Review: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (Xbox 360 & PS3)
I’m a rather huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. A strange thing to begin when writing a review on one of the games in the series, but it’s like the game’s makers, Ubisoft, tried to find the exact topics in a story that would get me going. A setting steeped in history? Check. Crazy, pants-on-head retarded conspiracy theories? Check! An almost comedic level of violence, bordering at times on genocidal? Check and mate!
Despite the lack of evidence in the title, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is a direct sequel to last years Assassin’s Creed 2, which becomes readily evident the moment you start playing, as the single player portion kind of picks up from the moment AC2 ends. You retain your role as Desmond Miles, everyday bartender-turned-badass-assassin, who himself is reliving the life of one of his ancestors, Ezio Auditore, through crazy future technology. I’m not going to delve into the details of the plot, because now three games into the series things have kind of gotten, I suppose, difficult to accurately define. Let’s just say that present day Desmond Miles is looking for a magical macguffin that his ancestor Ezio hid, and so needs to relive Ezio’s memories in order to find out where.
In the process of finding what you’re looking for, bad things are going to happen to people
And by “reliving his memories”, what that boils down to is stabbing dudes. A lot of dudes. The memories of Ezio take place at the dawn of the 16th century, almost entirely within ancient Rome. Within the context of Ezio’s story (damnit this is hard to easily explain), you’re trying to rebuild the assassin’s guild within Rome, and to defeat the local Templar power base (the Templars being the Cobra Command to the assassin’s GI Joe). You do this by running around the streets and rooftops of Rome, taking on assassination missions, buying up local shops and landmarks, burning down Templar bases, and generous, generous face-stabbing.
You can also travel throughout Rome and recruit individuals into the assassin’s guild. Doing this gives you the ability to call these recruits for aid during combat, which may be up there for one of the most entertaining gameplay mechanics of the year. You target a guard, hit the “call assassin” button, and watch as a guy or girl-in-white jumps out of the nearest haystack or roof and cold murders the guy targeted. You can also send your underling assassins out throughout Europe and Eurasia, going out to accomplish other missions in exchange for money and experience that in turn is used to strengthen the weapons and armour of your assassins. You don’t actually play those missions, but you get a very satisfying “Assassin Tycoon” feeling from sending out your assistants to go do terrible things.
Watching your team of assassin’s causing a ruckus is thoroughly, thoroughly satisfying
The basic gameplay mechanics of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood remains much the same as it’s ever been in the series. You spend a great deal of time skulking about the city, traversing up walls and over rooftops in a very parkour-esque manner; it remains as entertaining as ever running through the city all helter-skelter, though there can be moments of frustration when trying to make very specific, difficult jumps, as the mostly automated jumping system sometimes doesn’t do what you want it to do.
Rooftop escapades are once again the order of the day in ACB
The combat too is, if you’ve played the original or its sequel, something you’ll be quickly comfortable with. It’s the same system of “waiting for your opponent to attack, countering, then watching you stab the fool”, though in ACB it’s become even more streamlined, by adding the ability to easily string together execution moves by hammering on the X button after successfully pulling off the first kill. It’s fast, fluid, and as entertaining as ever.
I did suffer through a couple of weird bugs and glitches in ACB, however, some of which were game-breaking, though very infrequently. There were a couple occasions where the map wouldn’t function properly, once where an in-game cinematic broke and the characters all froze in place, vibrating violently like some sort of demon possession, and once in combat where Ezio just decided not to move anymore. These events were incredibly rare, to be sure, and since ACB autosaves so often that even if you have to restart due to glitchery you won’t have lost more than a few minutes of game time.
Somehow I think this is a very poor way of hiding, Ezio
In addition to the single player there’s also a much-publicized multiplayer component to ACB, of which I admittedly only played a little bit. You play as a random assassin, who’s given the objective of trying to find and kill another player-controlled assassin in the region. The only problem is that the character you’re chasing looks like any number of random NPC’s in the area, and you can only really kill the one that’s player-controlled. So it all boils down to trying to act as inconspicuously as possible, and when caught trying to run away as quickly as possible. There’s something of a perk system too, like in all contemporary multiplayer games, and it is entertaining, but it still wasn’t as compelling to me as the single player component.
Being chased by a knife-wielding clown is a recurrent nightmare of mine, and ACB really doesn’t help that
I can’t really overstate how beautiful this game looks. I always hate in reviews going into detail about the “graphics” or “sounds” of a game, because I feel like it’s generally trite bullshit people don’t care about, but I need to emphasis how pretty this game is. Character models look realistic and act in a smooth, believable manner, and the locations looks downright picturesque. It’s readily evident that Ubisoft must have spent a mint on motion and location capture to have such accurate movements and settings.
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is my first wholehearted “Get” of the holiday season. It looks and plays beautifully, has a storyline that, despite going off the deep end on a number of occasions (especially the ending, which is a real thumper), captivates you and holds on until well past the conclusion. The only caveat I have for ACB is that if you haven’t played Assassin’s Creed 1 or 2 yet, then you should probably give those a try or at the bare minimum troll through a wiki first, because going into ACB cold with no knowledge of the story to that point will likely just utterly confuse you. If you’ve played the prior games however, I can’t state this enough: you really need to play this game.
Score:
