Is @#%^ing awesome. The story picks up literally where AS2 ended, and gets off to a quick start. Monterigionni gets attacked, uncle Mario gets killed, the rest of the family heads back to Florence, and Ezio goes to Rome for some good old fashioned revenge. Meanwhile Desmond gets to see some actual gameplay in the form of a platforming section with Lucy..
Rome is massive, easily three times the size of Florence and is just gorgeous. This time around you get to take over parts of the city from the Borgia and renovate the place. Apparently by the end of the game you'll be able to give the entire city a facelift. One nice addition to the gameplay is something called kill streaks. Basically when surrounded by enemies, when you kill one, you can target the next one and immediately kill them next if they're in range. You can make really quick work of large groups if you can time it right.
I played a couple hours of multiplayer and it's a blast. The main mode is called Wanted, basically you get assigned a target and have to track them down and take them out. Meanwhile you have to watch out for the person or persons (you can have up to four pursuers on you at once based on your performance) hunting you. You learn pretty quick that a mixture of subtle movements and aggressive attacks works best. NPCs don't climb, so if you want to blend in you want to stay on the ground. I've found that it can be useful to hang around with NPCs with the same character model as you if you think a pursuer is close. It makes it easier to pick them out of the crowd and either avoid them or take them out before they get you.
So far I'm loving this game. The single player game has all the goodness of AS2 with some nice new gameplay mechanics tossed in, and the multiplayer is just plain fun.
Edited, Nov 17th 2010 2:05am by Turin