[rokbox title=”Assassins Creed: Brotherhood Review” thumb=”http://www.geeksofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ACBfeature.jpg” size=”854 505″ ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFAiXaf7G-8&hd=1&autoplay=1[/rokbox]
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood once again stars Ezio Auditore Da Firenze fresh off his victory in the previous game in the series. Ezio quickly has his world flipped upside down as his town is attacked, and he’s forced to chase down the attackers in Rome. Meanwhile… Desmond and the Assassins are on the run after their base is discovered in Assassin’s Creed 2. It all comes down to both Desmond and Ezio trying to find important artifacts that will change the world.
• The Combat system is straight out of Arkham Asylum. It functions nearly the same when you’re going toe to toe with an enemy. With Batman you would have to string a series of punches and kicks together while watching out for enemies to counter. In Assassin’s Creed instead of multiple hits, you can combine multiple kills called a Death Streak. However, unlike in Arkham Asylum… Ezio can actually counter while attacking another person. It’s pretty gratifying to say the least, and will make you feel all the more powerful.
• More of the same… but in a good way. If you played Assassin’s Creed 2, a lot of Brotherhood is going to be familiar to you. It’s the same masterful parkour simulator it ever was, but this time you focus less on multiple cities and more on one gigantic one. The most important change is how it keeps you in the action. You no longer have to run all over the city to get to a destination, simply unlock the various tunnels scattered about in key locations.
• The sound is top notch and really draws you into the gameplay. All of the actors seem to nail their roles perfectly, and it starts with Ezio Auditore. He just sounds so much more confident in his abilities this time, and you’ll genuinely feel like he’s the man for the job. That goes for everyone that he interacts with also, none of them ever sound like they aren’t apart of the world. That goes for the future crew too, even though there was a particular area that sounded almost too much like Uncharted.
• The city is yours for the taking… literally. Unlike in Assassin’s Creed 2, where you just ran around and purchased buildings to help your town. In Brotherhood, Ezio has to literally free certain areas before he can make purchases. He can do this by taking down the Borgia Captains in each location, after that he will have to burn the closest tower down. This will allow the player to renovate the city at will, and even buy landmarks to further line their pockets.
• Leading your own band of Assassins is terrific. While the actual use of them is somewhat limited to a button press. The real fun is sending them off on contracts to make you money, all the while they will earn experience and level up. It’s an easy system that could have been fleshed out a bit more, but what is there is actually useful and fun to toy with.
• This is a game that you can continue to come back to. Besides the obvious main storyline, there are plenty of things to do on the side.. Assassin Contracts, working for Leonardo Davinci, searching out treasure chests, unlocking “The Truth” puzzles, and so much more. It’s easy to become distracted by everything happening in the game.
• The game just doesn’t run that smoothly. There are a lot of display issues in Brotherhood, and I can’t tell you if these problems only occur in the PS3 version. The visuals are marred by an assortment of screen tearing issues, along with monumental slowdown issues. This is something that you can’t avoid if you’re riding a horse through well populated areas. There are also quite a few pop-in issues, like NPC’s suddenly appearing out of nowhere.
• The controls can be an unresponsive mess when it wants to. Most of the time things will fair pretty well, your parkour moves will go off without a hitch. However, a lot of the time Ezio will decide to do what Ezio likes to do. You can tell Ezio to keep jumping in a direction, but he’ll say no thanks brah and jump off a cliff. You’ll say “Hey… Ezio… why not grab that ledge?” but he’ll say “No way brah, I’m going to ignore grabbing anything and just fall.” It’s really frustrating to have to deal with it, because you know you have no control over it at all.
You’re only really holding down one or two buttons and letting the game automate itself. So when it starts doing stupid things like having you bounce off walls, or jump off the side of ledges… you’ll wonder how this even happened. It hurts the most when you have an 8 minute challenge to complete, but mid-way through Ezio starts ignoring simple commands and starts doing whatever he pleases.
• Multi-player is a one trick pony in all modes. It’s a game of tag you’re it, and that’s about all there really is to it. You have one target to kill before someone else does, and you’re always being hunted by another opponent. Even if someone is being obvious about chasing you, and you see them out of the corner of your eye. All you can do is run and draw more attention to yourself, or hope that they kill some random NPC instead of you. This carries over to the Manhunt modes, where each team switches roles to see who kill can each other the most. Also, you can end up waiting for about 10 minutes in the lobby for a game to start…. and that’s just weak.
The final say on this one is that Assassins Creed: Brotherhood is loads of fun. Sure it can be utterly frustrating at times, and the Multi-player feels like a lukewarm addition. Yet the single-player is tons of fun, and contains high replay value that most games just don’t have. I’d easily give this one a B if not for the performance issues. So if this is not a problem on the 360, the score would be bumped up half a grade. So for now… Assassins Creed: Brotherhood receives a B- from Half-Ass Gaming. An entertaining sequel that shows the series is headed in the right direction.
