Assassin's Creed II: Bonfire Of The Vanities

Bonfire Of The Vanities is the second and, we can presume, final piece of DLC narrative to be released for Assassin’s Creed II, and picks up right were the previous downloadable chapter, Sequence 12 - The Battle Of Forli, finished.

In your guts, drone!

For those unaware, these two DLC memory chunks plug the gaps left by the two missing memory sequences that were omitted from the main game, and centre on Ezio trying to retrieve the Apple of Eden having taken it from the Spaniard to then see it go missing again - perhaps it should’ve been named the Hot Potato of Eden considering it jumps from pillar to post nearly as much as Ezio himself. Without giving too much of the story away, the ending of Battle Of Forli saw the Apple retrieved by Ezio but quickly stolen once again, this time by a Dominican priest named Savonarola. This latest chapter follows Ezio’s continued efforts to finally reclaim the artefact.

In the story, it transpires that Savonarola is a un-fan of all things the Renaissance and is using the power of the Apple to force nine influential citizens (dubbed lieutenants in the game) to influence the people of Florence to burn any objects that could be deemed sinful - basically books, paintings, nudey sculptures, that sort of thing. This, save for the whole Apple of Eden MacGuffin, was a real historical event christened in history books as The Bonfire Of The Vanities, so given that this latest chapter is well entrenched in some good ole fashioned Italian history we were expecting it to be a satisfying and epic conclusion to this downloadable side story.

In Bonfire Of The Vanities you get twelve new memory sequences for Ezio to tackle, which should take you around two hours to finish, and while nine of these are assassination missions (one for each of Savonarola’s lieutenants) each is different enough from the next to keep things interesting. One, for instance, finds Ezio chasing down a target along the rooftops of Florence, a few of the more challenging require him to sneak up on his prey undetected, and there’s even a neat mission that finds our swashbuckler taking on around 30 guards in an epic courtyard battle. But there’s a sense that the interesting Bonfire Of The Vanities setting isn’t being as well utilised as it could be.

Car chases used to go a little like this.

Apart from Ezio occasionally whizzing past a mound of burning books and paintings, Savonarola and his lieutenant’s psychobabble fails to feel like it’s having any real affect over the city, or, more to the point, any kind of developing impact on the story. Another niggle (though this particular one is completely subjective) is the sequence’s finale, which, while can be applauded for being historically accurate, opts for an unusual interactive cinematic (ala Modern Warfare) that draws things to bit of an abrupt close. Finally, Ezio’s new spring-jump also seems to bring very little to the party as it can only be actuated wherever red coloured springboards - which are located around the rooftops around the city - are found. As these are few and far between the move gets very little look-in during the DLC, which was also disappointing.

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