It’s 2009, you finished Assassins Creed two weeks ago after finally catching the hype bug from watching so many of your friends play it and talk about how great it was to be an assassin back in the 1100s and the ridiculous conspiracy theories about how it “could be real man, it makes so much sense” and the newest installment in the series, Assassins Creed 2, just released and you went to the oh so fabulous midnight release to pick it up. If that sounded oddly specific that would be because that is exactly what happened to me so many years ago. It’s now 2022 and we have another release of Assassin’s Creed 2 for the Nintendo Switch, this time bundled together with the full Ezio Collection developed by Ubisoft Montreal Virtuos and published by Ubisoft, named after the protagonist, and my personal favorite character from the whole series.
The Ezio Collection spans across the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze and I mean that quite literally, in the intro for the first game in the collection you witness his birth, and it teaches you how to control him as a newborn child and follows his journey, as he becomes the master of a newly formed order in Assassins Creed: Brotherhood and takes you all the way to the end of his journey at age 52 with Assassins Creed: Revelations. The inclusion of the Assassin’s Creed: Embers animated video where we witness his death and see a much older Ezio at the ripe old age of 65 where, after all the ridiculous things he has encountered, dies of a heart attack in the middle of a market, is a sad end to one of the coolest characters to come from the series.
The Switch collection covers all three major games and includes three single-player DLC and two short films, one of which was the Embers previously mentioned where we see his final days. In the first game you witness him take on the role of an assassin after witnessing his brothers and father get killed by the Templars and leads to him uncovering the secret of the garden of Eden, where a vision shown to both Ezio and his descendant witnessing his life speaks to them and tells them about a civilization that created humanity and a great catastrophe is about to happen.
The second follows Ezio after becoming a master assassin and re-establishing the assassin’s brotherhood and uses a new mechanic of calling on disciples to dispatch enemies you fight as well as a turf battle mode where you can level up characters and fight off waves of Templar attackers; not the smoothest gameplay but still fun. The final game in the Ezio Collection is Revelations and rounds out the series by bringing it full circle and giving us a glimpse of the original game’s main character, Altair, and how he lived out his days preparing a library that held the knowledge of the ancient ones.
Thankfully there was one item that did not make it to the collection and that is the multiplayer mode that debuted with Brotherhood. I say thankfully because it was a huge mess; everything was stuck behind a ridiculous grind which nobody enjoyed, and I couldn’t imagine the issues it would encounter trying to play on the Switch multiplayer.
I was really hoping for some big improvements in the Ezio Collection, not just in the better lighting and reflections, but also some much-needed quality of life improvements, the biggest one being the ability to skip the cutscenes. Let’s be honest, this is a 12-year-old game; if someone is picking up this collection then it’s assumed that they have played it at least once and even if they didn’t, why not let us skip? I appreciated the fact that all of the in-game rewards are unlockable via the Ubisoft Club but noticed some content is still locked under those damn Ubisoft coins.
Aside from the fact that you might have already seen the story and just want to play, the cutscenes are not the prettiest to look at compared to the other console remasters with issues such as being able to see some polygons on characters to very muffled audio. I ended up having to get my headphones out just so I could hear it clearer, as turning up the audio didn’t really help the problem. With this being a port of the PS4 versions of the collection I expected a consistent experience and found that even between the three different versions the Switch seems to have gone for a more consistent performance experience by removing some visual features, which makes it look different across them all. It’s not “bad”, but it just looks off, and this trend of bringing back old games with remasters and collections just proves that some things are better left untouched or just get the PC version and mod it yourself. Ezio might have aged well but the games in his collection did not.
The Ezio collection released February 17th, 2022 on Nintendo Switch and retails for $39.99 which, for the replayability and nostalgia, is a fair price for such a great story and having all the games in a single bundle and is the best way to enjoy some of the best games in the series if Switch is your only option. One day I hope to see a true remaster and replay Ezio’s life one more time, but this isn’t the one.
