Review: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Release Date (PS3, Xbox 360): NA: November 16, 2010 EU: November 19, 2010 AUS: November 18, 2010 JP: December 9, 2010 

Release Date (PC): NA: March 22, 2011 EU: March 18, 2011 AUS: March 17, 2011 JP: June 3, 2011

Developed By: Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Annecy

Genre: Third-person action-adventure

Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Mac

Platform Reviewed: Playstation 3

This review focuses on the single player component of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. With Revelations now out, most players of Brotherhood's multiplayer will have likely moved on to the latest game in the series, so to review it would perhaps be somewhat redundant.

Annual releases of the same franchise are becoming a common thing. With such little time to improve on the previous game, you might wonder if it's worth investing more of your own time and money into something that could be a little too familiar. That's why Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is a big surprise. Released only a year after Assassin's Creed 2, you may be fooled into thinking it was a convenient way of putting out a game in the series with multiplayer in it, with a mandatory single player mode tagged on as a formality. After all, it would have been simple enough to continue Ezio's story just by putting out more DLC for Assassin's Creed 2. But what actually we have here is a follow up that proves its worth as a standalone entry in the series.

Set immediately after the events of Assassin's Creed 2, Desmond Miles is still looking for the piece of Eden and is once again thrown into the time of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the hooded hero that has grown into a wise, skilled assassin. And he really has come a long way from the boyish rogue he was at the beginning of the previous game, which is made very apparent when you experience some of the flashbacks Brotherhood takes you on. After an attack on Monteriggioni by the Templar Borgias, Ezio travels to Rome with his family to take revenge, and put an end to their tyrannical rule over the capital city.

When in Rome...

The game starts out slow as it has to cater for anyone new to the series, and spends a good few hours refreshing your memory of old Assassin's Creed concepts, while introducing you to the new ones. It's not until a few chapters in that the story reaches a point where it can truly open up and allow you to take on all the different gameplay elements Brotherhood has to offer.

Every action you take as Ezio is a step towards taking down the Borgia. The main story missions are traditional in the sense that they have you taking out important Templar figures using the proven methods of assassination you learned in the last game. Meanwhile, every side mission has you disrupting a specific part of their rule. Side missions are plentiful, and involve tasks such as taking control of Borgia guard towers, destroying war machines, and rebuilding derelict buildings to gain support of the citizens. Rather than feeling like arbitrary tasks that have been tacked on, each side mission you complete ties into the story of taking down the Borgia really well, and the more you get involved with them, the better experience you have as a whole. 

Not only that, but many of them are just plain fun to play through. Special mention has to go to the sabotaging of war machines sequences, which feature scripting on a level that you'd usually only expect in the main line of missions. You also encounter new game mechanics when you get to spend a little time trying the machines out before their inevitable destruction. It gives the impression that the developers put equal amounts of effort and polish into every aspect of the game, rather than just focusing on the main sequences.

If that weren't enough, many of the main and side missions have optional challenges too, in the form of '100% sync' objectives. An example of this could be during a combat heavy section, where you're tasked with not losing more than 3 squares of health, or you'll sometimes get out of the ordinary goals such as staying out of water that would have otherwise made for a convenient escape route. You can play through the entire game without paying any attention to these, but completionists will find themselves busy trying to get 100% in every mission. It provides an extra challenge to those who may find the main objective of the mission too simple.

Stabtastic

One of the drawbacks of Assassin's Creed 2 was the eventual repetitive nature of the combat. It generally boiled down to waiting for an enemy to attack and countering, which felt slow. Brotherhood improves on this with a new kill streak ability, which allows Ezio to smoothly move from kill to kill, cutting through large crowds of guards with ease. 

It's still on the simple side, and it doesn't seem like Ubisoft's goal is to actually challenge the player during combat anymore, which may not even be possible without a major overhaul to the system. While that would have been appreciated to make combat more engaging, the increase in overall fluidity and speed means that it at least doesn't suffer from repetitiveness as it once did, and always feels satisfying.

Sneaking is still where the real danger of failure applies, and there are plenty of sections where detection isn't an option, forcing you to use all your assassin skills to remain unseen. There were times in Assassin's Creed 2 in which this created an unnatural spike in difficulty, but Ezio now has a few more tools at his disposal to relieve some of the frustration you may have felt in his last outing. A crossbow makes for a more suitable silent, ranged weapon, as opposed to the noisy pistol you had last time (though you can still use this, if you like everyone to know where you are). 

The only problem that comes up in these sections is that it sometimes seems that the game wants you to play through the sequence in a very specific way, and it's not always clear what that is. If you don't catch on, sometimes even the most logical of plans can fail simply because you're unaware of what is and isn't permitted.

With a Little Help from My Friends

Of course, the title feature of Brotherhood is just that; the brotherhood of assassins that you take charge of. Recruits can be found causing civil unrest, and when aided, will join your cause in liberating Rome from the Borgia. These brothers and sisters in arms can then be called upon at any time, subject to a cooldown after each use, to take out any target in Ezio's sight. Since this doesn't count as detection for Ezio, it can make for a really powerful tool in sneaking through a heavily guarded area, or for keeping enemies busy while you're chasing down a specific target. And most of all, it just feels really stylish to whistle, and have a fellow assassin instantly leap off a nearby building, striking your enemy down.

Recruits can be trained up through a new system of overseas missions that they can be sent on. Missions have a varying difficulty level attached to them, with a proportionate reward on offer when successfully completed. Up to 5 recruits can be sent on one mission, and the combination of recruit levels, mission difficulty and number of assassins add up to a percentage chance of success. Once sent on a mission, assassins are unavailable for around 10-20 minutes, so there's a lot of management involved in sending away recruits for training while keeping some available to help you out on your mission, at least until you unlock more recruitment slots by completing other side missions. All of this is done through menus, but it does well in creating the illusion that you're heading up your very own assassin's guild and taking on Templars across Europe. If you put enough time into it, you'll ultimately be rewarded with a small army of Ezio clones. A sight to behold.

Presentation... by Da Vinci?

This is a beautiful looking game, more so than Assassin's Creed 2, which was a great looking game in its own right. 15th/16th century Rome is just as majestic as you would imagine, and it all seems to be down to some dramatic improvements in lighting and shadows. The framerate is a little more consistent now, but still suffers from slowdown in busier areas due to the massive scale of the cityscape. The music still consists of a romanticised Middle Ages style, with some dramatic pieces to accompany the more action orientated sequences. The voice acting is, as always, brilliant, and each actor is on top form, smoothly interlacing Italian into English when the script calls for it.

The main drawbacks of Brotherhood are mostly technical. Loading times still feel just a little bit too long, which is noticeable if you find yourself failing a sequence a few times in succession, leading to some irritation. It also still suffers from interface overload, as the screen can become busy with distracting prompts which often aren't necessary. They can also pop up at inappropriate moments; one that comes to mind being a romantic scene in the beginning of the game which was hard to take seriously when a loading icon kept appearing, yelling "video game!" profusely.

Overall

These are only small complaints, however, as Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is pure fun throughout. "The sum of its parts" is a term often thrown around when it comes to video games, but in this case, it describes the game in question perfectly. Every mission and gameplay element, whether side content or part of the main campaign, adds up to form a plot about rebellion and uprising that you always feel fully invested in. 

Considering this is a sequel to a sequel, Brotherhood fully earns its place in the Assassin's Creed series by improving on the previous entry in many ways. For the developers to have achieved that only a year after releasing their last great game is no simple feat.

Rating: 9/10