Chances are, AC2 might absolutely blow your socks off if you're that much into the first game. It's a massive step up in nearly every way - except that it went for a softer, more painterly look instead of the sharper, more realistic art style of the first game. The story picks up very nicely too and at least at that point, I was still fully invested in both the Desmond and Enzio part of the narration and how cleverly they were interwoven. There is a tiny bit of bloat, it's not as focused as AC1, but from the perspective of someone who played the first game not too long after its release, this is highly subjective, since that title almost felt like a proof of concept at times that could have done so much more with its game world than it actually did - and AC2 showed that Ubisoft definitely listened to this kind of very frequently shared feedback back then.

I love the old warning on the Steam store page for AC1, by the way:

Requires a dual core processor or better. Please check system requirements before purchasing.

Those were the days. This was one of the first games I tried on my new gaming PC in 2008 (after the most powerful PC I had regular access to was a machine from 2001, with some 2003 parts) and it was definitely a title that showed off the power of this extremely cheap, yet capable system, just like Crysis and COD4. In a way, this series in particular was a dream come true, since I've always been hunting for games that allowed me to truly immerse myself in a 3D recreation of the past. Much earlier, I had gotten a glimpse of that with the basic 3D-rendered scenes of historic buildings in Encarta and the unfortunately very limited (even though I hyped this up to no end before playing it) Pompei: The Legend of Vesuvius (2000), but AC1 far surpassed every earlier attempt at digitally reconstructing historic places.

One can criticize the more modern AC games for a great many things, but one thing they are getting right is that they are putting more of an emphasis on the educational side of things: Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla all come with separate and increasingly fleshed-out educational modes (also available as standalone titles) that remove all normal game mechanics except for traversal and instead offer bite-sized excursions into the world, explaining a little bit of the history, while also explaining some of the decisions the developers had to make during production.