Also whoever said that AssCreed 2 introduced air assassinations is wrong. What it did instead was make it effortless. Air assassinations
were a thing already in AssCreed1. Despite having less content, in terms of purity of the game design AC1 is probably the best. Unfortunately, when people complained about not having enough to do and the game being repetitive, Ubisoft responded with shittons of filler bullshit and mobile game money sinks.
That's the biggest problem, it tries to do everything and excels at nothing. I don't mind traversal, I think especially in 2007 the parkour was novel enough in open world games that using it as traversal was great. However, that's the thing, it's a mode of traversal. But then in AssCreed2 they started introducing those Tomb Raider style tombs where the main idea is platforming, and all those were piss easy because the parkour was always there for traversal, not actual challenge. Then, although it was prevalent already in AC1, they focus a lot on combat situations where stealth is not viable. But then the combat is boring trite shite even worse than in Batman games because in Batman, the Simon Says was at least elegant enough to punish button mashing (even though I dislike all the combat systems of that type), while even in Brotherhood you could just spam counter, leave the room IRL for a few seconds and come back with all the enemies dead. I actually did it, I went to take a leak during midcombat and kept countering on my Bluetooth controller, came back, the pack of about 10 enemies that I left at were all dead. It abandoned pure Assassin-style stealth that it at least aimed at in AssCreed1 and kept introducing new shit without focusing on fundamentals. So if every gameplay mechanic is so childish and easy to execute, maybe have interesting problems to solve? Nope, all you have to do is always told you, checkpoint after checkpoint. And boy, fuck all those investment and assassin guild management bullshit. You literally make no interesting choices whatsoever, just buy random shit and send assassins on random missions, it's not like the blacksmith you bought will go bankrupt or assasin's die on their missions.
All you're left is beautiful locations and architecture, but that's it. Worst part is that it's such a missed opportunity. You have these fantastic historical settings and locations to take advantage of, something you rarely see in non-strategy games, and what do you get? Buckets of shit.
And then they waste settings like October Revolution Russia and Ming Dynasty China on 2d sidescrollers.