Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Game Info

 

The story will continue where ACII left off, but instead of playing in a new time period, the game will shift over mainly to the land of Rome.  Once again you will play as Desmond and use the animus to access the memories of his ancestor, Ezio, and continue the ongoing battle between the Templars and the Assassins.  The story will begin with Ezio getting ready to relax after all he has done and been through but Cesare Borgia, son of Rodrigo Borgia, is pissed off and sends his guards to a full on assault on the assassins.  Monteriggioni is destroyed and all the goodies you worked so hard for in the last game are gone, yet again, so you will start from scratch, again.

 

 

There has been an addition of an assassin’s guild, new abilities on horseback, added weaponry, combat controls, and multiplayer.  Brotherhood came up with being able to recruit new assassin’s.  The more Borgia towers you destroy, the more assassin’s you can unlock and have at your command.  Once the recruitment of the assassin’s is opened up to you, then you must send them on missions so they can gain experience and level up to make their way up to assassin.  Every time one of your assassin’s level up you will be able to add to their level of armor or weaponry.  The higher their level, the more difficult the missions you can send them on and gain more money and receive items that will be used for shop quests throughout the game.  A cool thing about having assassin’s, you can call them to help you in the middle of a battle of just to take out your target for you.  They have some awesome cool scenes when they come in for their kills, depending where you are he/she could ride in on a horse, just drop out of nowhere, or a smoke bomb will go off and you will see them do their thing.  If you have enough of the assassin’s unlocked, you can call upon a shower of arrows, so instead of your assassin’s coming in and killing them with their blades, they will kill all your attackers with arrows.  After each use of the arrows or the assassin’s themselves you gotta wait for a little bit to be able to use them again, kinda like a cool down period i guess you could say.  Also, you gotta remember that your assassin’s are NOT invincible and can die, so you gotta be careful not to use them if they are not a high enough level, which may happen a couple of times throughout the entirety of the game.

 

 

The crossbow is also new to the game.  I feel it makes the game a lot easier and less of a challenge, like not having to sneak around rooftops anymore, just aim shoot and move about freely.  The cool part about that though is that you can loot your victims of their goods and actually get useful things out of them like smoke bombs, crossbow bolts, bullets, medicine, and poison; so now you can replenish your stock without spending your florins at the shops.  The skills to horseback riding have been upgraded but not by much.  Unlike the previous games, now you can ride the horse through the city and call your horse at any time and it will gallop its way to your location.  Now you can leap from one horse to another horse for a kill, as well as stand on your horse to jump off and get back to free running or to jump up onto ledges.  The negative about this, they got rid of the gallop button and turned that into the stand button, so now you basically feel like your just getting around faster than running but nowhere near the speed as in the past games.  I didn’t really do much of these things with the horse really, just rode to get from point A to point B.

The combat in this game is siiiick!  Along with counter attacks and dodging, you can now kick the enemy to drop their defense and go for the kills.  The sub-weapon system is even more bad ass, not only do you get your average sword slashes and gashes, but you will stab the guard and then shoot them point blank in the face or in the back of their skull as they are looking down in pain.  There are many variations to the combo kills and are vicious and awesome but are definitely not suitable for children.  A new addition to the game is the added objectives to achieve 100% synchronizations.  The objectives include finishing missions in under 8 minutes (which sometimes is pretty difficult and may take a couple of play throughs to memorize the level), don’t take any damage, only kill the target, and more.  I like the inclusion of this because it gives the game a little more of a challenge and if you can’t achieve the 100% sync then it also will give your game some replay value.

 

 

The multiplayer has a cool role reversal to it, instead of being an assassin, you are an abstergo agent or a modern day templar.  You are given a target to find and kill, while you are being hunted by another player with the same goal.  The radar will help you track your target, but the city is full of wandering people in which your opponent can blend in with and get the upper hand so watch your back.  There are a total of four multiplayer modes:  Wanted, advanced wanted, alliance, and manhunt.  Wanted and Advanced Wanted are basically free-for-alls.  One will be a little more challenging than the other, hence the word advanced.  Some of the rules will be different, like the radar will lead you to the vicinity of your target rather than the exact location of his whereabouts.  Alliance has players split into pairs and manhunt splits players into two teams of two, one team will hunt and the other will hide.  I actually enjoyed the multiplayer very much, its a more patience attack than gun ho, throwing bombs type of affair.  It’s really cool when you are caught off guard by your adversary who is hidden in the crowd, on the bench or even in a haystack and kills you.

 

I LOVE the Assassin’s Creed games, so it is hard for me to say the good from the bad.  But, since you need an unbiased opinion I can say this, if you have never played the previous two installments, then you will love this game, the amazing graphics, game play, and action but may get lost due to the continuation of the story.  Now, for the players that have played the last two games, you will notice the little differences and love the multiplayer but will think the game is a lot like ACII with the minor improvements.  My biased opinion though is the game is awesome and if you can get it at a deal, you definitely need to pick it up.