LO1 Game Analysis of Assassins Creed 2

(PS3)

"Assassin's Creed 2" is the second installment of the 'Assassin's Creed' series and is a single player, open world action adventure game. It shows conventions, such as free roaming in-between missions, which let you get collectibles and side activities, this fits with the adventure side of the game, but the action is involved when free running and assassinating targets. Compared to its predecessor, which was very initiative at the time, introducing new mechanics to the genre, and Assassins Creed 2 basically has the same mechanics but a lot more smoother and introduces a few more (e.g. shops).

The story is that there is a waging war between the Assassins and Templar, and Ezio, the main character, becomes an assassin after is father and two brothers are killed because of a 'faked' treachery to their country. At first, he kills for revenge, but as you progress he becomes more mature and realises their's more to what he is doing, and leads up to killing the Templar leaders. The narrative informs you through the game play by setting your main goal, one of the targets, and each 'sequence' builds up to you killing that target, in which the story develops. You feel sympathy for Ezio because half his family was killed and you find it justifiable that he wants revenge.

"Assassins Creed 2" was developed on the Anvil engine by Ubisoft Montreal with a staff of 450 people working on the game, it was confirmed in November 2008 and was released in November 2009. There are lots of game physics involved in the game, as the game is meant to be realistic.

Ezio is relevant to the target audience because he wants to exact revenge on the people who killed his father, and at least once a person would be compelled to take revenge. If you play the whole series of Assassins Creed 2 (Brotherhood and Revelations included) you watch him grow in age and character you may grow attached to him as a character as you may go through the emotions he has. Ezio as a main character is a very strong character especially because the character is played through 3 games and you see the character develop,You feel sympathy for Ezio because half his family was killed and you find it justifiable that he wants revenge on the person who did so.

The challenges of the gameplay is that the enemies come in different variations (Normal, agile, seeker and brutes) which all have different strategies to kill you and more strategies to kill them. There is also free running as a challenge where you have to run away from  enemies and become anonymous, you can mess up and die from heights or guards with ranged weapons. The normal enemy is equipped with a normal sword and just attacks you, and you can easily fight back. The agile enemy can avoid your attacks and if your running away they can easily catch up with you and hurt you. The seeker is an enemy that, when your trying to be anonymous in a hiding place such as a haystack, bench or crowd of people, they break up or check your hiding place, you can either counter them and assassinate them and put them in the hay with you or run away and alert the enemies again. Finally, the brutes are enemies that use heavy weapons such as battle-axes and great swords, but they are slow and can easily be dodged, they normally are in pairs and so can make it difficult taking them both on. The enemies get harder as you go on in the game but this is countered as you have better weapons and more techniques to fight them, like smoke bombs for example, this can engage the player as it gives them more variations on defeating enemies.

The target audience are males that are 16 or over, this is because of the action and gore involved in the game that would be inappropriate for people of a younger age. The game itself is quite unique to other games of the same genre, like God of War or GTA V, as God of War is more unrealistic and mythical, whilst GTA V has a lot of realism in the game, meanwhile Assassins Creed 2 is a bit of both with realism and mythical aspects to the story of the game and gameplay. 

Finally, the game was available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The game would be best on a console rather than a computer, this is because the characters motion is quite slow when moving about, and then the free running would be quite hard to control on a keyboard as you would need to move from left to right quickly and this can only be done easily on a controller.