The people rejoice. Yay…!
Ubisoft announced that they are planning sequels to Assassin’s Creed, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell this year – 2009.
I have to say I’m pretty excited about the prospect on all three of these games and if you know what’s good for you you’ll read the rest of my article to find out why. Else I will come into your home and I will cut you.
Right off the bat, Ghost Recon 1 and 2 are fine jams. Sadly they didn’t seem to get enough play with The JRE. We all loved them with the modern military warfare theme going on there. You got to shoot terrorists (which any red blooded American loves naturally) using a variety of awesome heaters ranging from .50 caliber sniper rifles to corner shot rifles. Urban warfare at its finest. So consider me excited that we’ll be getting a new installment of that franchise sometime this year.
Next – Splinter Cell. Oh Splinter Cell, how you’ve fallen away from what once made you great. I’m going to come out and say it. Pandora Tomorrow was Ubisoft’s first and greatest attempt at pushing Splinter Cell into the multiplayer arena and it was quite the hit. They brought something new and innovative to the table with their 3rd person perspective spies sneaking around the maps facing off against 1st person mercenaries. Nothing like this had ever been done before. This particular game truly gave rise to what is now the modern day JRE Core Elite consisting of Keyan and myself. This is where we discovered that we loved stuffing corpses into ventilation shafts together. That’s no innuendo – we love putting digital corpses (ie. dead bodies) into small cramped spaces. It’s hilarious!
Sadly since then each installment of the Splinter Cell franchises multiplayer components continued to innovate (for the worse) and the latest entry, Double Agent, is nothing that it’s predecessor used to be. I hope they restore the game to it’s former glory. If they insist on “innovating” the game any further they may want to consider giving the spies their ball filled nutsacks back for better or worse.
In this I propose a philosophical question to Ubisoft: if you take our spy-nuts away how can we sire a future generations of spies? Moduserous has spoken.
Finally – Assasin’s Creed 2.
This game has so much potential. The story is awesome. The gameplay is mostly awesome. The implementation – not so awesome.
If repetition had a name it would be Assassin’s Creed. They have this highly detailed open world available for the players to explore and at first you’re thinking, “wow – this is great.” Not so much. You start to notice there are only so many character models. Everybody has the same dialogue and sounds the same. But an even bigger problem is that all these side quests you perform (which unlock the final take-down for each mission) are highly repetitive. I can deal with aesthetic monotony, and I can deal with cheesy overused dialogue. But I can’t deal with gameplay that’s overly repetitive.
They need to include a lot more variation in these side quests. They should feel integral to the story, and not like tacked on mini-games that only serve to unlock the final showdown.
Which bring me to my next point and possibly that games biggest failing – the takedowns themselves. Let’s see – I’m a highly trained assassin, master of disguise, skilled with all manner of blades and throwing knives… You’d think I could pull off an assassination that was both stealthy and anonymous. You know – grassy knoll type stuff? Neither of these are possible. Every assassination attempt involves running into a pack of bad guys, slicing them up, and finally slicing up the main dude. All sword fighting. To me – that’s just brutalizing a bunch of guys. Not an assassination.
So Assassin’s Creed 2 could stand to improve on a lot of things, but if it only improves on one or two things I’ll consider that worthy of a rental at best.
Moduserous
Bravado In Chief
