Assassin’s Creed II DLC: The Battle of Forli and the Bonfire of the Vanities

Not good. I feel like Ubisoft Montreal have pulled my pants down in front of a crowd of people: they’re completely in the wrong and yet I’m the one who has to cope with the embarrassment. I was naïve.

To recap, the _Assassin’s Creed II_ downloadable content takes place in the ‘memory gap’ in the original game. Even while playing through the main title this empty space seemed both arbitrary and frustrating and now, having paid my own good money to fill it, it seems like a cheat. A part of me wanted to respect Ubi’ for having the sheer nerve to slap me in the face whilst unashamedly pointing out to me that they were going to do it again, but this DLC is part of a worrying trend that more developers are buying into. DLC is all well and good if it brings something new to the experience of the main title; a new gameplay mechanic perhaps, or even a new environment. It may be small, but it must do something to justify the extra money spent. The _ACII_ packages simply do not do this at all. In _Assassin’s Creed’s_ case I would have accepted more plot information, having become engrossed by its conspiracy-based story on my original playthrough – but I didn’t even get that.

_The Battle of Forli_ sees Ezio reunited with Caterina Sforza, the countess of Forli, who you may remember from a rather tedious gondola-escort mission in the main title. When I finished _ACII_, it did seem rather odd that quite a lot had been made of a character whose screen time amounted to about five minutes. So, in the hope that The Battle of Forli would see this character developed, I purchased it on the Playstation Store. No luck. Caterina takes part in only a couple of conversations and we simply have to take the game’s word for it that she is the brave and sassy leader of Forli that the animus database makes her out to be.

The gameplay takes some of the least inspiring aspects of the _Assassin’s_ series and pads them out for a solid hour: escort missions and endless crowds of templar knights to battle through. Unlike many, I actually like the battle system in _Assassin’s Creed_ – it’s stylish and brutal in all the ways it needs to be. It struggles with scale though; battles descend into farce as soon as you take on more than three enemies as they queue up to hit you in turn. It’s simply not very much fun. These sequences worked in the main title because they were part of a fairly varied experienced. On their own, they’re simply wasted. And remember that much hyped ‘flying machine’ that was showcased at length in the trailers then suspiciously was only accessible in one scene. Well, it makes a return. ‘Thank you very much Ubi’, now we can have untold fun with the flying machine, whatever will you have us do with it?’ would be an understandable response. The problem is, Ubi’ didn’t think of anything. All you can do is fly about aimlessly until you decide it’s time to get off it – ambassador, you’re spoiling us.

I’d go into detail on the plot points but there aren’t really any worth mentioning: Ezio loses the apple, some kids get kidnapped, Ezio saves kids, Ezio gets apple back… It’s pretty dry stuff. The plot points that we were promised some detail on just don’t turn up, though they weren’t very important anyway. For example, who cares why Leonardo Da Vinci ended up living at Ezio’s pad? Given that we already know they’re lifelong friends, it’s not exactly a loose-end worth tying up. Nor was it necessary to dump Caterina and Machiavelli back into the game – it seems like all Ubisoft Montreal are doing here is desperately trying to make good on the claims they made during the development of _Assassin’s Creed II_…

Now I see, why did I not notice sooner? Ubisoft Montreal just didn’t finish the game! They blagged a ‘data error’ to avoid a more punishing continuity error, told the guys at the finance department that they’d make more cash by selling the stuff they hadn’t finished yet as DLC (which, no doubt, made them very happy indeed – times are tight). It’s actually just as well that these sections didn’t make the final game, because for pacing purposes they’d have been absolutely useless – stalling the game just as it was reaching its climax (a lesson I’d believed had been learned since _ACI_ but now I’m not so certain). The real issue I have with all this is that I don’t believe it’s particularly fair to charge for stuff that was quite obviously supposed to be included within the original price. There’s not really any new tech, it’s the same engine running the same environments with all of the same animations for the same characters. Granted, some creative work has gone into planning the downloadable sections but hardly enough to justify nearly a fifth of the price you could get the original game for. Pseudo-celeb Danny Wallace returns to provide a couple of lines of surprisingly amusing British cynicism, so I can only assume that he makes up about a third of the price tag but still, this kind of behaviour simply isn’t on. I know that many of the leading developers are having tough financial times, but conning those fans who show their franchises such loyalty is not the way to go about solving them.

For the sake of comprehensiveness, I’ll take a quick look at _Bonfire of the Vanities_ which is arguably the much better rounded of the pair. Getting back to the actual fun of _Assassin’s Creed_ (y’know, the assassinations), chapter thirteen is actually quite enjoyable. You undertake several assassination missions in order to dispel the following of priest Girolamo Savonarola – one of the major figures during the actual event. Again, though, there isn’t really much more to say about it. You’re still doing the same things in Florence, where we’ve been before. To even call this ‘additional material’ is being slightly flattering. The one thing that is worth a mention is how _Bonfire of the Vanities_ manages to massacre any likeability Ezio had as a character. If it seems slightly ridiculous for a man who sticks knives in people’s necks for a living to get a bit squeamish at the sight of a public execution then it’s going to seem plastic-eating barmy for him to start preaching to the baying crowd about the value of good friends. It’s one step too far and it’s sad to see such an excellent game bastardised like this in its downloadable extras.

If you’re not a die-hard _AC_ fan then please avoid this and spend your money on something better (just on the Playstation Store I can think of at least ten more worthwhile purchases for this money). Quite simply, both downloadable instalments add nothing to the original title, they reveal nothing in terms of the plot and allow you to do nothing new. Do not buy them. This is a very concerning release for any follower of the series too, as (if recent Ubisoft press releases are to be believed) the next major _Assassin’s Creed_ release will continue with Ezio, in Rome (somewhere we’ve already been, however briefly). It’s all starting to sound a bit suspect, like we can expect an eighteen-hour marathon of the same stuff – which would be tragic for what was a very promising franchise. All I hope is that Ubisoft Montreal decide against it, stop milking the cash cow, and actually get on with making another new, exciting world for _Assassin’s Creed_ to move on to.