Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Too short"

The Battle of Forli is, in a word, short. Really short. The cinimatics are great, of course, but the mission itself took less than 20 minutes or so. And that includes the 'Special Memory'.

Here's the good news: If you missed the Flying Machine trophy you can pick it up at your leisure here. It will always be there, a mini-game that you can try and retry with no other purpose at all other than to give you a second chance at the trophy. But the bad news is Forli adds a ton of new trophys that span over both DLC releases, so your platinum is still just out of reach.

As I mentioned the cinimatics are superb and they explore a real-world incident that actually happened with Caterina Sforza... of course with a fictional spin. It was still nice to see all that. Ezio gets an inexplicable shave for a little while though, and that brings me to Disappointing Thing #2: Glitches.

Besides the beard being there/not there/there again Forli suffered from a weird glitch during an escort mission. First my escortees got seperated while one of the two tried to climb a ladder over and over and the other one ran off like he was in a marathon. Naturally I had to stay centered and help neither lest I be desyncronized. Finally I opted for that, moving to the marathon runner and, poof!, the ladder-obsessed party member just appeared in battle. Just after that glitch my escortees turned into mannequins. They refused to go forward. Once again I nearly desyncronized myself trying to get them to follow and once again, poof!, here they are.

Forli moves seamlessly, practically mid-mission, into Bonfire of the Vanities, the next DLC. Of course that hasn't come out yet and won't for another month. How frustrating. Why not just combine them and release both in February?

Overall Forli was disappointing coming off of AC2. It's main problems were its utter brevity and some very annoying glitches. It also felt choppy to move around, like it was unpolished. On the good side it does give you endless chances to get that one trophy you missed and the cinematics are as superb as always. At only 3.99 this seems like a bargain, but you;ll be better served to just wait for a combo Forli/Bonfire to come out (if it does) or just buy both at once. There's really NO need to rush.

You STILL won't have that Platinum!