Assassin’s Creed II Discovery ($6.99, iTunes link) is a companion to the current console game Assassin’s Creed II. You play as the same character—the Assassin Ezio, in an adventure taking place around the same time period as the console/PC version.

Your task, as Ezio the Assassin, is to travel to Spain to investigate the Inquisition’s attacks on your brotherhood. Along the way you’ll face predominantly three types of gameplay: normal, where you have complete a goal on the level; stealth, where you have to make it to a certain point without being seen; and chase, where you must escape from attacking hordes.

If you played the original Assassin’s Creed iPhone game, you’ll notice the sequel is very, very different. Rather than a 3D game, ACII is a polygon sidescroller. The advantage being that instead of having a large virtual joystick to control the main character, there’s only a slider for traveling left and right. Jumping, fighting and other such niceties are controlled via buttons on the right of the screen. If you figure that this control scheme still takes up too much space on the screen, you can alter how big it is through the games options.

The controls are good, except for one or two hiccups with the way they’re integrated. A large chunk of the game is spent climbing and jumping from rooftop to rooftop—in fact one of the games strong points is the fact that every level has many different routes that you can take, each with different advantages. Another major gameplay objective is sneaking, so you aren’t seen as easily. When you’re in sneak mode, you can’t climb walls, which makes no sense. You can jump and fight, or hang on the walls, but you can’t climb them. Likewise, it’s very tricky to control jumping over a ledge vs. slowly lowering yourself over the edge. A critical difference when being chased by hordes of enemies.



As an Assassin, you’re good in a fight, but much better when you’re sneaky. So the game rewards cunning rather than brute-force play. Sneaking up behind an enemy and stabbing them gives you one of many nifty kill animations. In fact, that’s how the game gives a goodie for killing someone in an interesting way—a dramatic kill scene. You also get them when you hang on a ledge, and grab a passing ankle to send someone plummeting to their death; or use a counterattack to kill an enemy. If you’re in a rush, it’s often easier just to bypass enemies entirely. Sure you can sit there and artfully parry their attacks until you get an opening to kill them; or, you could just jump or roll past them and keep on sprinting.

ACII also excels in replay value. Beyond just completing the levels, you are given a set of conditions to try and meet: how fast to complete the level, how many people to kill, how much damage you can take, how many times you can be seen. Completing the levels in the time constraints give you “Animus Hacks” which are additional abilities, upgrades and outfits. Also scattered through the levels are parts of a secret map, art work that you can save to your iPhone, and wanted posters that you can rip down for health (there’s also a cool feature where you can take a photo of yourself, and it’ll be placed on the wanted posters). The intense amount of extras give the game a major replay boost beyond just powering through each level. There are also the nearly mandatory achievements tied to your playing too.

However, ACII also has a number of drawbacks. The slowdown on my iPhone 3G was considerable, and it really struggled through much of the game, leading to dropped frames and laggy play. The difficulty of the levels can be absolutely brutal. Some are straightforward and easy, but other are hard. Like crazy hard. This is probably the toughest game I’ve hit on the iPhone to date. You will die frequently. Often the only way to get through a level is just to keep attempting it and failing until you’ve memorized the layout and locations of enemies—on the stealth levels especially. Many of the stages have unskippable cut-scenes at their beginning, which is usually fine until you die half way through, and have to watch it again. And again. And again. On that subject, the voice-acting is pretty mediocre—mostly just people speaking with poor versions of European accents.

Conclusion

Assassin’s Creed II Discovery ($6.99 iTunes link) is certainly not without its flaws. The difficulty is all over the place, and some devices will struggle with the graphical intensity. Even with these drawbacks, it’s a great game. It has high production values, good graphics, and lots of replayability. While some might balk at the price, for dedicated gamers its something they’ll come back to repeatedly, in order to find all the games hidden content. We recommend Assassin’s Creed II Discovery, and give it a 7.9/10.