I breezed through every other part of the game, each puzzle with out issues. I dont think I ever had to go and retry any of them.

I remember this part and it was indeed the shits. I think I was completely addled when I played it, though, so I didn't get too mad about it.

I remember this part, took me a bit but I got it. It's just rote memorization.

There are definitely occasions where the controls just kind of don't work right when you need to do something really precise. Be sure to grab Brotherhood if you liked 2...it's as good or maybe even better.

I don't recall that specifically, but it's been a while. Brotherhood's a different story. I tried to get the best possible score on every mission and eventually quit bothering thanks to some of craziness required in a few of those missions. The timed Romulus ones are especially unforgiving and require lots of replays simply because it's not possible to get them exactly right on the first try.
I won't even get into the pain that was the Da Vinci tank mission, which requires either pure luck or an exploit glitch to complete flawlessly.
The game by itself is pretty easy, but getting 100% animus sync is a task far beyond my tastes.

The timed jumping puzzles in the later Catacombs were indeed a pain in the ass. The one I hated the most was the one that was very tall, I forget the name of the place, but it was the Church one. Took me a while.

Then, the last one with the water and the timed levers had me hating life. All in all I have to say you missed out on a hell of a game op. besides the catacombs, which i think were totally optional, they fixed almost every complaint I had about the first AC game.

Still need to finish AC:B though

Domingo said:

I won't even get into the pain that was the Da Vinci tank mission, which requires either pure luck or an exploit glitch to complete flawlessly.
The game by itself is pretty easy, but getting 100% animus sync is a task far beyond my tastes.

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I agree. The DaVinci stealth missions were fucking impossible, and some of the total synch requirements made me feel very stabby.

Are you serious???

The puzzles were NOT hard.

I can beat AC2 from beginning to end in 2 days flat, and in fact, my first playthru, i did it in 3 days


what a pansy!

One thing that has hurt the series since day 1 is the counter attack system. It's way too strong.
They give you a whole host of weapons, but there's no real point to using them when the hidden blade + counter attack is far more effective. They're also overly forgiving with the timing on using it, too.
I always figured that maybe I was abusing that technique and that maybe it wouldn't work on "hard" mode...if only there was such a mode.
I'm hoping that in the next game they finally tone that down and give us some motivation for actually attacking first and using other weapons.

Domingo said:

One thing that has hurt the series since day 1 is the counter attack system. It's way too strong.
They give you a whole host of weapons, but there's no real point to using them when the hidden blade + counter attack is far more effective. They're also overly forgiving with the timing on using it, too.
I always figured that maybe I was abusing that technique and that maybe it wouldn't work on "hard" mode...if only there was such a mode.
I'm hoping that in the next game they finally tone that down and give us some motivation for actually attacking first and using other weapons.

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Combat has always been the game's weak point, which is kind of funny when you consider the point of the game is to be an assassin and kill people. The gameplay works great for that role, specifically, but when you aren't attacking by surprise, it gets kinda clunky, and you CAN abuse the whole "throw smoke bomb/then use your hidden blades to kill enemies" technique.

I always felt that the story and puzzles were the strongest points of this series, AC: B kinda dropped the ball on the story, but the puzzles were still great and fun.

I'm really not sure if they can improve the combat at this point, they have been trying but I just don't think there will be a good combat system for this series, I'm sure it's possible, it's just I, personally, do not see how they can improve it. If they remove counter attack, players will complain about that, if they keep it, it's too easy and gamers will complain about that too

So, really, no win.

Fail said:

Are you serious???

The puzzles were NOT hard.

I can beat AC2 from beginning to end in 2 days flat, and in fact, my first playthru, i did it in 3 days


what a pansy!

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Congrats.

"pansy", thats a real zinger!

Domingo said:

One thing that has hurt the series since day 1 is the counter attack system. It's way too strong.
They give you a whole host of weapons, but there's no real point to using them when the hidden blade + counter attack is far more effective. They're also overly forgiving with the timing on using it, too.
I always figured that maybe I was abusing that technique and that maybe it wouldn't work on "hard" mode...if only there was such a mode.
I'm hoping that in the next game they finally tone that down and give us some motivation for actually attacking first and using other weapons.

Click to expand...

Hidden blade and the sword is all that I ever ended up using. Everything else seemed like a novelty.

This is good to know. I never finished the first one but bought the 2nd on a Steam sale. Played about 15 minutes of it and gave up. Keep thinking about going back but may not. The controls always aggravated me. All this "hand" and "eye" symbols. Just tell me which button it is already! Wish more 3rd person games controlled like Batman.

Personally I think the easiest fix to the counter attack issue is to force you do more than simply hold block and hit the button during a 2-second window when someone’s attacking. No items needed, no timing needed, no risks needed, and it works best with the default weapon.
The best option would be to have more enemies that can’t be defeated by it, or even better – make it so that only certain weapons can kill with it. Make it more of a parry instead of a kill-shot with the hidden blade. Then we might finally have some uses for the dagger and small sword. They had the right idea by making only the large swords able to harm people on horseback – flesh out the other weapons to do something specific, too. Maybe have some enemies that will counter then hidden blade right back, too. You have 30 weapons in the game – how about making us want to use even one of them?

One thing the first game had that was removed was the ability to do a fighting game-style “just frame” insta-kill by hitting the button during a tiny window when an enemy was blocking. The timing was hard and it didn’t always work, but once you got it down, it was a more aggressive version of the counter. Why not bring that back or make the counter have tougher timing?

I don’t want to make the game insanely hard, but right now the combat’s too easy. You can just hold block and hammer "X" if you want.

Domingo said:

Personally I think the easiest fix to the counter attack issue is to force you do more than simply hold block and hit the button during a 2-second window when someone’s attacking. No items needed, no timing needed, no risks needed, and it works best with the default weapon.
The best option would be to have more enemies that can’t be defeated by it, or even better – make it so that only certain weapons can kill with it. Make it more of a parry instead of a kill-shot with the hidden blade. Then we might finally have some uses for the dagger and small sword. They had the right idea by making only the large swords able to harm people on horseback – flesh out the other weapons to do something specific, too. Maybe have some enemies that will counter then hidden blade right back, too. You have 30 weapons in the game – how about making us want to use even one of them?

One thing the first game had that was removed was the ability to do a fighting game-style “just frame” insta-kill by hitting the button during a tiny window when an enemy was blocking. The timing was hard and it didn’t always work, but once you got it down, it was a more aggressive version of the counter. Why not bring that back or make the counter have tougher timing?

I don’t want to make the game insanely hard, but right now the combat’s too easy. You can just hold block and hammer "X" if you want.

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I had the same problem with the original Assasins Creed for the PC. Its defiantly better with console controller.

Droc said:

Congrats.

"pansy", thats a real zinger!


Hidden blade and the sword is all that I ever ended up using. Everything else seemed like a novelty.

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I apologize, you're right, it was less meant as a "zinger" as you put it and more of shock that you found it hard

I thought AC2 was a pretty good game, it had it's challenges in some spots, and I have played through it from beginning to end several times. I really enjoyed it so much I actually bought the DLC for it, that's the first time i've ever bought DLC for ANY game and I'm very strongly anti-DLC.

Fail said:

I apologize, you're right, it was less meant as a "zinger" as you put it and more of shock that you found it hard

I thought AC2 was a pretty good game, it had it's challenges in some spots, and I have played through it from beginning to end several times. I really enjoyed it so much I actually bought the DLC for it, that's the first time i've ever bought DLC for ANY game and I'm very strongly anti-DLC.

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Game was no problem, aside from that one tomb. Everything else was a breeze, thats what ticked me off with the game so much. Everything else was well designed and easy enough to make it through on your first try, but that one bloody part. Aside from that, it was a great game. Purchased the book too, aswell as brotherhood, though Im not enjoying it as much.