Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Let me start off by saying that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is a full on sequel to AC2. Ubisoft really shot themselves in the foot by only focusing on the multiplayer aspect of the game, because the single player campaign is just as long and involved as all the other games. There’s never a moment where this game feels like a level pack shoved out a year after AC2. People have that impression because of the multiplayer focused marketing and the fact that you still play Ezio Auditore from AC2. The truth of it is that ACB is the tightest and most fully featured Assassin’s Creed game yet. Just for reference, I put a good 22 hours into the game before I even tried out the multiplayer.

*AC2 SPOILER ALERT*

AC2 ended on a cliffhanger. Ezio found The Apple and saw a holographic projection of an ancient race who explained to him their history, the prophecy about the end of the world and how Desmond is destined to save them all (Understandably, hearing Desmond’s name confused the heck out of Ezio). Meanwhile, in present day, the Templars have found Desmond, Lucy and the others and they rolled the credits with them on the run in a truck going down a highway.

*END SPOILERS*  

ACB picks up right where the previous game left off. Ezio finds himself relocating his family to Rome, and in the future Desmond and the others find themselves in another hideout waiting for Desmond to discover the location of The Apple. Rome is dominated by the Borgia family who controls the city through their army and the Church. In order to fight back, Ezio realizes he must build up his allies so that he’s strong enough to take on the Borgia. This is where the “Brotherhood” part of the game comes in.

The majority of the game takes place in Rome, so you won’t be traveling from city to city during this game. But don’t let that fool you into thinking this game isn’t big. Rome is huge and you’ll be pretty far into the game before you find yourself able to clear all the Viewpoints so you can see the whole map.  

All the same side missions that appeared in AC2 are back in ACB. There are some tweaks that give more variety and keep things interesting. In previous AC games all you had to do was get to the top of each viewpoint, press a button and you got that map. This time, there are a number of “Borgia Towers” which are restricted areas each of which has a Borgia Captain who must be assassinated before the tower can then be burned, freeing that region from Borgia influence. Each tower has a difficulty rating of 1-5, so some are much more difficult to infiltrate than others.

Once a Borgia tower has been taken over, Ezio gains the ability to renovate the local stores, buy landmarks and repair parts of Rome. In AC2 wasn’t long before you had more money than you could ever hope to use, but ACB balances out the rate that you get money better so it’s not until the very end when you find yourself with more money in your pockets than your local bank can hold in its vault. The Rome restoration part of the game has all the fun of buying buildings, but with the convenience of not having to travel to another city to use the game’s economy.  

Another way the game mixes up the gameplay is every mission in the game has a “Full Sync” condition that must be fulfilled to get a 100% Sync rating. A few of those conditions include things like taking no damage, not being detected, or killing with a specific weapon etc. If you’re so inclined, this forces you to be more careful and creative in the way you approach your missions. Once a DNA sequence is completed, missions can be replayed via the menu.

The missions can be boiled down to: following targets, free-running, killing/avoiding guards and assassinating. But to think of the game as repetitive would be selling it extremely short. For one thing, the missions are changed up by the sheer variety of locations and scenarios you’re put into. Sometimes you’ll chase someone across ceiling rafters, do some fighting, and then end up in a full horseback chase all in one mission. There primary story missions are very well done, sometimes tense, exhilarating and really satisfying when you finally catch up and stab that hidden blade somewhere in that person’s general face area. 

Ezio’s arsenal and bag of tricks is bigger than ever. All the same weapons return like: swords, short swords, hidden blades, hidden gun, smoke bombs, hammers, maces and good ‘ole fists. There are a few other gadgets that you get courtesy of your old friend Leonardo Da Vinci. There are also some more projectile weapons that make certain situations a lot easier and add variety to the way you can approach a particular mission.

Combat has also received a tweak that speeds things up significantly. Whereas before you had to wait and counterattack, you can now select an enemy during mid execution and press a button to instantly kill the next guy. You can chain up some pretty badass combos in this fashion. The guards have some new moves too. They’ll grab you from behind forcing you to break out of the hold by flipping them over. The timing for hidden blade counter attacks is much easier to pull off this time around. I was almost never able to pull it off in previous games.  

The biggest new addition are your assassin recruits. Around five hours into the game, Ezio starts recruiting citizens to join his Assassins. You can send them out on missions throughout Europe in order to level up their abilities, earn money and get special items. The mission system boils down to what’s basically a text based mission system where you don’t see anything go on, but 5-20 minutes later you find out whether they were successful and you get your reward. The gameplay aspect of it is just looking at numbers go up, which the RPG player in me enjoys. 

Aside from that though, you can call them to help you on the street. You target a guard, press LB on your controller and out of nowhere you see an assassin sneak up and stab the guy in the back. The higher their level, the more health and weapons they have. Eventually they’re riding in on horses, shooting guys and using smoke bombs to get away. It’s an easy way out of certain situations, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a hell of a lot of fun to do. It gives you a great sense of power that with a hand gesture and a whistle, assassins are coming out of the sky. Lots of fun indeed. In the menu you can customize the color of their outfits, but they always wear white when you summon them, which makes me wonder why they let you change their outfits at all.

Another game mode is “Virtual Training” which are like the VR missions in the Metal Gear Solid games. They’re in categories of combat, stealth assassination, free running and collecting flags. They look kind of like Mirror’s Edge because of the clean red and white aesthetic, but they provide a nice diversion to practice the gameplay mechanics. I’d love some DLC packs of more Virtual Training scenarios if they made them. The free running ones especially offer some nice tips that can help you out in the story mode. See? Didn’t I tell you there was a full game in this? I haven’t even talked about the multiplayer yet.  

There are a number of modes, but they all play pretty much the same. You’re given a target, and you have to find them and kill them and only them. You have a circular radar on the bottom of the screen with a section that grows wider until it fills up when you’re in the immediate vicinity of your target. The trick is that if you see multiple people with the same character model, you’re not sure which one is an NPC and which is the actual player, so it’s up to you to spot their behavior or wait for them to reveal themselves somehow. 

 Meanwhile, there’s always at least one person chasing you at all times. The higher you are on the ranking, the more people that can be on your tail. If you spot your pursuer, you can stun them if you sneak up behind them. Points are also awarded for escaping your pursuer or stunning them. In team mode, points are given in 15-25 point increments whenever you’re blended out in the open.

The game rewards stealth play over running straight to your target and killing them. For example, a stealth kill where they didn’t see you coming could net you 400 points, but if you ran and chased after them you might only get 100 points. It’s a very interesting change of pace for multiplayer with a lot of mind games at work. Do you kill the guy in the middle of the group? Or is the person actually on the outside because they assume their pursuer would go for the guy in the middle? Do you pretend to talk to another one of your characters or do you hide in the hay bale next to them? Like all multiplayer games, there’re some extra abilities and perks which enhance your arsenal once you pass a certain level.  

Another interesting thing about the game is that the score can dramatically shift back and forth depending on how people play. The more creative you are, the more points and bonuses you receive. Some of them are quite difficult, because aerial kills gain more points, but if you’re climbing on buildings then you make yourself a very obvious target. There’s an achievement for taking the lead within the last ten seconds of the match which I managed to get to my extreme surprise. I’ve only just started, but I’d love to someday assassinate a guy while sitting on a bench or hiding in a bale of hay.

The team multiplayer is also interesting because the hunters and hunted take turns. In one round you’re hiding the whole time, and the other you’re trying to find and kill your targets. It’s also fun trying to figure out how to best act like an NPC without giving yourself away.  

Graphically the game still looks like AC2, but that’s still a great looking game. The way the city of Rome is rendered with nice textures and color makes it an incredibly pretty game to look at. They’ll have to up the ante a bit in the next installment either with a new setting or upgraded engine, but good art style can really make up for lack of technical advancement. Kristen Bell’s character Lucy has undergone another remodel, and I’m convinced this is the worst of the three. Her eyes are huge and it just looks awful and weird. All the other character models look good.

If I were to harbor a major complaint, it’s that the crowd audio is horribly repetitive. You’ll hear the exact same dialogue bits constantly and it gets old incredibly fast. Other than that, the voice acting is very well done. The only odd thing about the dialogue is I wonder what the decision making process was for what dialogue to leave in Italian and what gets said in English, because it’s downright awkward at times. Also, the breakup of dialogue in the subtitles is arbitrary, occasionally badly timed and in one situation, completely off to the point that the scene ended before the subtitles were close to finishing.  

ACB ends in a cliffhanger bigger than any of the previous games, so I eagerly await the next installment. They’ll probably have to mix up the formula more in the next game to stay fresh, but of the three games, ACB by far has the greatest variety of fun gameplay. It combines so many things that I love to do in games. Stealth kill guys, brutally take out a dozen bad guys in stylishly animated attacks, gain new abilities and buy and build up an empire. Did I mention I like stalking bad guys in games and stealth killing them?

If you played AC2 then for goodness sake, play this game! It’s not a spinoff and it’s not a multiplayer only game, it’s the sequel you wanted! If you haven’t played any Assassin’s Creed games I’d suggest starting at the beginning because there is a big story being told here. It’s a bit difficult to recommend the first because they were still figuring things out and it’s really repetitive. If you want to skip the first I can’t blame you, but make sure you catch yourself up on the fiction either via Wikipedia or videos on YouTube. If you like light RPG elements, buying stuff in games and stabbin’ guys in the face then Assassin’s Creed should not be missed.