Assassin's Creed II

Assassin's Creed II tells the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Venetian nobleman who, after the murder of his father and brothers, transforms into a master assassin pursuing a Templar conspiracy across Renaissance Italy, from Florence through Venice to Rome. Compared to the first installment, the game significantly expanded its repertoire of movement and combat, adding city economies, purchasing and upgrading equipment, swimming, hidden assassin tombs full of acrobatic puzzles, and flight using Da Vinci's flying machine. Dozens of side quests, collecting codex pages and feathers scattered across the map gave players a reason to explore the open world far more thoroughly than in the original game, which is why the second installment became one of the most significant titles of the entire console generation.

On PlayStation 3, the game launched on the same day as the Xbox 360 version, in November 2009, and it was identical in content — no platform got a different story, different main quests, or different endings. The differences in 2009 mainly concerned technical performance: at launch, the PS3 version ran with somewhat less stable frame rates in larger crowds of characters in cities than the competing Xbox 360, something reviewers at the time also noticed, though Ubisoft later partially evened out the differences with updates. The controls were adapted to the DualShock 3 button layout, but otherwise it was exactly the same experience as on Xbox, including the same music and the same voice acting.

More interesting was the fate of the downloadable content: the Battle of Forlì mission, which added a story episode featuring Caterina Sforza, was for a time a timed exclusive on PlayStation 3, while Xbox 360 owners had to wait somewhat longer for it. This practice of timed DLC exclusives was common among publishers at the time, and Assassin's Creed II was one of its notable early examples within a single console generation, though it had no effect on the main campaign, which players on both platforms ultimately experienced as essentially identical.

Why play it: PlayStation 3 owners also had temporary exclusive access to the Battle of Forlì mission, even though the main campaign remains essentially identical and equally excellent on both consoles.