Has anyone picked this up and played it yet? My girlfriend got it for me as a Christmas present, and I have to say it's vastly improved over the first. The game doesn't feel linear at all, and in a lot of ways feels like I'm progressing through missions ala Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game feels a lot more open ended, less time wasted traveling, more side quests to do, exploring caves and such for assassin's coins in order to unlock Altair's armor, collecting treasures, etc. A majority of my complaints about combat have been addressed, such as the difficulty of running away while target locked, or trying to climb a wall only to be knocked down repeatidly (Ezio climbs straight things much faster than Altair did)

The storyline seems to be pretty good, both in and out of the Animus this time around. The first game was amazing, this takes everything that was good about it and polishes it.

I'm kind of wondering where the series is going to head from here. All in all I'm probably a little over halfway through with it so far, or so I'd guess.

It feels like a lot of gaming elements from other great games were mixed together for this game, some dungeon/solving climbing events from things like Prince of Persia, more open ended questing system with less linearity and repetitiveness from games like Grand Theft Auto, etc.

If you remotely enjoyed the first one, I'd definitely recommend picking this one up.