This has some of the best maps in the series! Just big enough to feel big, not big enough to be annoying to navigate. I really like the little bits of countryside around the cities, the San Gimignano towers, and the narrow alleyways of Venezia.

The climbing and parkour is just slow enough to provide a pleasant friction, you may at times be called upon to manually grab a handhold or do a side jump or have to shimmy to the side and go down then up to climb a building. However, any time the game wants to speed up the parkour, such as during a chase sequence, the fiddliness of the controls inevitably gets in the way.

In general, this game's desire to be a faster-paced sequel conflicts with a control scheme that is designed for slow and patient movement. The game played best when I tried to meet it halfway as a game about standing in a crowd and observing guard patterns to know when to move. The music and visuals are pleasing enough that this was not a boring ask. But again and again it kept trying to have action sequences or long combat sequences that were just frustrating. The combat finisher animations are cool, but not cool enough to last the whole game.

The story is also kind of a patchwork mess. It starts strong in Firenze with clear motivations for Ezio and character growth inspired by the people around him, but in the second half of the game the targets become increasingly distant from the original revenge plot, and there's a bunch of awkward time jumps where Ezio seems to have gotten character development offscreen. But the Vault is still one of the coolest things to happen in the series, so at least it finishes strong.