I started playing through the series a few years ago, having never played them before (I finished Origins a while ago and am now on a break).

AC2 is quite playable still - in fact all of them are. But there are some things that I would’ve liked to know beforehand.

The keyboard and mouse controls are bad. Unity is the worst here: I’d try to run from an enemy and suddenly the character would decide to jump onto a fountain and run around on top of it. AC2 has less of this, but the parkour can feel clunky.

There are too many collectibles, and they all get icons on the map. It’s hard to ignore these, but in trying to collect everything I started to resent the games. To a lesser extent, the same is true for trying to get perfect scores on missions, or doing all side content. The problem is that some of the side content is actually good, but some is just filler and you can’t really know in advance.

Something that bothered me a lot: often you’d get a new mechanic thrown at you looong before the main story introduced that mechanic.

Overall my advice is to play the game - and others in the series - by picking and choosing what you want to do, not by trying to do or see everything.