Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Xbox 360)

Assassin’s Creed threw quite a few of us when it arrived because we were expecting a historical epic, but what we actually got was time-skipping science fiction. The first title in the series looked lovely and played well, but ultimately felt a bit samey after the first few missions. This was partly rectified in the sequel but the action ended in a cliff-hanger just as things were getting interesting.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the latest title in the series, is a true sequel in the sense that you really need to have played the previous games to get the best out of it – the action begins precisely where the former game ended, with only a re-cap by our hero Desmond in the form of a cut scene to let new players know what’s happening. If you haven’t already, I recommend you pick up the former games for a few quid and play through them before trying this one, as the story just won’t connect unless you know the background.

Assuming you’re familiar with the series, we can continue. AC:B is set mostly in Rome, with occasional short trips to Monteriggioni and Firenze among others. Rome has fallen into disrepair under the enforced rule of the Borgia family in collusion with church corruption from the Pope down, and Cesare Borgia wants the assassins out of the way so that he can make a bid to rule the country. French forces have been drafted in to help, with their own ideas about how things will go, and the ever present Templars are hanging around in the shadows wielding influence over affairs.

You play as both Ezio and Desmond in different time periods, attempting to track down the Apple of Eden – a mysterious artefact that grants the keeper unbelievable power. Discovering the location of the Apple through memories of Ezio’s life will allow Desmond and his band of modern day assassins to recover it and fight against the incoming Templar threat, in the form of the multinational company Abstergo.

At first glance, nothing has changed, and I do mean nothing. AC:B seems to use precisely the same game engine as Assassins Creed 2, complete with the slightly irritating level of detail adjustments that happen far too close to the camera. You still get the strange camera glitch when you exit a shop, and the same issues with locking onto surfaces unintentionally when free-running are present. It’s almost as if developers Ubisoft made a very big game and sliced it down the middle to form two separate releases.

The game structure is the same too. You have a main quest which will bring back old friends Leonardo, Machiavelli, Bartolomeo and La Volpe, and a series of side missions from assassinations to faction missions that you can choose to take on. You have a new set of secret locations to find related to the mysterious subject 16, and a set of optional skill based challenges related to each faction – courtesans, mercenaries and thieves. You also have the opportunity to buy and renovate various shops and landmarks in order to obtain new equipment and gain a steady income, as with Monteriggioni in AC2, but you’ll need to destroy Borgia watchtowers in order to remove their influence before you can do so. There’s no real need to renovate anything though because you can get by perfectly well without by salvaging money and items from dead enemies. Fans of Leonardo will enjoy a set of missions where he asks you to track down his war machines and turn them against their Borgia owners, in return for which you’ll get a new (and slightly pointless) toy – the parachute.

There are a few other subtle tweaks to the recipe too. There’s a new assassin academy of sorts where you can rescue and train up to 10 people, and then send them off on moneymaking missions around the world. You can call on up to three of these assassins in a fight, or briefly swap all three for a hail of arrows that takes out pretty much every enemy in your vicinity. This is a remarkably powerful and dramatic ability with a fairly short cooldown time, and consequently feels slightly out of place in the atmosphere of stealth. There’s only one mission where you have to use your assassin trainees though, so the whole concept feels slightly half-baked, and leaves the impression that it could have delivered much more.

In conjunction with this, it seems Ubisoft have dropped the difficulty level overall, replacing it with a challenge for each memory instead. Unless you meet the requirement (complete within a time limit, use a particular weapon, don’t get detected etc) you’ll still complete that memory but with only 50% synchronisation. This is particularly irritating because it frequently removes the freedom to choose your own path, and it’s often possible to miss an objective when it appears and fail the challenge unintentionally. It’s hard to see the point, frankly.

This is true of some of the other changes too. There’s new fighting system with additional attacks during grabs, but in all honesty you don’t notice it. What you do notice is that the combat seems a lot easier this time, and you can get through almost every single fight by simply using your hidden blade to deflect and counterattack. The timing needed for this seems to have loosened up so you can do it with little effort. Your enemies will still stand around waiting to attack in turn there’s no real sense of panic even when faced with a crowd of angry guards. Add the hidden pistol and crossbow to the mix, and you can come dangerously close to getting through the whole game without breaking sweat.

Finally, you can drop back out of Ezio’s world on demand and into the lab where Desmond is working with Rebecca, Lucy and Shaun, but apart from witnessing some good dialogue there’s not really much point. You’re given the chance to hack their email accounts when a mysterious contact send you their passwords, but again there’s nothing much to be gained by doing so other than a few funny exchanges. Again, an interesting idea with no substance.

On balance then, AC:B is a very good game, in precisely the same way that AC2 was a very good game. The new changes make little difference to the recipe though, and so the best way to see it is as the next chapter in a book you just put down for a while. It’s a shame that Ubisoft added tweaks to the game but then failed to do anything interesting with them but as the original concept was so strong it’s not a deal breaker. You enjoy Assassin’s Creed titles for the flowing gameplay, the interesting environments and the conspiracy theory plots, and those are as good as ever. And yes, it does end on a really annoying cliff-hanger that suggests the rabbit hole is about to go a lot deeper..

8/10