The modern-day story is a continuation of Assassin’s Creed 2, although you're not missing much if this is your entry-point to the series since it is rather brief. Desmond views more of the life of Ezio Auditore who lives in Renaissance Italy. The Villa that you built up into a fortress in the previous game gets ransacked, led by Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Rodrigo Borgia.
Ezio travels to Rome. You will be restoring Rome instead, after taking down the Borgia Towers in each district. Investing in shops allows you to purchase weapons, armour and medical supplies at a discount. Although the system sounds good, I was just buying any building I came across, and only bought a few weapons and armour at key points in the game.
It’s a problem with the majority of these games really, that there’s a few systems and loads of objective types but every aspect is just basic and you just casually play without putting much thought into most of it.
The parkour part of the game often just involves holding the run button and moving forward so Ezio automatically jumps when required. The impressive climbing animations allow you to traverse most buildings as there is almost always something for Ezio to cling onto in the city areas.
There’s quite a few “tailing” missions where you have to follow someone, and you can’t get too close, or too far from them. Some stealth sections don’t allow you to take the easy aerial route, but when you are on the ground, you can “blend” into crowds by walking slowly with them.
Committing crimes in a city increases your notoriety bar which determines how much attention the guards will pay to you. The lower the meter, then the closer you can walk to the guards. At a low level, they may be curious and walk towards you, but if you have high notoriety, they will begin chasing at first sight. You can lower the notoriety by ripping wanted-posters from the walls, killing officials or bribing the heralds. It's an overly simplistic system which means you don't really need to care about your actions since it's easy just to revert the situation back to normal. When guards give chase, you also have the option of running out of a set area to evade them. Alternatively you can hide in the hay, or roof-top shacks as long as you have broken line of sight.
The exploration element of Assassin's Creed remains the same. There's a large environment to explore, and scaling buildings is easy. Your map initially lacks detail unless you climb the tallest buildings and 'synchronise'. At this point, points of interest such as quests, shops and notoriety-reducing-elements are marked on your map. But then it becomes so cluttered with all kinds of icons.
The health system is similar to the previous game. Ezio starts off with low health (using the usual trope of being injured to make him weak compared to the end of the prior game). You can only replenish full health points by using the medicine items, or visiting a doctor. I found the 5 medicine vials you can carry to be rather generous, and this limit can be extended by purchasing better pouches. You can increase your health points by purchasing better armour which can also be temporarily broken until repaired at the Armourer. These elements make the game very easy.
There's a decent range of weapons you can purchase, with various daggers, swords and axes to play with. You can also customise the theme of Ezio's clothing by dyeing his clothes via the Tailor.
There's a basic combo system to combat, but the counter-attack move still remains the most effective and easiest option. The enemy variety does result in different strategies, but ultimately it resorts to similar behaviour to the first game where each character takes turns in attacking, allowing you to pick them off easily. Once you execute one guard, you can chain into nearby guards for easy kills. Stealth assassinations allow you to kill from hiding places, ledges and rooftops for some satisfying and strategic kills.
Scattered around towns are groups of Warriors, Thieves or Courtesans which you can hire. Warriors can fight but are limited to the ground, Thieves are weaker fighters but can follow you over rooftops, and Courtesans give you a moving group to blend with, and will distract guards with their charm. Although this sounds like a good idea, just like all the other ideas; it's overly simple. In the prior game, I used them for easy escape but didn’t bother with them much.
There’s actually a better system to use anyway, where you can save citizens from being beaten by guards, and they join your Assassins. Then you can call them to swoop in to take out guards for you. You can send them on missions to gain experience to level up, which is a simple system of a percentage chance and a short cool-down timer when they return. Although if they fail, they are killed and don’t return.
There's a good amount of collectibles with the usual flags, feathers and chests.
There are a couple of areas where you are in non-city areas like tombs. These are small Prince Of Persia style areas where you will be climbing and jumping around structures. It doesn't quite reach the complexity of Prince Of Persia, or even match its design, but it's a nice change of pace although it can be hard to tell where you are actually supposed to go.
The game is just more of the same Assassin’s Creed 2. Although that was a great game, it just feels a bit too repetitive and unoriginal at this point, and is a little too easy.