$ grep -r Tag: «игры»

I finished the first of the three Chronicles entries. I bought the whole trilogy during the recent Ubisoft sale.

The game has an interesting story. On one hand it is about China, and on the other hand it is connected to the previous Assassin's Creed games — the ones with Ezio Auditore. According to the plot, in his old age he trained Shao Jun, the main heroine of the game.

It seems like all the action is two-dimensional, but at the same time there are various three-dimensional transitions inside the levels. The levels themselves are large and interesting. There is a level map view and even Eagle Vision.

The game is beautifully drawn, as if painted on canvas.

Most levels have several ways to complete them. In fact, depending on the style you use, you receive corresponding rewards at the end of the level. You can complete levels quietly in stealth style, eliminating enemies with hidden takedowns. You can also go through them without taking out or touching anyone at all. Or you can openly fight the enemies. You can mix the approaches too. The mechanics for each style are implemented wonderfully. As you progress through the game, new moves, abilities and tools appear. Parkour is there too.

I thought this would be some throwaway game released to make money between main Assassin's Creed installments, but it turned out to be a full-fledged game with excellent mechanics and gameplay. Off to play the other two parts now :)

I finally finished the latest installment in the Assassin's Creed series so far.

As far as I understand, the game is built on the same engine as Assassin's Creed Unity — the same parkour system that lets you run over obstacles both upward and downward, a similar assassination mission structure with several entry points and extra sub-objectives or different ways to approach the target, skill upgrades, and so on.

This installment is, in my opinion, colorful, successful and interesting. Definitely one of the best in the whole series. However, there was one thing that confused me right away.

As soon as I launched the game, I immediately noticed that the graphics detail was awful and the screen resolution looked very low. I went into the graphics settings in the game and was stunned. For some reason the game says that my 2 GB of video memory is only enough for the lowest graphics settings and a resolution of 1280x720. That is terrible — none of the previous installments made demands like that. I understand that my video card is not top-end (AMD Radeon R9 M395X), but it is not so weak that it should deliver such miserable graphics in this game. All the previous installments played perfectly and looked great, while here it is a total failure, with completely insane GPU requirements.

The story is great. The game takes place in nineteenth-century London, and the main characters are Jacob and Evie Frye. The twins decide to take matters into their own hands and head for London, which is entirely under Templar control, to find a Piece of Eden instead of sitting idle and merely following orders from the Assassin Brotherhood.

By the way, that Brotherhood appears only once in the entire game, demanding that Jacob and Evie follow its instructions strictly and stop getting involved on their own. After that it disappears from the game entirely, and there is only one "local" Assassin left — an Indian working in London.

Jacob immediately decides to stir things up in the city. Since the Templars rule all of London through their gang, the Hanging Men, then the answer is to create your own gang and take the city back from them. Evie periodically reproaches him for indulging in the joys of a criminal life. The game is generally very good in terms of humor :)

Accordingly, the game has a fair amount of freedom of action. You can follow the main story by completing story missions, or you can do various parallel storylines. As usual, they feature historical figures such as Dickens, Darwin, and even Queen Victoria. On top of that, you can capture districts of London by doing, again, a set of missions. At first this is very impressive and looks very interesting. But after capturing 2–3 districts it becomes dull and routine. The missions themselves are interesting, but there are too many samey ones.

The game is not as colorful visually as Black Flag, but it is interesting, bloody, and has the gray atmosphere of London. On top of that, it introduces several really cool new features.

The hook. London streets are wide, in many places you cannot jump across the street, and rooftop movement is no longer as easy as it was in the early games. So we are given a grappling gun — the heroes simply fire it at the destination point and slide along the taut line. Convenient, though not especially realistic :)

Carriages. Finally, you can move around the city by transport. It immediately reminded me of GTA. You can get into any carriage — one standing empty or one driving down the street by throwing the coachman off it. Riding a carriage is much faster, and a route to the destination is drawn right on the road, showing where to drive and where to turn, taking traffic direction into account — practically GPS in augmented reality. On top of that, you can climb onto carriages and fight on them while moving. That is great: you no longer have to spend half an hour running to your destination, since the synchronization points used for fast travel are rather far apart in this game.

The gang. Members of the protagonists' gang, the Rooks, wear green, so you can always recognize them. You can take gang members along with you so they follow you. The squad size increases as you progress through the game and upgrade the gang skill tree. The gang has its own separate skill tree, and all bonuses apply specifically to the fighters — new fighter types, higher level (and strength), and so on. And the brawls during district captures, with big gangs fighting each other using brass knuckles and knives, are beautiful. In general it is very satisfying to gather a crowd and send it to beat up another crowd while you, for example, quietly slip somewhere under the noise.

Money plays an important role in the game. With money you can buy weapons, equipment and clothing. Everything can be upgraded, increasing your heroes' stats (strength, stealth, and so on).

You can also earn money through side activities — for example, I took part in boxing matches where you have to defeat several waves of opponents in fistfights. It looks great :) Besides that, you can rob, steal, and even rob a train. Or earn some money in carriage races if you are short.

The fights in the game look good, but combat has been simplified too much. Block, hit, block, hit. Almost monotonous button pressing. The only variety is the ability to shoot an opponent, throw some kind of grenade, or perform double and triple takedowns. Yes, it looks cool when during a finisher the hero kicks an enemy into the water, but you want to create some action yourself too. The fights are rather boring.

The modern-day storyline is present, but only in the form of various videos. There is little of it, it is unclear, and you do not participate in anything. I do not like that.

The main villain is kind of lame. He just sits there doing nothing, not even really giving orders to his helpers. Passive, he starts doing anything only at the very end of the game. That becomes the final battle, made to a familiar pattern — in many installments the ending follows the same scheme: find a First Civilization temple, find the artifact, then defeat the main villain who now has the artifact in his hands (that is, a superpower) while trying not to die from some incomprehensible First Civilization technology. In this installment, however, all of that is made more interesting by the fact that there are two heroes in the game at once.

Overall the game is good and it was interesting to play. Just like in Unity, there is a separate storyline dedicated to World War I. Only while in Unity the action was in Paris, here it is in London. It is interesting, but short. I think I spent most of my time on side missions and parallel storylines, barely touching the main plot. And the main plot itself is rather short, so the extra variety does not hurt.

The game is cool. If only it did not have such insane graphics requirements. I look at my screenshots and everything looks really sad. Especially compared to AC IV Black Flag. At first I thought maybe they would optimize it in later updates, but nope: the game has been out for a long time already, and Ubisoft is most likely busy making the next installment, rumors of a June announcement of which have already appeared.

Up next is DLC for this installment. Thankfully Ubisoft had a sale this weekend, so I stocked up :)

I finished another installment, Assassin's Creed Rogue.

The game is built on the same engine as Black Flag, which was very good. Even though the previous installment, AC Unity, was already on a new engine. Judging by the feel of it, this is DLC that they decided to release as a separate game.

Once again, you spend most of the game sailing a ship across different seas, only this time in northern waters. Hence the new details — ice floes that you have to break through with the ship, floating icebergs that you can (and sometimes have to) shoot with the cannon so you do not hit them and damage the ship.

The ship upgrade system is almost the same as in Black Flag. The battles are almost the same too, they just added a few details. One pleasant innovation is that during naval combat not only can you board an enemy vessel, but an enemy vessel can board you as well. A couple of times that even saved me — you are fighting several ships, you have been battered badly, it seems you are about to be sunk, and then they board you, which ends up saving you: you quickly defeat everyone in melee, repair your ship using the captured one, and calmly continue the fight with your hull strength restored.

The modern-day storyline is also similar to Black Flag — you walk around the Abstergo office, there is some kind of accident, for some reason almost everyone except you has been evacuated, you hack computers, start servers by solving puzzles, and along the way collect various information, much of it with references to previous installments.

For example, there is a short dossier on Al Mualim from the first game. Though viewed through a different lens — a Templar one.

Overall, the main changes are in the scenery. There is a lot of snow, the gameplay is slightly expanded with details from AC III about the Native American Connor — there is more tree climbing. And the world map feels larger. But all of it is dull and routine because of the boring plot.

The plot itself is just boring and muddled. Once again the Assassins prevent the Templars from finding artifacts so they cannot use them to bend the world to their will. Along the way a young Assassin becomes disillusioned with the brotherhood after taking many lives and joins the Templars. Supposedly he wants to stop the murders, but at the same time he slaughters almost everyone indiscriminately. Sadly, with such a great engine they still could not manage an interesting story. Once again there is a lot of «collect them all» stuff, only even duller.

Although the graphics have visually become cooler and prettier, there is something strange going on with the shadows in the game. All the faces look dull and creepy.

On the plus side, the game has a nice nod to the installments about Ezio Auditore — in one place you have to climb around a temple (Lisbon), jump across pillars and beams, find and pull levers to open a secret passage.

One of the most beautiful and dynamic scenes in the game is the escape from Lisbon. According to the plot, the famous earthquake that destroyed Lisbon was caused by the game's protagonist himself while he was still an Assassin. In fact, that is what changed his view of Assassin methods. This section is a fairly simple runner — just run and dodge — but it is all done beautifully.

The cities are more reminiscent of the locations from AC III — American colonies, gloomy cities.

Back to the graphics again — everything is beautiful, but what the hell is happening with the shadows? Why is everything so gloomy?

Everything is kind of yellow and dreary.

Naval battles are still great. You fire the cannons and steer the ship. The smoke from the shots blocks visibility, so you have to maneuver to see where the enemy ship ended up in order to aim again. Or fire blind, which is not bad either. The battles are just as dynamic.

The melee combat, in my opinion, became prettier and bloodier compared to AC IV Black Flag. That is nice. But the weapon set did not change: darts, sabers, pistols, a rope with a hook. Though overall it is a great set.

A lot of characters from other installments appear in the game. For example, Kenway, who, as I later understood, is the son of Edward Kenway, the main hero of AC IV Black Flag, who became a Templar and went to the American colonies to search for artifacts. He was the one who fathered a son with a local woman from a Native tribe — Connor, the hero of AC III. I have always liked that way the story connects several installments of the series.

If not for the boring plot, the game would have been great. But in the end I played it very little — I just finished the story, sailed around the world a bit and dropped it. All of this was already in Black Flag, but there it was much more colorful, interesting and fun. I did not even feel like fighting the legendary ships. I would rather install AC IV Black Flag again and play that than replay Rogue. Though who knows.

Next in line is the latest main installment — Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which I finally finished. If I have time, I will write down my impressions of it too, for the record.

I finally got around to writing about Assassin's Creed Unity, which I actually finished a few months ago; family matters left me no time to write a post while the impressions were still fresh.

The game starts with a rather vague prologue about the Templars and their Grand Master Jacques de Molay. As everyone knows, he was burned at the stake, but the prologue itself is not particularly connected to the game's plot. Somewhere they mention some grand plan of the Grand Master that the French Templars are supposedly going to carry out centuries later, but overall it makes for a pretty unclear opening.

The game itself follows a young man named Arno. His father was murdered when he was little, and the head of the Templar order took him in. One fine evening that man is murdered, and Arno, who happens to be at the scene, is accused of it and thrown into the Bastille. Then the revolution begins, and his assassin cellmate invites Arno into their Brotherhood. Along the way Arno tries to find out who was behind the murder. On top of that, he is in love with the daughter of his murdered adoptive father, who, ironically, is also a Templar.

The locations and scenery in the game are, of course, beautiful. Paris is gloomy, but beautiful, with many landmarks.

You can climb every landmark. Quite often, you can even get inside. It's always interesting to explore familiar places you've seen in real life.

They changed the gameplay quite a lot in this installment. Unfortunately, they completely removed the assassin brothers I liked so much: you can no longer mark a target and sic an assassin on it. There are many places to run and jump, you can enter a lot of buildings and pass through them, go up floors, and pick locks. Parkour and running feel a bit clunky in places and slow in others, but overall there is nothing fundamentally new; compared to the Ezio games, it feels more simplified, where you could jump or pull yourself up with the hookblade.

The city has several districts, each with its own difficulty, scenery, and inhabitants. In some places there are riots in honor of the revolution, while others are still calm.

During the story there are certain glitches in time (after all, we are still reliving an ancestor's memories through the Animus), where we hide so the system cannot track us. As a result, you get to run around Paris in other time periods. Climb the Eiffel Tower or see the Statue of Liberty before it is sent to the USA.

The combat system changed a lot. Now it is not so easy to stand against a crowd of enemies. In the early games you could just hold block and nobody would touch you; you only had to counterattack in time. Here everything is harder: it is easier to defeat the hero, every enemy has a power level (difficulty), and fighting even a couple of strong opponents is already pretty hard.

There are many different locations. Besides districts, there are lots of interiors. Palaces, for example. Lots of catacombs and dungeons.

I really liked the new investigation mini-missions. You arrive at a crime scene, collect clues, question witnesses, and expose the murderer. Great stuff.

There are a ridiculous number of missions in the game, by the way. All sorts of completion-meter stuff like collecting every chest, and there are several types of them. Rebuild your headquarters, buy and open taverns, increase their profits; all of this is also split into districts, so you can tackle it district by district. In general, you can spend more time on that than on the story itself. Many of them are rather repetitive and even routine. I liked the ability to buy weapons, clothes, and armor, of which the game has plenty. Changing the character's look and leveling him up through weapons and armor is always interesting.

The key story missions are certainly interesting. What sells them is that they can be completed in several ways: go in head-on, use some trickery, enter one way or another. You can also fulfill extra conditions so that, for example, people will help you by rushing the guards, delaying them and giving you a chance to escape.

Overall, I liked the game more than I disliked it. But somehow it does not reach the level of part II, Brotherhood, and Revelations in terms of story. They stuffed it with a lot of grindy completionist fluff. The plot is vague and the storytelling is not built especially well. Of course, the graphics are beautiful, the gameplay changed a lot, and in some places it became better while in others it became questionable. We'll see what happens in the next entries.

This installment was released alongside Assassin's Creed III. It was made for the handheld PS Vita, and only later got an HD version for home consoles and PC. Still, it is very noticeable that it was not made for them.

The game is laggy and buggy. I had some completely unreal lag on launch. I changed the resolution to 1920x1080 and it became smooth. But the controls on PC are very clumsy, and I kept running into glitches with them. At one point the engine suddenly decided I was in water even though I was on land. As a result, the character was dangling in the air to the sound of splashing water and could not move anywhere. I had to reload from a checkpoint. It is a shame I played it after the excellent Part IV (Black Flag), because with that contrast it looks even worse.

The main character is a girl named Aveline. The only truly original difference in this part compared to the others is that you can change her outfit. There are 3 appearances for different purposes. Lady — a woman in a dress, she cannot climb buildings or fight, but she can charm people and barely raises suspicion anywhere. Slave — a girl in simple clothes (according to the story, Aveline is the daughter of a slave who was freed and then adopted into a rich family), can climb and fight, though not especially well. It lets you slip into various places disguised as a worker and avoids drawing too much suspicion from the guards. Assassin — full combat gear, lets you use all weapons and fight at full strength. It immediately arouses suspicion among the guards.

You can travel by canoe in the game. However, because the controls are very clumsy, this is constantly a problem. You crash into something, fail to turn, or just get stuck and stop moving forward.

There are several locations. On the one hand, there are some bright spots, but on the other, everything looks just as dull and bleak as in Assassin's Creed III.

Chichen Itza was nice, though. An ancient temple, caves, catacombs — not bad.

The main villains are vague somehow. The plot too. Everything feels dull and, in my opinion, wildly dragged out. While playing, 2 or 3 times I thought, well, this is finally the end of the game, but no, the story kept going for some reason. Unlike the other parts, I had no desire at all to do side activities like buying and opening businesses in the city, because it all looked rather pointless here. There are barely any counters either; it does not even show the number of synchronization points.

Like in Part III, you can climb trees and branches in the forests. There were a couple of cool missions built around that. But again, the clumsy controls spoiled them.

The graphics are nothing special either, except perhaps for the character detail. And not for all characters, and not entirely either. Still, that is understandable. It was originally made for a handheld console.

At one point you go to New York, where you meet Connor, the Native American hero from Part III. The problem is that he does not look anything like either the hero of Part III or even a Native American at all. Only his outfit does (the screenshot above is not him). That is odd too.

The most interesting part of this game comes at the end. In fact, after the credits, when you think everything ended in a certain way. Still, I am unlikely to ever want to play this installment again. Though as a fan of the series, I still wanted to check it out. The game can be finished in 3 evenings, so it is okay for a look.

I finished part 4 a couple of weeks ago.

The game turned out to be really great. So far I spent longer on it than on all the others, 45 hours in total. Though I also started playing it a long time ago, somewhere around January. So far it was the most colorful and engaging Assassin's Creed game. A colorful main hero, a slacker who decided to make a fortune through privateering and eventually became a pirate. I kept wondering how the story would tie a pirate to the assassins. It turned out to be simple and straightforward, and the plot was a bit not even about that.

The plot itself, I have to say, did not impress me. In the modern-day sections you play as some employee extracting ancestors' memories for a company that makes movies and all kinds of entertainment. Nothing special really happens there, but it does shed light on how the previous game ended and what happened to Desmond. The pirate adventures themselves, the story ones specifically, were about average. Though of course it is funny to watch the Black Sails series and play this game at the same time. In part, the same events as in the series, the same characters, and famous pirates like Blackbeard and Charles Vane. Just with different emphases. But everything that does not concern the main story is simply gorgeous. You sail a ship, disembark wherever you can. Everything is seamless, with no cutscenes or interruptions. You simply sail up to an island, let go of the wheel, jump off the ship, swim to it, get onto land, and poke around there doing side missions or simply stealing someone's goods.

The world itself is wonderful too. Islands, villages, cities, ships, very bright colors. Different locations, from jungles to proper cities like Havana.

The naval battles deserve a separate mention. What in Assassin's Creed III was just optional naval missions is now a full part of the game. You sail around, fire different weapons, choose tactics for battle, upgrade your ship so it can take more hits and bring down stronger enemies. For example, if you end up between two ships of the line, even maximum upgrades may not save you: they will simply blow you to splinters from both sides. And what is cool is that after smashing up an enemy ship, you sail up and board it. Again, everything is seamless: you leave the wheel, keep firing while the ship is being pulled in with boarding hooks, climb over to the deck, and then start cutting everyone down left and right together with your crew. It is done really well.

Besides that, you can capture forts. And that is done well too: first smash everything there with cannons, then sail up, land, and throw yourself into the thick of the fight in the fort, cutting everyone down left and right.

They were not shy about blood either. The main character finishes people off in a very bloodthirsty and brutal way. Besides being a pirate, he is also a bit of a fool. So there is a fair amount of humor in the game.

Actually, it seems to me the main story itself took very little time. But everything outside the story was genuinely interesting. Well, except for the dives. I just do not like swimming underwater and dodging sharks for the sake of some chests. But for the first time in several games I wanted to collect everything in the game. In the end I collected all the Maya keys, all the Templar keys, and unlocked both types of armor in the game. Even so, I still did not collect absolutely everything, I reached 90% synchronization, and when the story finally ended, after the credits I lost the desire to keep digging around in the game. Maybe I simply started to feel sorry for the time, since there were still several unplayed games ahead.

The graphics pleased me: everything is beautiful, with lots of detail. But once I caught a funny glitch: textures disappeared and the character's insides showed through in the screenshot above.

Overall, the game is really very good. Before this, the Ezio games were great, and this one probably left no weaker an impression. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

I'm continuing to play through the Assassin's Creed series and write down my impressions.

The third game, which is actually the fifth if you count properly, radically changed the setting. From densely built-up Europe it moved to North America in the era of the colonists, in the period when the colonies' war of independence from England was beginning. The scenery became less dense: low houses, not pressed so tightly together, lots of trees and forests.

It feels like the engine was either heavily reworked or replaced entirely. The controls were simplified a lot, with far fewer different combinations. I think the game even has fewer buttons now. Visually, everything changed in terms of graphics too.

The modern-day storyline continues: Desmond, together with his team and his father, reaches the First Civilization temple and searches through his ancestors' memories for the key to open and activate it. Desmond has matured and looks harsher now. He seems angrier too.

You start by playing some grown man who sails from England to America in search of the temple. Along the way he gets into various scrapes, gets a local tribal girl pregnant and, suddenly, turns out to be a Templar. After the prologue you start playing as his son Connor, who grows up among Native Americans, and circumstances push him to seek out an old assassin and learn the craft.

The game has a lot of forests and trees. Since you play as a Native American, you can climb trees and jump from branch to branch. At first it feels very unusual and unclear, but then you get used to it. Though I still liked running through the woods on foot or riding a horse more than jumping through trees. Besides, you cannot travel far along just any route through them.

The game has more kinds of weapons, though compared to the previous part there are no radically new weapon types. Firearms appeared. After firing, they need to be reloaded. You can take down a soldier with a musket, pick up his musket, shoot the next enemy, throw the musket away, pick up the next one, drop the next enemy, and so on. Though if they are all close together, it will not work.

The combat system itself was simplified a lot and became boring. There are very few opportunities to attack proactively. Usually the whole fight comes down to holding block and counterattacking. That is very boring. The finishing moves themselves do look nice and bloody, though. Chains of finishers remained, but you cannot always use them. While you are finishing off one enemy, the next one may already start attacking, and you simply will not have time to do anything except block and counterattack again. Even though the game does give you things to shoot with, constant reloading means you can only do that rarely, so most battles are still hand-to-hand.

Characters look great after battles, covered in blood. In the screenshot there is one of the recruit assassins you can recruit in the game. There can be up to 6 of them. Each has some kind of ability. For example, a sniper can quietly take someone out from afar. But the recruit system itself was simplified a lot for some reason. You can still send them on missions to different states so they gain experience and level up, but it is all clumsy and lacks the interactivity of the previous game. You cannot customize them, and they are not very useful, mostly just for calling for help in cities. And even then they get taken out quickly if they are not leveled up. I only learned in the second half of the game that you can apparently level them and send them on missions at all, that is how unclearly it was made. To recruit them, you first need to find them while exploring the location, and then complete some mission connected to them. Overall, their missions are interesting. But they also feel as if they were torn out of context.

The story felt rather dull to me. There seem to be lots of events, some movement, uprisings, conspiracies, war, but everything moves at a sleepy pace and there is not much action as such. Not very interesting and not dynamic at all. There are a lot of plot holes and no smooth transitions in the narrative. So far it is probably the least interesting part in terms of story. The conflict between father and son, the disagreements, how awkwardly it is all revealed and how awkwardly it ends too. Apparently they aimed more at Americans, like a funny excursion into the War of Independence. Famous events you can participate in, such as the Boston Tea Party.

Though some turns in the story are interesting, of course. For example, at one point you end up in prison, stripped of everything, and need to escape from it.

In the modern-day sections, Desmond also gets to run around and climb various cool places. For example, a construction crane on a skyscraper so he can parachute-jump from it.

I just took a nice screenshot.

At one point you end up in Brazil, where Desmond's face is hanging in the subway because he is wanted.

A separate topic is the naval missions. There are not many of them and they are almost all optional, but steering a ship and sinking enemy ships is cool. Firing cannons, boarding enemy ships, very cool!

Overall I did not like the game all that much. The graphics became better and prettier. But the story is boring, the narrative is dull and lacks dynamism. The side missions turned out to be more interesting than the main plot. A lot of things were simplified for no good reason. Plus I saw quite a few glitches in the game. A middling effort. Let's see what the next parts are like.

Fresh impressions of the next Assassin's Creed game.

This part is practically an ode to old age and the changing of generations. It continues the adventures of Ezio Auditore, who was the main character of the previous two games in the series. Here he has already grown old, and the game takes place 30 years after the beginning of Assassin's Creed II. Ezio follows in Altair's footsteps from the first game and finds his secret library in Masyaf, beneath the assassins' fortress-hideout. Naturally, the Templars are hunting that library there too. Nobody knows what is inside, but everyone wants it anyway. To open it, 5 keys are needed. Altair once gave those keys to Niccolò Polo, the father of traveler Marco Polo, so he could hide them. The trail leads Ezio to Istanbul.

In Istanbul, Ezio is met by Yusuf, the head of the local assassins, a colorful character. Probably the most colorful one; everyone else fades next to him.

The main plotline is not as interesting as in the previous parts. More boring. But the parallel line with the memories is good. I especially liked the ending. I finished the game in 18 hours. Though this time I got distracted from the main story more often by various side activities.

Over the course of the game, Ezio searches for the keys. Each key contains one of Altair's memories. That way we go even farther back into the past and can see events from before the first part of Assassin's Creed, when Altair was saving the Brotherhood and Al Mualim.

On top of that, in these memories we learn what happened to Altair after the first part, all the way up to his old age when he became a gray-haired old man.

Each key involves some descent into old catacombs where you have to cross gaps and look for paths. They are not difficult at all, and in places are downright linear. Sometimes, though, there are stealth-style missions. The hardest location is probably the last one. There you have to run to the right place in time, and also figure out where you are even supposed to run.

At the end you always get into some little room with a statue holding the key, and from there Ezio somehow miraculously gets back to the surface on his own.

There is still room for humor in the game. For example, in one mission Ezio has to dress up as a street musician to get into a celebration, and there he sings songs. The songs are about events from the previous games. For example, he sings some pretty funny verses about Cesare Borgia :) And yes, Ezio has grown very old.

As in Brotherhood, here you can recruit Brotherhood members. Many of them just need to be protected from guards; with others you need to compete: catch a thief, win a race, or simply fight and beat them. Recruits can be leveled up too. Each now has their own weapon type. You can also send them on missions to different cities, where they gain experience and earn money. In addition, every city is now under Templar influence, and successful missions reduce that influence. After reducing it enough, you can take the city away from the Templars, but it gives no extra opportunities. You just need to keep the city by continuing to do missions there. Recruits can also be used to eliminate targets as you go, and in some missions they even go into battle alongside you. Beautiful, spectacular stuff.

Each recruit can be leveled to 15 so they become a master assassin. To do that, besides experience, you need to complete two missions together with the recruit as regular missions.

The whole city is again divided into spheres of influence, and as in Brotherhood you need to capture districts by taking down the lead soldier there. Some can be handled head-on, while others have to be handled stealthily. For each district you can recruit one or two more people. After capturing a district, you also have to defend it. And that is a whole sub-game in the Tower Defence style, interesting and very cool. Waves of soldiers come at you, and you need to place barricades and place assassins on rooftops so they can bring soldiers down or fight them hand-to-hand. Once you have a master assassin, you can assign him to a district and then he will successfully hold off the soldiers without your involvement. They upgraded the Brotherhood system really well in this part, and I liked it a lot.

The game has new weapon types, including bombs that you can assemble from different ingredients and that do different things. For example, smoke and noise bombs for distracting attention.

Ezio is cool, of course. He still runs and fights well. He is just no longer a young man, so he looks like a tired, experienced guy who should probably retire already. All the games with him are good after all.

The ending, when Ezio finds Altair's skeleton in the chair where he died of old age, is impressive, of course. And what follows after that is now remembered with pleasant nostalgia. A worthy ending to his adventures, even if the main plotline in Constantinople itself was not all that impressive. Next up: Assassin's Creed III.

Finished another game in the Assassin's Creed series. It's awesome.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is a continuation of Ezio Auditore's adventures. The new part starts where the previous part ended, in Rome. Most of the game takes place there as well. Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope at the end of the previous part, survived, escaped, and keeps scheming. But not for long: the real focus of the story is his evil son, who wants to conquer all of Italy and does not even obey the pope.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is beautiful and full of bright colors; they refined a lot from the second part. Graphics, gameplay, story, all of it. The game is short: according to Steam, I spent 14 hours on it while playing at a relaxed pace. Compared to the previous parts, that is very little.

The biggest new thing in this part is helpers. In the story Ezio leads the Assassin order and recruits new apprentices. All of Rome is divided into districts, almost all of them taken over by the Templars. Each district can be taken back: you enter the required area, the mission starts, and you need to find the Templar captain and take him out. Some are hard to take down, some need to be handled stealthily or quickly, otherwise they run away and you have to wait until the next attempt. Every captured district gives you the option to recruit one more apprentice assassin. You can point your apprentices at a target and they will quickly eliminate it. If there are many targets, they will dispatch some of them quickly and fight the rest with swords. They can die too.

The apprentices also have progression: the more experience they gain, the stronger and more powerful they become. You can also send them on missions. The stronger the apprentice, the higher the chance of success on missions, which are divided by difficulty. They get experience, level up, and bring in money from those contracts. If you have many apprentices, you can call in an arrow storm, and all targets die quickly, but the apprentice usage bar is fully consumed and you need to wait. Overall it is very cool: you can call them for help or simply tell them to clear the way so you do not waste your own time or get spotted. In missions, if a guard sees you, that is it, alarm and failure. If he sees an apprentice who takes him out, somehow it is not a failure :) And for recruiting new assassins, the mini-missions from the first part returned: save a resident from guards (or simply sic your apprentices on them) and done, a new assassin. All under the pretext of the uprising, the liberation of Rome.

The second cool thing is the tunnel system. Now you do not have to run across the entire city to get to a mission; as you play, you can restore wells like these and use the tunnel system to get where you need quickly. Convenient: you spend more time actually playing and less time running long distances.

There are also lots of battles, and they are cool, fun, and bloody. They added chained finishers: after delivering a fatal blow to one opponent, you can quickly pick another nearby enemy and finish that one right away too. It looks beautiful, spectacular, and bloodthirsty. The finishing moves became more varied too.

There are battle scenes in the story too.

Rome itself is full of cool buildings, but beyond those buildings everything is rather uniform and a bit dull. Though you do come across big temples that you can climb all the way to the dome. It is strange that there is a hole in the dome that lets you climb into the temple. Either there was some repair work in the plan, or it never rains in medieval Rome.

The story is awesome. The game is short, but very dense, and you can binge the story without getting distracted by side tasks like buying shops for profit. Assassins versus Templars, a new turn in the conflict. They even mixed in the French. On top of that, it gives you the full spread of mission types: mass battles, stealth, and much more. There are repetitions too: in the second part there was Altair's armor. To get it, you had to gather all the keys, and each key was obtained by climbing around temples and catacombs, a kind of puzzle. Here it is the same, only now it is the Armor of Romulus. I decided not to spend time on that and just play the story. The story does not let go, and the graphics became much better, especially Ezio, who is drawn very well, so it is pleasant both to play and to watch. Now I understand why fans of the series praise the Ezio parts the most.

The modern-day story follows the same direction as in the second part: the assassins are on the run, looking for refuge, digging further into Desmond's ancestors' memories to find artifacts. One of the refuges is the ruined villa where Ezio himself once lived.

What is strange is that in the story the Templars wrecked the villa many centuries ago, and it has apparently stood untouched ever since. That is odd. And nobody ever discovered the underground passages in it either. But you have to crawl through those passages while playing as Desmond.

So that is one very cool game. It is basically just a continuation of the second part, but a very cool one and perhaps more interesting than the second. Fixing earlier mistakes and improving what had already been invented, combined with an interesting story.

After the first part of the Assassin's Creed series, I finished the second. The contrast is huge. The second part is just really great. Bright, beautiful, with a great story. On the one hand it felt much longer than the first part, on the other hand I spent only 3-4 hours more finishing it. The story is simply denser, and there are fewer repetitive routine missions.

The second part takes place in Italy during the Renaissance. You play a guy who goes from a reckless teenager who gets into fights, sneaks to young ladies at night, and only knows how to climb buildings, to a seasoned adult assassin.

Ezio Auditore, the main character

The second part adds a lot of new gameplay elements borrowed from other genres. There is RPG stuff here: armor affects how long you can last in a fight and how many hits you can take. Clothes can be dyed different colors. Weapons can be changed as you play, you can buy new ones and choose whether to fight with a sword, a cleaver, or just smash enemies over the head with a war hammer. There is also an economy now: money appeared in the game, and you can spend it on weapons, armor, and ammo. The main character has his uncle's villa, which you can improve: build structures, for example, or buy paintings in different cities that later hang on the villa walls. The more upgrades, the more the villa is worth and the more income it brings. You can then spend the profits on weapons and armor. Or just pay for transport to another city and choose one of several drop-off points there. Convenient. Although when you travel to the villa itself, it drops you off at the outskirts, and running to the villa on foot every time gets old.

An additional story thread was also added around Altair's armor. There is a vault with the coolest and most powerful armor in the game, which Altair made for himself after gaining knowledge from the Apple of Eden. It is locked with 6 locks. Each lock needs a key stored in an assassin tomb. Some tombs are just simple chase sequences, but most are interesting puzzles about how to reach the next level in a building. Sometimes you have to climb under cathedral domes, for example. Interesting stuff.

As in the first part, the action takes place in different cities. Each city looks different from the others. But for the most part everything looks quite colorful. Green suburban landscapes, or gray tones and bad weather.

Historical figures appear in the game again. The one who shows up most often and is the most useful is Leonardo da Vinci. He upgrades your gear and comes up with various things like a flying machine for getting into an impregnable fortress. One part of the plot revolves around the Assassin Codex written by Altair from the first part. Its pages are scattered across different places in the game, and you need to collect them. Da Vinci decrypts them, sometimes finding Altair's inventions there, such as the hidden pistol.

Niccolò Machiavelli is in the game too, another well-known historical figure. There is not much of him, though. He is involved in the events, but more often stays in the background. Still, the cast in the story is interesting.

One stage of the game takes place during the carnival in Venice. And the city itself is beautifully transformed: it is nighttime all the time, there is fun everywhere, dancing, everyone is wearing masks. It decorates the game both visually and in terms of the story. Carnival masks are a great plot device so the hero can act in secret and not be recognized.

The scenery is beautiful: medieval European cities, rivers, the canals of Venice.

As for combat, everything became much more interesting than in the first part. First, enemies are smarter and harder to bring down. Second, after a certain point in the game you can fight with the hidden blade, and it looks beautiful and brutal. Third, you have allies in the game. Either through the story or just in gameplay, you can hire a squad of 4 mercenaries to fight on your side. They fight so-so, rarely landing hits and mostly just fending enemies off. But they can distract some of the enemies. And battles look bigger because of them. They also fixed something that looked implausible in the first part: now an enemy (usually an archer on a roof) does not die from one throwing knife. Now you need to throw two :) Can't say it became fully realistic, but it is better. And now you can shoot bullets too. You even need time to aim.

The main character changes as the game goes on. For example, in the screenshot above he had been wounded and spent time sick in bed. He got scruffy and pale. It is funny in general that more than 20 years pass over the course of the game's story while you play.

Overall, the first part completely pales next to the second. The second is really good, interesting, and varied. I barely did any side quests like «go beat someone up» or deliver a letter. There is much less routine in the main story than in the first part, and much more variety. And again, you often have a choice: complete a mission stealthily or go and cut everyone down. The missions themselves fit the story well; in the first part it was always the same thing: go, gather information, eliminate the target. You had to do the same sub-missions 9 times, like eavesdrop and beat somebody up. Here that is gone; the missions progress linearly. Overall I am satisfied. Though I realized I had never actually finished the second part the first time I played it. I do not remember why I could not reach the finale; I think there was some kind of bug or my computer let me down, but it turns out I saw the ending of the game for the first time today. Gap filled. Next up is Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, a continuation of Ezio's adventures.

Back when I was still a student, I played the first Assassin's Creed. I liked that game a lot at the time and went through several more, up to Assassin's Creed: Revelations. I played the early entries on PC, and Revelations, which I liked the least, on PS3, which made me like it even less. In games like this, controllers just are not for me. Then I stopped playing this series for a long time. Mostly because they stopped releasing OS X versions. A couple of weeks ago I decided I wanted to play through the whole series - both the parts I had already played before and the ones I had not. Especially since the older versions cost only 300-400 rubles on Steam now. I finished the first part and decided to write down my impressions.

Assassin's Creed always pleased me, of course, with its interesting story, beautiful locations, landscapes, and relative freedom of action. The first part uses the common prologue pattern where the action starts immediately and the main character has access to the full arsenal of weapons and moves right away. After the opening, the main story begins, where you gradually learn everything the game has to offer - new moves, weapons, and so on. What I like about Assassin's Creed is a certain balance between the story and the gameplay. On the one hand there is a cinematic side consisting of 2 storylines - the future, where the assassin descendant Desmond Miles is held by some organization so they can dig through the past of his ancestors, which is stored in his genes as a kind of ancestral memory, and the past, which is what they are actually digging through. So you get two plotlines that are connected to each other. Besides the cinematic part, the game gives you relative freedom of action - if you want, do everything in stealth mode and complete missions quietly; if you want, gather pretty much every soldier in the location together and turn it into a bloodbath until you take them all out. Or until they take you out.

At the center of the story is the Middle Ages, the year 1191, the Third Crusade, and the confrontation between the Templar Order and the Assassin Order against the backdrop of the war between the crusaders and the Saracens. Playing as an assassin named Altaïr, in the end you fight pretty much everyone. In general, the soldiers are all the same, differing only in appearance, but even that did not bother me in 2008 when I first played it. I have loved history since childhood, so it was quite interesting to look at all of this. And on top of that, the plot briefly presents an alternate history in which the waters did not part before Moses, and Jesus did not turn water into wine.

You start from the assassins' fortress. On the one hand, they are supposed to hide, disguise themselves as monks to blend into the crowd, and operate in the shadows, while on the other hand they have their own castle and the templars even know where it is. They even begin besieging it at the start of the game, but the assassins manage to drive them off. On the one hand it seems like a plot hole; on the other hand, the game gives an answer to that question at the end.

The game has 3 different cities - Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Plus the assassins' castle with the settlement next to it (Masyaf), as well as locations between the cities that are simply called the Kingdom, although different parts of this kingdom belong to different forces. All the cities differ from one another visually - both in architecture and in the color palette of the graphics, which also creates their own atmosphere.

What is cool is that you can explore the whole world in any order. You can start with any city. The first time you approach a new city, you immediately have several ways to get inside. If you want, take out the guards at the gate. If you want, climb over the wall or over the gate above them. If you want, pretend to be a monk and walk past the guards with them.

And now for the bad. There is quite a lot of routine in the game. To see missions on the map, you constantly have to climb high points to look around. Usually these are some kind of towers. On the other hand, you can admire the scenery of the virtual world. At least they came up with a fast way down, even if it is completely unrealistic. Jumping from the height of a ten-story building into a wooden hay cart and not dying... and even landing in it from that height... Still, it looks spectacular. For completionists there are quite a few scorekeeping activities - collect all the flags, of which there are many kinds. Find and eliminate all the templars. I had absolutely no desire to spend time on that just to gather everything. Each stage is a new mission where you need to deal with someone, and every time you are expected to do the same thing - come to the assassins' brotherhood headquarters in the city, get instructions on where to begin, and after that everything is always formulaic. Run against the clock, deal with guards, eavesdrop, beat someone up, or collect flags against the clock. At first it feels interesting and varied, and to begin the assignment you do not even have to do all of this. But later it gets boring. There are 9 assassinations in the game, and 9 times you have to go through all of this. The map is scattered with townspeople whom guards are harassing. You can help them, and then some guys will hold back the guards chasing you so it is easier for you to hide. That is useful if you do not want to fight, but on the other hand you have to fight for them to appear. I helped them mostly so I could fight the guards, because the bloodbath turns out fun. You can stab someone at the start with the hidden blade, throw a knife at someone else, shove someone into a market stall, and chop up the rest with a sword. Overall, for me the hacking and slashing was the most interesting part of the gameplay.

But after completing the side tasks, the most interesting part begins. You have supposedly gathered the necessary information about the target and go carry out your mission - to take out the villain who, as a rule, is preparing a coup in order to seize power. The scenarios there are more varied, and the ways to complete them vary too. Usually you can either do everything cleanly in stealth mode and get away, or fight your way through and chop everyone to pieces. And the final part of the mission always continues telling the story and explaining what is happening both in the past and in the future.

Sometimes in the story sections you see interesting scenes. For example, closer to the finale you move through the Kingdom and see an army on the march. What is cool is that historical figures are woven into the game's story. For example, you can talk with King Richard of England, who leads the crusade.

When I played it for the first time, the game seemed insanely cool to me. Now, against the background of the later entries, where a lot was added to the gameplay, it looks sparse and repetitive in places. But overall the impression is still positive. Apparently the story does its job. The story in the past is interesting, and at the same time you really want to know what is happening in the future and what all the fuss is about. The many mysteries and unanswered questions in the narrative are very intriguing. Steam showed that I finished the game in 22 hours, without spending time on obsessive scavenger hunts around the map, but doing all the missions for gathering information on the target. You can finish it over a weekend and enjoy the story. Besides, the game was excellently dubbed into Russian.