Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Review for the Xbox 360 and PS3

     Assassin's Creed 2 (AC2) saved the series for me. It updated the game in just the right way so that everything worked mostly the way it was supposed to the first time around. The story was also very character-driven and delivered several hours worth of varying gameplay. But then, it was given plenty of time to change for the better.
     What's going on with the series now is that Ubisoft wants their AC team to produce a game every year. Most games take several years to make from scratch with some series being able to pump out a sequel in about 2 years using the same, updated engine. But what you get with those sequels are improvements for the series, worthy additions that create new, staple mechanics or features for that game. With that in mind, when Ubisoft touted releasing this game only a year after AC2 and all they wanted to talk about was the new multiplayer mode, I was completely put off and I never picked it up. My thoughts were that AC shouldn't be about multiplayer and I didn't believe Ubisoft was a capable enough developer to pull off a complete, hazard-free game in one year.
     Now, Revelations is on it's way out and I've heard very mixed things from longtime fans of the series saying that Brotherhood was either very decent or a letdown so I thought it would be time to play the game for myself and draw my own conclusions. Allow me to shed some light on the release. Also, in this review I'm going to assume you've played the previous Assassin's Creed games or at least know a fair bit about them. This sequel isn't exactly a departure from what the series has been doing thus far.



GAMEPLAY


Single Player

+ Brutality! - Ezio can now dual-wield secondary weapons with medium-sized weapons (Gun/throwing knives with one-handed blade/light hammer). It blew my mind to see him stab through a guard and blow the dude off of the sword with a quick shot to the face. A lot of Ezio's animations in combat are more brutal and it actually gives him a lot more personality when he isn't speaking. Altair, from the first AC, might deflect a blow and slam his sword through a guy's collarbone but Ezio won't do it without kicking the guy in the groin first.


+ Crossbows Are In - The crossbow is available in the game whenever you can afford it which is to say you'll have it really early on if you save up the cash and it's definitely worth every penny. It's a bit overpowered since one shot is an instant kill and it's silent so you won't raise any suspicions using it but it's a necessary tool for the game's more difficult situations.


+ Less Filler - I really enjoy how they managed to flesh out sidequests to the point that they actually feel in line with the main story's missions. They also offer unique experiences such as using Leonardo's invention's of war (I won't spoil them here) and gaining more backstory on Ezio that wasn't covered in the second game. It makes everything you accomplish feel like it had true substance to it as well as something new you hadn't done before in the series.

+ The Brotherhood - You get to create your own league of assassins! Basically, you go and save select people on the streets from the Borgia and they automatically want you to teach them how to kill. You can send them on contracts for money, rare items, and experience for the newbie. As each recruit gains experience, you can level them up to net them more weapons and armor until they become full-fledged assassins.
     Now, once you have your little brotherhood built up, you can summon them into battle or mark targets for them to kill all while you draw zero attention to yourself. You get up to three brotherhood summons and once one is used, you have to wait for it to charge all the way back up to be able to use the summon again. You can also use all three of your summons at once to call down an arrow strike eliminating all threats in the vicinity at once.
     Summoning the brotherhood is definitely awesome. When summoned, they'll pop out of hiding spots for close-up assassinations, come riding in on horses to strike guards down, toss knives from rooftops, or throw down a smoke bomb and shoot everyone in the face with wrist-guns. Fun times indeed.

= Tear It Down, Build It Up - In Brotherhood, there are towers throughout the land that serve to maintain Borgia control over zones. You need to travel to each tower, kill its captain, and burn it down. After doing so, you're allowed to purchase/renovate shops, stables, quick travels, etc. It's kind of a cool mechanic but there's not really a whole lot to it. You don't actually feel like you're lowering the presence of the Borgia and buying more shops that are already available seems like a waste of cash after a while.


= Is This Going To Be On The Test? - Just a minor nitpick. In games, when you introduce something through a sort of tutorial or what a gamer will interpret as advice to heed for the rest of the adventure to come, it's expected that similar situations will pop up later or that the tool you used to solve a situation one time will be able to be utilized for similar problems down the road. It's weird when that turns out to not be the case. Example: In the beginning of the game, you're told you can use eagle vision to look at your surroundings to find an ideal path to take to make it through an obstacle. I had gotten stuck a few times during the course of play and decided to use eagle vision to find out where I might need to go. It never worked like the first time I used it and I eventually stumbled my way around the level (only to find out that I was going the right way through things but Ezio was the one who didn't care to act correctly - this is a different matter though). This happened a few times where something was only introduced the one time and never came up or worked the same way again and it just makes me think that they weren't giving much thought to how they were designing their levels.

- Utterly Useless... - I don't see why there are any weapons in this game aside from the crossbow and hidden blade. In combat, if I use a melee weapon other than my hidden blades I get nothing in the way of an advantage over my enemies. I don't have a better chance of breaking through their defenses for an instant kill and if the enemy is tough enough, they can reverse all of my counters. With the hidden blades, it's an instant kill every time and in every situation (bosses excluded but there's only, like, two of them). And that's if I even get into a fight!
     The crossbow can have up to 25 bolts at a time, it's got great range, it's an instant kill in most cases, guards rarely catch onto you using it, even if you shoot a comrade that's standing right in front of them, and it's incredibly easy to find more bolts by looting dead guards thanks to the generous helpings of items you get from looting in Brotherhood. Thanks to two weapons you're basically given from the get-go, it renders swords, short-swords, hammers, maces, throwing knives, bullets, everything useless.
     Add to that that all armor is basically useless because there's hardly ever any threat of death or failure in the entire game. If you have only one tile of health left, the next hit you receive will never kill you and the hit has to be strong enough in the first place to take it away. Basically, you're reduced to a panic screen saying that the next hit will kill you if it's strong enough (I've been hit three times in succession and haven't died while having no health to speak of) but you will recover that one tile of health back if you avoid injury long enough. And even if you do manage to die, the save points are plentiful so a death rarely means any true form of a setback. And on top of that, once you get the Brutus armor, all of the armor you bought in the first place will be rendered useless, never able to be used again as well as your ability to dye your outfit.
      So really, what can I use my money on if there's no point to buying anything in the entire game? And really, being able to net better, more interesting equipment is the one of the primary motivations in the game for the player aside from the story, so...


- You Pressed The Wrong Button! - Good luck doing anything correctly by AC: Brotherhood's standards. The control you have over Ezio in this new installment is about as reliable as Altair in the first game, if not worse. Gone is the newfound reliabilty of your controls from AC2. Honestly, sometimes it's so bad you can't believe it was never picked up in development. There are things like Ezio not realizing the only way forward is to grapple an object he refuses to admit exists in front of him at the time, not being able to climb up a wall using the same path and technique you used before, and jumping without pressing the jump button.
     There are also problems that arise from the developer not being able to decide whether the game should be controlled by the context of where the player is or the context of the camera placement. Example: Say you're clinging to a wall and you have a platform to your backside that you need to jump to. In this instance, the gamer would push back towards the platform and press jump. The problem with the game's design comes from not trusting the player to navigate and explore their surroundings as well as not deciding how it's best to control your character. When you climb that wall and you need to jump back, the camera will swing out to the side to show you that you should jump back behind you. Now you're put into a predicament because left and right on the stick will shimmy Ezio back and forth on the ledge and up and down do the same thing... So now I can only jump to varying degrees of left and right, not up, down, or back. This happens in Brotherhood much more than it should.
     Playing the game longer shines light on other areas in need of a reworking such as the controls. There are 4 button combinations to walk, walk faster, run, and sprint as well as varying speeds inbetween depending on how far the stick is pushed. Things like this also force them to assign grab ledge and drop from ledge on the same button. This wouldn't be a problem if the game was designed to either take all control away from the player or give all control to the player. As it is, Ezio will sometimes grab something or not. A player of my skill is going to want to use the grab button to ensure every action is successful. The downside is that the game will override my command to grab the ledge, grab the ledge anyway, and record my button press as a drop command. Yeah... How did we get to this point after the previous game was so polished? I don't understand...
     Ubisoft needs to get off the fence and decide what this game is supposed to be. Is it an adventure game where gameplay is the focus as much as the story or is it a game that they want to use purely to craft an experience where all of the hard work of the gameplay is watered down as much as it can so that a player of any skill level can beat it. With the way things are, the only experience I'm having is what it might be like to have Tourette's.


Multiplayer

(I'm only going to touch lightly on this.)

+ A Deadly Game of Hide and Seek - As far as first efforts go, this was a surprisingly well-done feature for a naturally single-player game. While there are a few game modes available, the only ones you can still feasibly play at this point is Wanted and Manhunt. In Wanted, you have an assassin trying to kill you for points at the same time that you're hunting someone else. Give yourself away and you lose your contract and you prey walks away unscathed. Manhunt takes two teams of 4 and they play two rounds, once as hunters and another as runners. You need to work together to track your kills or keep the hunters off of your trail. In both modes, acting as a target/prey, should your hunter give themselves away, you can stun them for bonus points and run away.
     As you rank up, you get perks, abilities, and kill/death streak bonuses that range from smoke bombs, poison, morphing groups of people to look like you, a more accurate detection of where your prey is, guns, etc. The problem that occurs though is that the veteran players have LARGE advantages over new players. You may be able to transform your persona to look like someone else at the get go but vets have abilities like templar vision to see exactly who you are in a crowd.
     There's also some abuse going on with the mechanics of the game where prey can escape from assassinations a little too easily or they can just run right up to your face to stun you and you can rarely do anything against it. I feel like the game needs a little tweaking when the players who are supposed to be hiding and not gaining points are 10,000 points ahead of the hunting team. You get 400-700 most of the time for an assassination and only 200 points for a stun so yeah, something's off. It's a wonderful first effort however and I had a blast playing the new multiplayer experience.


Story & Presentation


= Fill It, Fill It Good - Brotherhood is mostly a filler story. What is a filler story? Filler is content that does little to nothing for the overall development of the main storyline and character development. Almost every plot point in this game builds up to something glorious only to fall flat in the end. It has its moments of satisfaction but leaves you with the feeling of "Oh, that's it?..." at the end of each path it brings you down. Tales of romance and betrayal, all summed up in the shortest, most unfulfilling way. I'm trying not to exaggerate or complain more than the game deserves but it was a letdown for all the times it hooked me with interesting buildups.
     I can say that while the story is interesting and still worth the play-through despite its shortcomings, it's probably not necessary to go through to get to Revelations, the next game in the series. Keep your expectations grounded.


= It's Got Style - The menus and HUDs are similar to the ones featured in AC2 but just a bit more crowded and condensed. If you're not familiar with the system before, you may be confused about what you're looking at for a bit but I have no doubt you'll figure it out. Also, when going into multiplayer, the game goes through a short loading screen to access it. Not sure why it needs the loading screen and there's also a funny glitch that occurs on the way where the game states that all the DLC you have for the game is corrupted and will be ignored. The fix for this is to load up the main menu again and then load multiplayer a second time. Multiplayer is its own set of confusion when it comes to menus and displays but like the single-player experience, you'll figure it out sooner rather than later.
     The style of the menus look flashy and fit into the themes and context of the game. It makes you feel that you're actually a part of the Assassin's Creed world and that's more than you can say for a lot of games out right now.

Taken from my television. Sorry about the quality.

- Where Am I? - I've posted a picture of the map, take a look at it? I've been playing this game for over 15 hours and I can't even tell where my main mission is located half the time I look at it. And that picture shows only the default of what's available while in a mission (which I was at the time of the pic). You need to add side missions, special location markers, and more for a complete map. Well, I can go into the map options and turn of certain indicators but there's a problem that comes with it; depending on what you disable, it also takes away other indicators whether you wanted them to show or not. Everything will look fine on your main map but things will be absent from your mini-map whether you had them marked or not.
     Another issue is covering/uncovering map details before/after you use the viewpoints. There were plenty of times where activating a viewpoint didn't matter as the map section it belonged to was already uncovered by other viewpoints or was visible simply because of the game itself. In the inverse, there was a time that my mini map displayed things as though I hadn't uncovered the area beforehand. In an open-world game, the map should be the one tool you can always rely on.


- Where Are The Ethics? - In Assassin's Creed, Bloodlines, and AC2, Altair has some philosophical moments about the differences between the Templars and the Assassins, whether killing is necessary, should killing be in the dark or out in the open, what does a life truly consist of, is there a true right and wrong, is killing the only way, so on and so forth. These philosophical musings are usually succinctly written and should have more to do with the story than they do. I mean, Ezio and the assassin brotherhood have read these entries from Altair's diary and Ezio's already gone through some of these difficult moments when reflecting on his life. Unfortunately, everyone encourages him to kill and destroy as though it's the only solution.
      I feel like it would take the game in a new and wonderful direction if these thoughts and musings made their way into Ezio's development and the story itself in a way that's more than optional reading. It should melt into the gameplay too. Metal Gear Solid is a very good example for this and it seems like Ubisoft wants to go in that direction with the series anyway, I guess they just don't know how to do it. It's unfortunate and I truly feel that this is an aspect that exists within the game that shouldn't be overlooked.


Graphics and Sound


+ Improved? Maybe? - It seems like the graphics have been updated slightly. Environments have just a little more pop and characters have just a bit more detail. If you hadn't gone straight from the previous game to Brotherhood like I did, I'm not sure you'd notice it but the advances are there. Assassin's Creed was a pretty good looking game to begin with so... *shrug* What can ya do in a year?

= The Music Is Good - It's about the same as what you'd expect from Assassin's Creed 2. It doesn't really deviate from the sound they were already going for in the previous title but it does seems to experiment more with vocal sounds in relaxed states and moments filled with tension. It's a nice addition to the overall experience but it doesn't really standout and grab ya at any point.


Should you Buy?

     Rent it or buy it for cheap, I wouldn't honestly say skip it. There's plenty of things to do, although still not as much as a full-fledged game, and the multiplayer is robust enough to play even if it is a little dead online. Overall, this is a game that really shows off its flaws as much as it's selling points so I think you need to play it to see if it fits you or not.
     In regards to the one-year development time, while it is impressive and they were able to get a respectable amount done in such a short time, I think it holds the game back. There were a lot of issues and bugs that simply would not exist if more time for testing was given to the process. It's quite the ambition to have a game launch in one year and claim it'll have all the improvements and content you'd expect from a traditionally longer development time but I don't think this is the game to do it with.
     One more thing, I just played the Da Vinci's Disappearance DLC and so far it's pretty good. I did come to a situation where the camera went to my character's side to show I needed to jump backwards. Before I was able to throw my controller at the TV, a tutorial popped up saying to basically press the jump button without holding any direction. It also presented this situation several times in a row in one sequence and displayed the tutorial for it every time. So, I guess I wasn't the only one having control issues...

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. Played 15+ hours of the single player campaign to completion and beyond and 15+ hours of whatever multiplayer mode I could get into. I reached Master Class in team games and I'm currently at level 36 of 50.