A 2.5D side-scrolling stealth campaign slots into the Ezio arc between major memory sequences, sending its hooded protagonist away from his Roman vendetta and into the Spanish Inquisition. The mission brief spans escorting a famous explorer, rescuing imprisoned allies, and unravelling a Templar scheme to prolong the Granada war. Inquisitor intrigue, an audience with a queen, and voiced story beats between missions give the handheld format genuine narrative weight. The fantasy is treated with respect rather than shrink-wrapped for a small screen.
Full voice acting anchors the production, a rarity on the platform and close enough to the console performance that the two are difficult to tell apart. Notoriety meters reset per mission, hiding places enable genuine infiltration, and assassinations reward patience rather than aggression. Mission types rotate through standard, stealth, chase and timed variants, and throwing knives, wanted-poster health upgrades and map-scroll challenge unlocks round out the systems. Nothing here resembles the menu-driven crossbow gimmicks of the predecessor’s touchscreen.
Combat opens terribly and is repaired mid-game by tutorials that arrive too late. Guard breaks, counters and even counterable unblockables transform fights that previously felt impossible, teaching mechanics the opening hours never mention. Throwing knives seem useless until the unexplained one-hit rule against unaware guards surfaces, a mechanic the tutorial never covers. The systems are genuinely good; the teaching of them is not.
Archer vision cones spot from around corners, and even hanging from a ledge offers no safety, which makes several stealth sequences feel rigged. Guard captains are tanky, uncounterable and inconsistently spawning, best answered by running rather than fighting. The core mismatch compounds everything: visibility extends roughly three steps while running speed covers six, superb for chases and poison for infiltration. Stealth pacing suffers a structural disadvantage the design never reconciles.
The catacombs level built around rescuing trapped allies is the campaign’s early nadir, a pit-of-death maze where every wrong turn ends in a fatal drop. Late-game design collapses further: enormous levels, huge checkpoint gaps and drops to death everywhere turn the final prison assault into a misery of long re-runs. The sheer distance between checkpoints means a single mistake can cost minutes of careful work. Difficulty spikes here are born of structure, not challenge.
Corrupted glyphs render in the credits text on some setups, with certain letters missing their left side, though this appears to be an emulation artefact rather than a cartridge fault. One stealth omission stands out regardless: no ledge assassinations, despite the console release introducing them the same year. The 60 FPS performance on modded hardware is otherwise smooth throughout, and roll, climb and assassinate inputs respond cleanly. The technical foundation holds until the design undoes it.
Overall, this is the handheld entry that finally respects the fantasy, delivering real stealth, varied missions and full voice acting where its predecessor offered menus and trial-and-error. The speed-versus-visibility mismatch, rigged archer cones and late-game level bloat keep it from sticking the landing completely. What the campaign attempts, it mostly achieves, and the step up is unmistakable.
