Remarkably more engaging than the first game. Kinda overstays its welcome after a certain point, but I anticipated that simply from it being a Ubisoft game. For how much I complained about "binary stealth" in my review of the previous game, I was elated to find that you can simply walk along with a crowd to blend in. It's so seamless, and it enabled one of the funnier moments of my playthrough: casually walking into the audience of my target and firing a bullet into him at close range. They never saw it coming.

The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.

I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.