Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - Ubisoft - PS3

[stu]

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Ubisoft - PS3


   This game breaks the visual monotony chainmail and sword games sometimes fall into. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood keeps your interest by providing expansive city horizons and sci-fi geometry within your character’s local environment. The model design is fantastic and the lead assassin, Ezio has an outfit that’s just plausible enough. Sorta. I told myself he wasn’t an uncomfortable, stinking mess in those layers because part of the story takes place in January. Ezio looks badass, and that’s what counts. I wish all character design were this good.
   As a first-timer in the series, the controls feel convoluted at times. Something simple like dropping down from a ledge during a sprint rather than jumping is a trick to be mastered rather than a function which occurs in rhythm.  I also found myself using my pistol from rooftops when I thought I was going to jump and impale someone below. When caught in a mob against four NPCs, I found myself mashing buttons and hitting R2 (for a radial menu) to get health until the fight was over.  As far as recent entries go, the calculated action of Demon’s Souls, or the combo system from Batman: Arkham Asylum are heads above what AC: Brotherhood offers in terms of combat.
   The central draw here is multiplayer. You are given a lineup of about ten assassins to choose from. Each character is selected only once by each player for the upcoming round. The Memory Machine places you in a busy marketplace and you are given a player target to stalk and assassinate. Seeking out your prey amongst the crowd is exciting but you have to keep an eye out for other player assassins who are hunting you at the same time. You get a visual queue to give you a chance at stunning your hunter before running, but I have yet to pop a successful one. Even when you get made, the assassination animations are so fine, getting shivved doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out. Pre-match set-up/waiting for players took about two minutes per match.
   The only aspect of the game I haven’t been introduced to yet it the Brotherhood building in which you locate and train new assassins.
   Finding fun here is quick and simple, with plenty of options. There are some Cerebra-like training missions which get unlocked early on as well, but you have to enter your game to access them, rather than jumping in from the start menu.
   The only major complaint here is the lack of a physical booklet, which would have been nice since there seems to be so many options with the controls.

Total Game Play Time: Just Over Two Hours

Verdict: Buy It.

[Azazel]

I accidently deleted my save of AssCreed 1. Tossing up whether to replay it first, or go straight into the sequels. Leaning towards the latter now..

[Muffled]

I accidently deleted my save of AssCreed 1. Tossing up whether to replay it first, or go straight into the sequels. Leaning towards the latter now..

Absolutely no reason to replay 1 in order to prime yourself for 2 or 2.5, in my opinion.  Desmond's side of the story is absurd any way, and Ezio isn't connected to Altair at all.

[Hawkbit]

You could just as easily go to the wiki and read the plotline, including the 14 page dissertation (joke, but it's a lot of info) on the last 5 minutes of the game.  That would be absolutely sufficient to get into AC2. 

[LK]

You could also put yourself through Assassin's Creed 1, and get a better appreciation for the leaps forward they made in AC2 and AC2.5 as well as have more of an attachment to the world and its characters.

It all depends on where your priorities lie. I think AC1 is important to play just to see the genesis of a new I.P. and game formula that started strong but flawed, made significant leaps in AC2, and a refinement in AC2.5.

[Azazel]

Oh, I played and finished the first one. I appreciated things like the amazing vistas when you climbed to the top of a building, and so forth, as well as the semi-parkour running and assassinating. It only let you keep one save though, which I deleted because I missed the achievement for letting the chick talk fully and listening to everything she said (I missed one bit). I was also planning to get all of the flags, for whatever reason. Achievements? Ingame bonuses? Who knows what I was thinking...

Naturally, I got as far as deleting my save, and then playing for perhaps 5 minutes. This was a year or more ago now and I haven't exactly gotten around to getting back to it.

[LK]

I had the same issue before AC2 came out. I put myself through hell to get 1k achievement points before hitting AC2. But I placed higher priority on the Achiever aspect of playing games back then. I haven't hit 1k in AssBro (I did in AC2) and don't expect I ever will (Multiplayer achievements make it far more difficult).

I was surprised the VR sessions in AssBro weren't tied to achievements.

[Azazel]

Yeah, in the last year my Achiever impulse has dropped quite a bit, since a lot of games simply have bullshit grind tasks and I don't have the time to fuck about with doing them before finishing the game.

[stu]

I've been hitting flags and treasures on the way to whatever tasks I'm running. The last time I got caught up in that sort of thing, I ended up grinding and selling endless Alchemist pots in Oblivion and completely forgot what the hell I was doing. Then I quit. I finally unlocked the Assassin's Guild yesterday (yeah, I've been deliberate with this game) and I'm having a good time with it, sending recruits all over Europe in order to undermine the wicked Borgia. I'm glad the recruit leveling system is bare bones.

I'm digging the smarmy history notes that pop up throughout the adventure. There are still too many important functions that require you to push two buttons at a time. The game is constantly giving tooltips during action scenes. I'd like some sort of auto-adjust option for the camera while I'm sprinting on rooftops and ledges. Unless you play everyday, Brotherhood doesn't feel like something a player can just pick up, even with the tooltips. That's mostly minor stuff. I actually expected this game to be much smaller scale than it is, which is great.

Still happy I picked this one over Black Ops when they released. This'll be the first PS3 game I've completed since getting Demon's Souls more than a year ago.

[kildorn]

I was really impressed that they took what was a somewhat fun but flawed game in AC1 and turned it into the awesome that has been the AC2 games so far.