1- This game took me about 25 hours to complete, but I certainly did not spend 25 hours playing this game. There seems to be this idea that games need to be long so that the player gets their money's worth out of it, and as a result games end up getting bloated with meaningless gathering quests and other filler, but that's just making the game more drawn out. I can complete Sonic the Hedgehog in less around an hour or Mega Man X in about twice that, but I can guarantee that I've spent more time playing those games than I will Assassin's Creed II. For one thing, I had to learn my way through them, so I had to play levels numerous time before I could finish them, but I also replay them because they're fun. If you plug in Mega Man X you immediately jump into a fun, simple but exciting level with fantastic music. In Assassin's Creed II it takes you twenty minutes just to get to play Ezio, and two hours before you get your basic weapon.

It's slow in even the most basic ways. Every time you want to get healed, you have to go up to them and hit 'speak', 'confirm', 'confirm', 'back' and then the screen fades to white and reloads. Assassin's Creed basically put you back to full health whenever you weren't in danger, but this game has money in it so that had to go. Not that it made much of a difference. They even pause the game to make you 'accept' every single mission. If you didn't want the damned mission, why initiate it?

Does anybody look at a completed save file and go "man, I should really start another game!"? I can understand people who like the core gameplay far more than I did going back to play all those sidequests I never bothered to do, or replaying tombs for the fun of it, but does anybody ever actually want to restart this game? Ever?

2- This game is ridiculously easy. The fighting is easy, vanishing is not especially hard, but rarely worth the effort since killing the guards is usually so much more efficient, losing notoriety is so easy I have to wonder why they even included it in the game, and you don't get any real assassination missions until you're in Venice, and even those are easy. This game is not stimulating, because you're just making your way from one cutscene to the next. I am not a god of video games, this is just really, really easy. I could have played through the entire game without buying any of the armour. Or any of the weapons, really, since countering attacks while you're unarmed is so much more expedient than slashing at an enemy with your sword. The game gives me all these tools like poisoned blades, throwing knives, a short blade, a hidden pistol, smoke bombs, throwing money around, hiring mercenaries and thieves and courtesans, but I never actually had to use any of them.

And yet the game seems to value its combat system far more than anything regarding assassination. Combat is frequently inevitable, and in fact your earlier 'assassination' missions are generally about fighting or running or climbing rather than any actual stealth. Possibly the most irritating example however are the pursuit missions in the tombs or Templar lairs. The game gives you a mission to kill the fleeing guard before he can warn his allies, but that mission is impossible to complete. Not only is it incredibly irritating to be given the illusion that you can do something while having success always snatched from your grasp, but there is no good reason for them to do this, except that they love their combats so much they didn't want you to be able to avoid them.

Aside from the rare missions where getting spotted will result in an immediate desynch, there is really no penalty for getting spotted. In Arkham City, getting spotted pretty much guarantees your immediate death from machine gun or sniper fire unless you can immediately get to cover, but in Assassin's Creed II, the archers do next to no damage. In the one mission where you get 'trapped' by Savanarola's captain of the guard, I had four or five arrows sticking out of me, though that didn't impede me much.

3- The assassinations got crippled. I mentioned earlier how a lot of the assassinations don't even involve stealth at all, but it's much worse than that. Both of the previous points also applied to the original Assassin's Creed, but that game had the satisfaction of planning out your executions. All missions followed the same format - you learned the best way to kill your target through two to six information gathering missions, and when you were ready you carried out your plan. The game was long, with huge distances to travel and a ton of villager rescue or viewpoint climbing objectives to go through, and the information gathering missions were as boring as its sequel's, but at least there was a payoff. The combat might have been easy, but if you got bogged down in a combat your target would manage to escape and you'd fail your mission and have to try again. The game rewarded planning and preparation. You didn't go through all those missions because the game's linear plot commanded it, you did it because you, the player, could benefit from it. Assassin's Creed was not a great game, and I will probably never replay it, but at least it was a game that provided enough satisfaction that I didn't regret actually playing it.

4- On top of all the other stuff this game makes you collect, this game added money. It's part of the addition of RPG elements that tries to compensate for a weak gameplay with "customisation" or "leveling" or whatever. Now you need to go to an "inn" to heal, though I have no idea why. The price is marginal and doctors are omnipresent. It's not like most of your missions take place in the wilderness or in dungeons and this is the game's way of saying that you can't easily heal while you're out actually adventuring. You can go to the doctor in the middle of a mission, it's no problem at all. Same goes with repairing your armour at a blacksmith's. You also have to pay money to upgrade your weapons and armour, though with the difficulty of this game it doesn't actually matter - the hidden blade doesn't upgrade and your bare hands are a great way to counter-kill any enemy, so it's not like the equipment is that valuable. You can upgrade your villa and buy art pieces to upgrade your villa and generate more money you don't really need. The best armour in the game, Altair's armour, is actually free and just requires you to complete the Assassins' tombs missions, incidentally. You can get it before the best purchaseable armour, too. Again, this is so obviously padding that it offends me. This adds nothing to the game but takes substantial time, the game is just dangling keys in front of you to distract you of how boring this game really is.