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Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Review
15 years ago
General
OK, time to roll out the New Year with a new review! Assassin's Creed # Brotherhood!
Now, I've always been a fan of the Assassin's Creed series since the first one. I think Ubisoft can be considered the kings when it comes to free running, but Faith from Mirror's Edge comes in a very close second. I have followed the story of Altair to Ezio, so let's take a look at Ubisoft Montreal's latest title!
The game starts off right where we left off, literally, right where we left off. For those of you who haven't completed the second game, I will say this. We start at the Vatican where our returning hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze has had a very strange encounter and is rescued by his uncle Mario and brought back to his family's home at Monteriggioni, your base in the last game. Ezio is reunited with friends from the last game such as his sister Claudia, his mother Maria, and even Niccolo Machiavelli (I'm still surprised that he was even in the game at all! Awesome!) Suddenly after a love scene with the Countessa of Forli, Catharine Sforza, cannons thunder! Monteriggioni is under attack from the papal army! For those who played the last game, the pope, Rodorigo Borgia (known as Pope Alexander, who did actually exist) has sent his son Ceasare and daughter Lucrezia to wreak havoc on your town and you are shot, only to fall unconscious.
Ezio wakes up in Rome, intent on killing those who have taken everything from him, must band together with his friends and allies as well as potential assassin recruits to overpower the Borgia and restore liberty and peace to Rome.
Meanwhile in the real world outside the control of the Animus, our hero Desmond Miles has somehow found himself in Italy (I suppose the truck he was stuffed in was also a boat) after being flushed out from their previous hideout by the Templars only to hide at the old Auditore villa. Desmond's been feeling very odd over the last month or so, and is starting to see things, dubbed the 'Bleeding Effect' in-game. Desmond is starting to act and move more like an Assassin, but is starting to draw many parallels to Ezio, frequently replacing pronouns like 'he' with 'me', or 'I'. Now under the cover of an old relic, Desmond and his friends Shaun Hastings, Rebecca Crane and his first ally Lucy Stillman must uncover the locations of secret temples before the Templars do and save the world.
GAMEPLAY
This, at its heart is the same Assassin's Creed you know and love. The controls are the same as ever. Ezio's moves are still fresh from the first game with the addition of new tricks. Making its debut in the AC series is the 'Killstreak' function which occurs after you have beaten an enemy several times and employ a gory assassination move. Simply by highlighting your next enemy and hitting the attack button, Ezio automatically targets and instantaneously dispatches that foe. Beware though, this cycle can be broken should an enemy hit you, ruining your ultimate bad-ass moment. Ezio also hefts additional weapons such as the Bastard Sword, a Crossbow and the Spadone, each of which takes a long time to get an assassination streak going, but once you do, look out!
Once you dispatch your foes like in the last game, you can optionally choose to loot the bodies of people that you have killed. Doing this can net you some cash, but it might also let you pick up medicine and ammunition for ranged weapons. I never had to buy medicine ONCE, and once my ammo for one ranged weapon was gone, I could switch to another quite easily, even if it did take a couple of hits to bring them down.
I found that when I could do it, I would always use ranged weapons to take down my enemies, and there is no shortage of ranged weapons in this game. You start out with your hidden pistol, which is loud but gets the job done; throwing knives which become obsolete later in the game but is good to have as a backup, poison which can now be launched from your glove which puts enemies into those enjoyable little pre-death spasms, and once you get the crossbow, you cannot be stopped. Totally silent, one-hit kill for any target, and quite easy to pick up more ammo if you kill a rooftop archer, and sometimes even foot soldiers with spears will have these for some reason. It might be odd, but hey I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Also while I'm on the subject of ranged weaponry, the AI in this game is totally near-sighted when it comes to me taking down targets. A guard could be on a separate rooftop say, two buildings away in the more crowded areas of Rome, I shoot a guard with my crossbow and doesn't even make an effort to come look for me. Not a debilitating feature, but some responsiveness would have been nice and would have made the game more challenging.
What's new about this game is the addition of Assassin recruits. Ezio informs Machiavelli that in order to fight the Borgia, you will need to recruit more people. Civilian Rescue missions will frequently pop up, but once you save those people, you can induct them into the order where an RPG style system will allow you to upgrade them and send them on contracts all over Europe where you can get money from them. These recruits can also be of use to you in the campaign because some objectives will require you to remain undetected by your target. You can call on recruits to take down the enemy (and by the way, nothing is more subtle than riding on a horse in broad daylight, jumping off and stabbing guys in the neck). On the flipside, I was honestly surprised when one of my assassins leapt from a bale of hay on the ground, grabbed an enemy and dragged him to a straw death. What the hell was my assassin doing in a random bale of hay? Wishful thinking?
By this time I realized that there are assassins everywhere. That rooftop garden? There's assassins in there. That well over there? There's an assassin. That bale of hay? Two of them. We're in the middle of nowhere? I can get them to fucking teleport in.
Assassin recruits really become useful when you also have to kill Borgia captains to burn down towers scattered all around the city. These captains are also totally wussies because they run at the first sign of danger LAUGHING at you as soon as they slip away, but I always got the upper hand in the end when my recruit jumped from the water to drag my target to a watery doom. Awesome.
Rome itself is the largest city ever featured in an Assassin's Creed game. It trades off not having multiple towns, but by the end of the game it will have taken several days to explore all of Rome's corners. You won't have to explore many parts of the city until the middle to later Memory Sequences, and that's before you start rebuilding the whole city which involves renovating Blacksmiths, Art Shops, Banks and even Aqueducts and Tunnels. Horses are now able to be ridden in the city just because the whole place is that big! To be fair, you can take contracts from your friend Leonardo da Vinci to destroy war machines like tanks, machine guns and even a bomber which will involve you going to another town in Italy. These missions are awesome because they, of all things, allow vehicular combat in an Assassin's Creed game! This was awesome beyond anything I could have imagined because Ubisoft has managed to bring the great inventor's machines to life if they had worked five hundred years ago.
To replace the Assassin Seal sub-quest from the last game, we are introduced to the Lairs of Romulus which is inhabited by some whack-jobs that wear pelts and worship Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, as a god. Once you get all of the goodies there, you will be allowed access to a secret set of armor and a weapon left behind by a certain backstabbing emperor-killing dude.
The game is not without its gripes though. My major complaint is with guard intelligence. This aspect has not changed.
'Oh, who is that over there who stabbed my friend in the neck? Oh, I'm just seeing things.'
In one mission, I stole the armor of a guard working for someone called the Banker. When I went outside, the guard's friends called me Luigi and treated me as their friend despite the fact that Ezio probably looks nothing like Luigi, probably doesn't have the same voice and has a physical difference from him. In another sequence where the French have invaded Rome, I stole another set of armor and waltzed right into their camp without them knowing. I'm not going to give you the conversation because it was an awesome easter egg!
I thought the modern-day Monteriggioni scenes were next to pointless because there was very little to do in the town other than to show how different it was in 2012, a couple of artifacts that needed to be collected, and some romance dialogue between Desmond and Lucy. They had NO impact in the story whatsoever.
There is a very strong chance that you won't be able to complete every single memory with Full Synch your first time around and will have to replay one. The timed Lair of Romulus ones were a real bitch to complete because on your first time through, you would have very little to no chance knowing the shortcuts that would maximize your speed through the level, but going back with better equipment would provide you with a better chance of full synch.
But overall, I think that the serious thing was that you could win the game using your ranged weaponry mostly. My hidden blade pretty much went forgotten as I could shoot enemies using my crossbow and find more ammo very easily, and with the large quivers that you get by doing Shop Quests (a real bastard I won't mention. I STILL haven't been able to get 'Faith') I barely had to shop at all, and I think those poor Dottores were sad I wasn't able to sample their finest leeches.
(Is it me or are leeches a HUGE motif in this game. I caught many references to leeches. I know that it's period accurate, but it's a running joke)
Finally, It's really the same game that we're playing here. There is no difference really, and Ubisoft has a reason why because they believe that numbered sequels belong to new assassins instead of new adventures of old ones. This hints to the fact that the next game might be about a new character, which is good because it keeps the series fresh, and the formula isn't bad. Let's see some change! Hit us with something new!
MULTIPLAYER
Now, I only recently completed the campaign and I wish that I could do some more Multiplaying, but I love it to death already. You're actually playing the role of an Abstergo Agent (The bad guys in the series run by the Knights Templar) who's learning to think and move like an Assassin so that they could fight one in the real world. You face off against other agents where you have to kill in complete secrecy, incognito if you will. Players are expected to sneak up on others and attack while still hidden. You could run right into your killer and not even know it until they slice your neck. This is pretty cool because this is one of the most innovative multiplayer forms I have ever seen in ANY video game and it is beautiful!
You start out as being incognito, and you are directed towards your contract by a compass which gets bigger as you approach your contract. When you get close, you can assassinate, but if you sprint, you have the risk of being discovered, and losing potential points in the process. Your quarry tries to escape by any means necessary by using Pursuit Breakers such as gates, disappearing platforms and equipment such as smoke bombs. You can also stun your enemy for a limited time, and once someone hides, your compass goes wild and you only a have a limited time to find them before they escape and your contract is lost. Take note that everything I have just said applies to the people hunting you as well.
You level up after earning enough experience points and are able to equip abilities and perks in a semi-Modern Warfare way such as death streaks, disguising where you take the form of another NPC or transform all NPCs into your character to further the deception, but beware, the better you do, the more likely you are to have multiple agents on your ass, making survival much more difficult, but the kicker is that anybody can be a great assassin. I took out opponents at twice my level and still came out smiling. As you level up, you can unlock more weapons and perks such as the crossbow, poison darts and a feature that allows to detect hidden targets, not to mention further upgrades which make your abilities last longer which really determines who wins or loses.
I only saw two downsides to this game-mode. A lot of people took to the rooftops, which made them hard to track because you are easy to spot to your prey and your pursuing agent. It totally ruined the feeling and made it more of a cat-mouse sort of game. Also, stunning your opponent only works if you press the button first, otherwise you are snapped by the neck. What also brought my piss to a boil is if your target has you in their sights from a rooftop and decide to end you, you cannot move and are killed instantly. I feel that I deserved a chance to at least save myself but I was subject to a lock-on death.
BOTTOM LINE:
This is probably the best one so far. The amount of content is staggering and I could tell the developers had a lot of fun making this game. While it is essentially a gussied-up version of the last Assassin's Creed, I feel that it was 60 dollars well spent and I will take any of you on in the multiplayer mode! The ending is worth all the effort because of the shocking revelation we receive and the Truth of what the miracle of life is.
Buy This Game! However, I recommend also having Assassin's Creed 2 so you will have a better understanding of what is going on. Hell, I recommend having the whole series because you get a full understanding of an excellent conspiracy theory series with hints of science fiction and mythology on steroids! I am surprised I have not seen any books based on this game! It would make a fantastic movie as long as it is not directed by Ewe Boll.
8.5/10
'GOOD BUY!'
Now, I've always been a fan of the Assassin's Creed series since the first one. I think Ubisoft can be considered the kings when it comes to free running, but Faith from Mirror's Edge comes in a very close second. I have followed the story of Altair to Ezio, so let's take a look at Ubisoft Montreal's latest title!
The game starts off right where we left off, literally, right where we left off. For those of you who haven't completed the second game, I will say this. We start at the Vatican where our returning hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze has had a very strange encounter and is rescued by his uncle Mario and brought back to his family's home at Monteriggioni, your base in the last game. Ezio is reunited with friends from the last game such as his sister Claudia, his mother Maria, and even Niccolo Machiavelli (I'm still surprised that he was even in the game at all! Awesome!) Suddenly after a love scene with the Countessa of Forli, Catharine Sforza, cannons thunder! Monteriggioni is under attack from the papal army! For those who played the last game, the pope, Rodorigo Borgia (known as Pope Alexander, who did actually exist) has sent his son Ceasare and daughter Lucrezia to wreak havoc on your town and you are shot, only to fall unconscious.
Ezio wakes up in Rome, intent on killing those who have taken everything from him, must band together with his friends and allies as well as potential assassin recruits to overpower the Borgia and restore liberty and peace to Rome.
Meanwhile in the real world outside the control of the Animus, our hero Desmond Miles has somehow found himself in Italy (I suppose the truck he was stuffed in was also a boat) after being flushed out from their previous hideout by the Templars only to hide at the old Auditore villa. Desmond's been feeling very odd over the last month or so, and is starting to see things, dubbed the 'Bleeding Effect' in-game. Desmond is starting to act and move more like an Assassin, but is starting to draw many parallels to Ezio, frequently replacing pronouns like 'he' with 'me', or 'I'. Now under the cover of an old relic, Desmond and his friends Shaun Hastings, Rebecca Crane and his first ally Lucy Stillman must uncover the locations of secret temples before the Templars do and save the world.
GAMEPLAY
This, at its heart is the same Assassin's Creed you know and love. The controls are the same as ever. Ezio's moves are still fresh from the first game with the addition of new tricks. Making its debut in the AC series is the 'Killstreak' function which occurs after you have beaten an enemy several times and employ a gory assassination move. Simply by highlighting your next enemy and hitting the attack button, Ezio automatically targets and instantaneously dispatches that foe. Beware though, this cycle can be broken should an enemy hit you, ruining your ultimate bad-ass moment. Ezio also hefts additional weapons such as the Bastard Sword, a Crossbow and the Spadone, each of which takes a long time to get an assassination streak going, but once you do, look out!
Once you dispatch your foes like in the last game, you can optionally choose to loot the bodies of people that you have killed. Doing this can net you some cash, but it might also let you pick up medicine and ammunition for ranged weapons. I never had to buy medicine ONCE, and once my ammo for one ranged weapon was gone, I could switch to another quite easily, even if it did take a couple of hits to bring them down.
I found that when I could do it, I would always use ranged weapons to take down my enemies, and there is no shortage of ranged weapons in this game. You start out with your hidden pistol, which is loud but gets the job done; throwing knives which become obsolete later in the game but is good to have as a backup, poison which can now be launched from your glove which puts enemies into those enjoyable little pre-death spasms, and once you get the crossbow, you cannot be stopped. Totally silent, one-hit kill for any target, and quite easy to pick up more ammo if you kill a rooftop archer, and sometimes even foot soldiers with spears will have these for some reason. It might be odd, but hey I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Also while I'm on the subject of ranged weaponry, the AI in this game is totally near-sighted when it comes to me taking down targets. A guard could be on a separate rooftop say, two buildings away in the more crowded areas of Rome, I shoot a guard with my crossbow and doesn't even make an effort to come look for me. Not a debilitating feature, but some responsiveness would have been nice and would have made the game more challenging.
What's new about this game is the addition of Assassin recruits. Ezio informs Machiavelli that in order to fight the Borgia, you will need to recruit more people. Civilian Rescue missions will frequently pop up, but once you save those people, you can induct them into the order where an RPG style system will allow you to upgrade them and send them on contracts all over Europe where you can get money from them. These recruits can also be of use to you in the campaign because some objectives will require you to remain undetected by your target. You can call on recruits to take down the enemy (and by the way, nothing is more subtle than riding on a horse in broad daylight, jumping off and stabbing guys in the neck). On the flipside, I was honestly surprised when one of my assassins leapt from a bale of hay on the ground, grabbed an enemy and dragged him to a straw death. What the hell was my assassin doing in a random bale of hay? Wishful thinking?
By this time I realized that there are assassins everywhere. That rooftop garden? There's assassins in there. That well over there? There's an assassin. That bale of hay? Two of them. We're in the middle of nowhere? I can get them to fucking teleport in.
Assassin recruits really become useful when you also have to kill Borgia captains to burn down towers scattered all around the city. These captains are also totally wussies because they run at the first sign of danger LAUGHING at you as soon as they slip away, but I always got the upper hand in the end when my recruit jumped from the water to drag my target to a watery doom. Awesome.
Rome itself is the largest city ever featured in an Assassin's Creed game. It trades off not having multiple towns, but by the end of the game it will have taken several days to explore all of Rome's corners. You won't have to explore many parts of the city until the middle to later Memory Sequences, and that's before you start rebuilding the whole city which involves renovating Blacksmiths, Art Shops, Banks and even Aqueducts and Tunnels. Horses are now able to be ridden in the city just because the whole place is that big! To be fair, you can take contracts from your friend Leonardo da Vinci to destroy war machines like tanks, machine guns and even a bomber which will involve you going to another town in Italy. These missions are awesome because they, of all things, allow vehicular combat in an Assassin's Creed game! This was awesome beyond anything I could have imagined because Ubisoft has managed to bring the great inventor's machines to life if they had worked five hundred years ago.
To replace the Assassin Seal sub-quest from the last game, we are introduced to the Lairs of Romulus which is inhabited by some whack-jobs that wear pelts and worship Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, as a god. Once you get all of the goodies there, you will be allowed access to a secret set of armor and a weapon left behind by a certain backstabbing emperor-killing dude.
The game is not without its gripes though. My major complaint is with guard intelligence. This aspect has not changed.
'Oh, who is that over there who stabbed my friend in the neck? Oh, I'm just seeing things.'
In one mission, I stole the armor of a guard working for someone called the Banker. When I went outside, the guard's friends called me Luigi and treated me as their friend despite the fact that Ezio probably looks nothing like Luigi, probably doesn't have the same voice and has a physical difference from him. In another sequence where the French have invaded Rome, I stole another set of armor and waltzed right into their camp without them knowing. I'm not going to give you the conversation because it was an awesome easter egg!
I thought the modern-day Monteriggioni scenes were next to pointless because there was very little to do in the town other than to show how different it was in 2012, a couple of artifacts that needed to be collected, and some romance dialogue between Desmond and Lucy. They had NO impact in the story whatsoever.
There is a very strong chance that you won't be able to complete every single memory with Full Synch your first time around and will have to replay one. The timed Lair of Romulus ones were a real bitch to complete because on your first time through, you would have very little to no chance knowing the shortcuts that would maximize your speed through the level, but going back with better equipment would provide you with a better chance of full synch.
But overall, I think that the serious thing was that you could win the game using your ranged weaponry mostly. My hidden blade pretty much went forgotten as I could shoot enemies using my crossbow and find more ammo very easily, and with the large quivers that you get by doing Shop Quests (a real bastard I won't mention. I STILL haven't been able to get 'Faith') I barely had to shop at all, and I think those poor Dottores were sad I wasn't able to sample their finest leeches.
(Is it me or are leeches a HUGE motif in this game. I caught many references to leeches. I know that it's period accurate, but it's a running joke)
Finally, It's really the same game that we're playing here. There is no difference really, and Ubisoft has a reason why because they believe that numbered sequels belong to new assassins instead of new adventures of old ones. This hints to the fact that the next game might be about a new character, which is good because it keeps the series fresh, and the formula isn't bad. Let's see some change! Hit us with something new!
MULTIPLAYER
Now, I only recently completed the campaign and I wish that I could do some more Multiplaying, but I love it to death already. You're actually playing the role of an Abstergo Agent (The bad guys in the series run by the Knights Templar) who's learning to think and move like an Assassin so that they could fight one in the real world. You face off against other agents where you have to kill in complete secrecy, incognito if you will. Players are expected to sneak up on others and attack while still hidden. You could run right into your killer and not even know it until they slice your neck. This is pretty cool because this is one of the most innovative multiplayer forms I have ever seen in ANY video game and it is beautiful!
You start out as being incognito, and you are directed towards your contract by a compass which gets bigger as you approach your contract. When you get close, you can assassinate, but if you sprint, you have the risk of being discovered, and losing potential points in the process. Your quarry tries to escape by any means necessary by using Pursuit Breakers such as gates, disappearing platforms and equipment such as smoke bombs. You can also stun your enemy for a limited time, and once someone hides, your compass goes wild and you only a have a limited time to find them before they escape and your contract is lost. Take note that everything I have just said applies to the people hunting you as well.
You level up after earning enough experience points and are able to equip abilities and perks in a semi-Modern Warfare way such as death streaks, disguising where you take the form of another NPC or transform all NPCs into your character to further the deception, but beware, the better you do, the more likely you are to have multiple agents on your ass, making survival much more difficult, but the kicker is that anybody can be a great assassin. I took out opponents at twice my level and still came out smiling. As you level up, you can unlock more weapons and perks such as the crossbow, poison darts and a feature that allows to detect hidden targets, not to mention further upgrades which make your abilities last longer which really determines who wins or loses.
I only saw two downsides to this game-mode. A lot of people took to the rooftops, which made them hard to track because you are easy to spot to your prey and your pursuing agent. It totally ruined the feeling and made it more of a cat-mouse sort of game. Also, stunning your opponent only works if you press the button first, otherwise you are snapped by the neck. What also brought my piss to a boil is if your target has you in their sights from a rooftop and decide to end you, you cannot move and are killed instantly. I feel that I deserved a chance to at least save myself but I was subject to a lock-on death.
BOTTOM LINE:
This is probably the best one so far. The amount of content is staggering and I could tell the developers had a lot of fun making this game. While it is essentially a gussied-up version of the last Assassin's Creed, I feel that it was 60 dollars well spent and I will take any of you on in the multiplayer mode! The ending is worth all the effort because of the shocking revelation we receive and the Truth of what the miracle of life is.
Buy This Game! However, I recommend also having Assassin's Creed 2 so you will have a better understanding of what is going on. Hell, I recommend having the whole series because you get a full understanding of an excellent conspiracy theory series with hints of science fiction and mythology on steroids! I am surprised I have not seen any books based on this game! It would make a fantastic movie as long as it is not directed by Ewe Boll.
8.5/10
'GOOD BUY!'
