Assassin's Creed II is one of the games I've been meaning to buy and play for a year or three. As such, there are many descriptive reviews already written. My review will be very basic.
I originally played the first Assassin’s Creed on Xbox 360 when I trialed Gamefly years ago. I beat the game in a week and returned it. It was really fun and not too long. I knew I’d want to play the sequel.
I played Assassin's Creed II on my PC using an Xbox 360 controller. It's one of those games that should be played with a controller in my opinion, although I never even tried the keyboard and mouse. Using the controller worked very well. The only annoying action was changing your weapon using the weapon wheel. Pretty much every time I did, the cursor would pass over the weapon I wanted and land on the next one. When I tried to correct it, it would fly back two places, again missing the weapon I desired.
Assassin’s Creed II was too long for me. I thought the production of the game was excellent. It’s a top quality game. There are several activities you can do to play even longer than I did. I believe I spent nearly 30 hours to complete the game. I skipped many of the optional missions (aka memories). Still, I was expecting it to be around eight hours like the first one. To me, the length was a disappointment. To others, it was probably wonderful.
In summary, I’m scoring the game with 4/5 stars. I’d give it five had it been closer to ten hours. It would have been short and very sweet, making me want to play the next one. Instead, I don’t plan on buying other games in the series. I can’t give it any less than four stars, because I think the production quality of the game is top notch.