Page 2 | Assassin's Creed II: Battle of Forli

With up to half the aggressors taken care of, mopping up the stragglers involves little more than a few minutes of dodging and countering - or just repeated attack-button-mashing. The removal of any kind of requisite skill strips these encounters of any real tension. Once you're onto your fourth or fifth identical battle in a row the interest value ebbs away.

Bizarrely, Ubisoft Montreal has conspired to make Battle of Forli even easier by including ammo recharge points, allowing you to use all your high-powered weapons with abandon. With a few carefully lobbed smoke bombs, even the most fearsome enemy can be removed from the equation with a single button-press. It makes absolutely no sense.

After the third (of six) mini-missions, the concerted melee battling changes course and you're sent off on a rescue mission. But when you get there, the game once again spams you with a few enemies and a half-hearted series of encounters ensues.

It's not much better for the final two memories, which both involve simple chase sequences that last no more than a few minutes each - and that's assuming you fail a few times. As is so often the case with Assassin's Creed the chase is generally better than the kill, with your targets falling prey to simple one-hit assassinations and nearby guards offering precious little resistance.

Once you've powered through all six memories, all that remains is one single 'Special Memory' which marks itself mysteriously in the top right of the map. Upon climbing a tower, it transpires that you can board the same flying machine that you used once in the main game and spend some time kicking guards off buildings for larks.

As usual, staying airborne involves careful navigation between the various fires across the city, but unlike in the main game there's no context, no mission and no real point to it other than to give you something else to do. And while it's mildly diverting to take to the sky for a while, there's no quick restart option if you crash, meaning you have to trudge all the way back across the map and climb the tower in order to have another go.

While Battle of Forli is reasonably priced for a piece of DLC, you don't get an awful lot of entertainment for your money.The missions lack challenge and variety. The kicker is that the entire sequence is over and done with inside one hour, leaving you with little more than some cinematics to watch - but frankly, you could probably catch those on YouTube for free and go out for a beer instead.

By any objective measurement, this a poor attempt at adding a new sequence to an excellent game which already boasted a generous amount of content. Had it added more explorational elements, or another secret location to discover, it would have been worth the effort - but to simply stitch together forgettable melee encounters and chases with new cut-scenes is some distance from being enough.

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