AV Club: Assassin's Creed II Review

The original Assassin's Creed was an overly ambitious hodgepodge of gameplay ideas that never really cohered into a singular, compelling experience. The sequel gets off to a not-so-promising start, thanks to its dull science-fiction meta-narrative. The gist: the palooka-faced bartender from the first game is once again strapped into a machine called an Animus, which allows him to enter the virtual realities of his assassin ancestors. This meta-narrative largely involves Kristen Bell and Nolan North (Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series) trading self-important lines of dialogue.