Celebrate the New One by Playing The Older One!
Yes, at the time of my writing, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag has shipped for 360 and PS3. While all of those nice people get to enjoy it, I have to wait until the good ol' PS4 launch to play. Lucky bastards. So, instead I will review the third game in the series, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.
Picking up seconds after the ending of Assassin's Creed 2, Ezio has just had his mind blown down in the vault. He didn't understand what he saw, and he seems to just want to forget about the vault. Except he left loose ends. The biggest loose end, was Rodrigo Borgia, the main antagonist of the previous game.
Now Rodrigo has teamed up with his family to bring Ezio down. Which he does very successfully, resulting in major losses, personal and business wise for Ezio. Now Ezio plans to take down the entire Borgia family, get back the Apple they stole from him, and get revenge for everything they had done.
This game's story is told in much the same way as Assassin's Creed 2, but not as well. The villain, Ceserae Borgia, starts off as a minor threat, before being completely diminished as he disappears into the game. Throughout the game Ezio is dealing with the Borgia, without really dealing WITH the Borgia. The final fight in the game is as disappointing as the last. At least in Assassin's Creed it was tough!
The gameplay is also much the same, but a little better in some ways. The game feels bloated with content. From taking down Borgia towers, recruiting Assassin's, destroying Leonardo Da Vinci's war machines, and seeing flashbacks to an old love of Ezio's.
This content is all well and good, but it just goes to show how boring the actual story is in these games, when I would rather be doing the millions of side activities at large. That isn't how the game should make you feel. The story needs to be gripping, and the events IN the story need to make you want to play it. Eventually, the only reason I was playing the story was to unlock the last Borgia towers, and then just to finish the damn thing.
The Assassin Recruits were a good edition to the series. A very nice one. Leveling them up is addictive, but it is a pain in the ass when you have to sprint to a pigeon coop around Rome to be able to direct them. You can also level them down certain paths, but each path is balanced, because eventually you have to level them down the other path anyway.
The combat has a new fun addition. Combo killing. It isn't like in Assassin's Creed where you had to do some sort of Dance Dance Kill type input. Now when you kill someone, if you hit the next person, you will kill them, and so on, and so on. It really improved the stale combat of the series, and I'm glad they included it.
Overall, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood isn't a bad game. It is just so much like its predecessor, that its hard to find a reason to play it, other than you really REALLY loved the second one.
