It’s only been a month since I covered Assassin’s Creed 2 and I’m still looking back on it fondly. A nice 15 or so hour long adventure with great characters, pacing, and mission ideas that prevent it from getting too samey. The plan was to originally cover the rest of the Ezio trilogy, but instead I hopped to Black Flag. Jumped the gun right there didn’t I fair reader? So let’s take a step back and see where our dear friend Ezio is right now. He’s setting towers ablaze in Rome. That seems about right for our favorite mentally ill Italian. Here we are with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the sequel to AC2 as Ubisoft wanted to capitalize on their most successful protagonist. Yet again developed by their Montreal team, and it’s quite surprising to see them churn out a game one year immediately after the second. This is when video games weren’t so expensive to make.
The main goal of Brotherhood was to offer more of the second game, but more refined. The game was smaller in scope, but to compensate they’d be pushing the capabilities of console tech at the time. Brighter environments, more color, more detail, and smoothen out the rough textures of the last game. Then deliver more bombastic set pieces and you’re all set to go. It’s more AC2 and that’s okay because people back then were easier to please as now you have people online constantly shouting into your ear that gaming somehow sucks and that maybe this year the industry will collapse on itself. When it always has been since the early 1990s. Anyways, there was a lot of hype surrounding Brotherhood up until the release date and all you had to wonder was if Ubisoft Motreal would deliver the same amount of excellence the second game had. The answer was surprisingly “yes” if not more for some people. Brotherhood much like AC2 is considered by many fans as one of the best entries in the series if not one of the greatest games ever made. It was pure, and the team did a great job recapturing Rome.
That’s the popular consensus for Brotherhood, but what’s my opinion on this matter? How do I, someone who is a huge fan of AC2, see the follow up? Does it still hold up to this day and did it deserve the hype it received in 2010? My opinion on Brotherhood is a little hard to describe but much simpler when fully explained. I do think this game is excellent. It keeps what makes AC2 great intact and refines a couple of the rough edges that plagued the second game for some. I had a blast playing through Brotherhood and if you don’t believe me then let me tell you I managed to beat Brotherhood in under a week just like AC2. I love this game, I love Ezio, and eventually I want to see how his journey ends in Revelations. I do think this game deserves the pure hype and praise it got back in the day and even now. However, as great as it is I don't think I like it more. In fact, I would even say that Brotherhood is inferior to AC2. While the gameplay and feel of Brotherhood is better I think AC2 had the better narrative, mission variety, and characters. Don’t get me wrong, Brotherhood is amazing and a majority of this review is going to explain why so. This is a game I do recommend. Yet, I can't help but to remind myself of Assassin’s Creed 2 when looking at Brotherhood. Sit back and relax as today we are gonna be retreading old ground. Why Brotherhood might be worth your time.
Story
The story picks off immediately after the events of AC2. Like not even short long after as we see Ezio bewildered by a glowing goddess talking about a guy named Desmond. We are not even gonna talk about the present day story. Ezio retrieves the Apple, otherwise the Piece of Eden, a device that can control the masses and even suck the souls right out of their bodies. His dear Uncle Mario then appears to help him escape and soon the both of them retreat from the bustling streets of Rome. They return to the Villa where Ezio sees the town he helped fund has transformed into a bustling city. Now filled with dozens of citizens, trade, and happy faces all around. They look to Ezio as a hero, a savior during trying times, and Ezio can’t but smile back at all those who look up to him. That night Ezio and Mario debate what to do with the Apple. Ezio then reveals to everyone he left the Pope, the villain of the last game, alive during their final confrontation and everyone is shocked to hear this. Niccolo Machiavelli, who is an important character to this game, tells Ezio that doing this was a mistake as the pope is most likely fleeing to find allies to attack Ezio when he least expects it. Ezio tries to ignore this statement and plan out the future of the Assassins.
He goes to bed that night and makes sweet love to Caterina Sforza who he helped out a lot in the last game. Ezio is enjoying the night when suddenly the Villa comes under attack by powerful Roman forces. Leading the army is Cesare Borgia who demands Ezio to be found and executed in front of them. Ezio amongst all the chaos tries to defend the Villa and help the people escape which he does, but during all of this Uncle Mario is killed, Caterina is taken prisoner, and the Apple is taken by Cesare. With his new home destroyed Ezio leaves for Rome. There he’ll find Cesare and make him pay for what he has done. As he rides into the night Ezio passes out due to exhaustion and awakens to find himself in a Roman house. There he finds Machiavelli who tells Ezio that the Assassins have lost most of their control over Rome. The street is flooded with the forces of Cesare, the people are constantly being taken advantage of, and there’s no one to stand against the overwhelming odds. So it’s up to Ezio to build the Assassin Brotherhood in Rome, train his own forces, plot the rebellion, and overthrow Borgia.
Gameplay
Brotherhood builds up a lot of the principles of Assassin’s Creed 2, because it quite literally is the same game again except with some gimmicks. Which is fine by me because the second game had a formula I quite liked. Navigate the open world, try not to drag too much attention, stealth kill your enemies, and try to pursue whatever objective you have. You’ve kept a lot of the same tools you had in the second game and can use those to approach scenarios in different ways. You got the Hidden Blade for silent kills, the gun that can kill enemies from afar but drags attention, the throwing knives, the poison knives, and much more. If you do drag attention to yourself or if you have been killing enemies wildly to raise the awareness level to the max you’ll most likely have to fight your way to safety. You can attempt to run and hide, but you have to do this until not a single enemy knows of your location. To defend yourself you have a sword and it pretty much works in the way you expect. Attack, counter, parry, break defense, and more. Sword combat works, but it’s not an optimal choice as too many enemies at once is harder to manage and if you take too much damage your armor breaks and your maximum health will decrease. Armor can be repaired at blacksmiths and lost health can be restored with medicine, but repairing armor will cost cash as well as refilling any of the medicine vials you used during exploration.
You can still scale the environment and parkour around like a madman, and the game encourages you too seeing how there’s a ton of verticality to the world yet again and the most simple path to your objective may not always be easily obtainable. It’s more Assassin’s Creed 2, but in Rome. At least people aren’t always trying to pickpocket you outside of a single cutscene. Well what’s new to Brotherhood that changes up the formula. Well there’s outposts now and you’re gonna want to liberate and burn down a lot of them. Yeah, outposts the thing that games like this and Far Cry 3 popularized. Where it differs is that in Far Cry you have to kill every enemy whereas in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood you just have to kill the captain. Sometimes the captain will try to flee and other times they’ll take you head on except they’ll bring every guard in the vicinity to fight you. It’s this scenario of learning to adapt to the situation and it’s quite fun trying to sneak to them, getting spotted, and quickly changing my plans.
Second latest addition as it’s advertised on the front cover is your Brotherhood. Eventually you’ll hit a point where you can start recruiting your own assassins. Helping citizens fighting against Roman forces lets you accept them into the Brotherhood. They can be sent out on missions or summoned to help you out quickly. Whether that be doing a quick stealth kill you couldn’t possibly achieve on your own or helping during a frenetic fight. Summoning an assassin takes energy, and that energy needs a bit of time to refill. The bar can be raised if you recruit more, but to recruit more assassins you need to liberate outposts as doing so allows more members to join your cause. Do this and you’ll have the greatest team in the world. Outside of that there’s nothing more I can say. It’s more Assassin’s Creed 2, and that’s okay because I loved the second game and I still love this game. Hopefully you can liberate Rome and bring freedom to all.
Thoughts
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is a good game. It’s an amazing game mind you. It looks at what made the second game a masterpiece, refines it, and delivers it on a smaller scale. If you were to ask me if I would recommend Brotherhood then I’d say I would and even strongly. I had a lot of fun playing Brotherhood, but would I say it’s a significant improvement from the last entry. Yes and no. Yes, because some aspects that made AC2 annoying to play at times have been removed. However, in an attempt to fix past flaws and deliver a far more focused game I feel like Brotherhood sacrificed a lot of the things I loved with AC2. A good example is the world. Brotherhood has one map, that being Rome, and it is gorgeous. I like how vibrant the setting is compared to the more drab locations of AC2, and how the map is laid out. You have the city streets that are cramped and hard to navigate. The rooftops on high where your parkour abilities are most likely the most flexible. The fields that house many fortresses and a coliseum, the prison which is this gargantuan labyrinth you visit a few times for the story, and much more. Rome is an amazing setting and probably one of the best to be honest with you. However, I liked the variety of the settings in AC2. How each city had their own traits and you can see the liveliness based on their art direction and tone. Rome is great, but lacks the personality of the last game.
Now making a map smaller in scale does come with benefits. I like how easy it is to navigate the world, and backtracking feels less of a hassle here compared to a lot of modern open world titles. Running from one side of the map to the other takes only a few minutes, and one new addition I like is being able to call a horse. The horse controls have been improved although not by a lot. Having one map instead of several cuts down the obnoxious transitions between areas in the 2nd game. As much as I love the maps in AC2 it is difficult to deny that sitting between loading screens between areas got annoying. That and the manuscript page hunt near the end of the game made going back to areas you’ve been to before more infuriating. I never encountered this problem in Brotherhood as the game did the best it could to push me to the next objective and not be bogged down by side objective bloat. So the smaller and singular world will either be loved more or hated depending on your liking of AC2. I stated it already, but I love how bases you had to liberate were handled. You don’t have to kill everything. Just kill the big mean captain in the area and burn the tower. It creates this unique strategy of how to sneak about and get to your main target. To adapt quickly when things go wrong and try to flee or summon a ton of other dudes to fight you. I like how this connects to progression. Liberating more areas lets you build a bigger brotherhood, and building a bigger brotherhood helps with stealth and combat. It may even help with liberating the more difficult fortresses.
I love building my brotherhood in this game, but I can't help but wonder if it makes the combat and stealth too easy at times. Now Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have the best combat or stealth in the world. I think stealth is okay at best and lacks the flexibility games like Dishonored or even the Metal Gear Solid games have. There’s not a lot of room with experimentation and it’s just stab the guy before he can scream for his comrades. However, the addition of the brotherhood allows you to be a tad bit more creative. Eliminate a guy or two who are blocking the way, but you can’t sneak attack onto them because someone else can see you. Create a distraction that lures the guards, or have them help you in an eight man fight. However, this removes the challenge in a game that already lacks a lot of challenge. You get to essentially cheese encounters or trivialize the stealth now that you have an instant takedown from a far away button. I like it, but it’s hard to determine if it harms the game or not. One addition I forgot to mention earlier is investing. You can purchase buildings and shops in the game sorta like how you could build your villa in the second entry. Opening more businesses allows you to gain more money overtime, but it feels more like a waste than actual help. Why do I need to spend money just so I can open a shop that allows me to buy armor that is already really expensive. Why open a medicine shop when I can just run to one of the doctors in the area? It’s not terrible, but feels wasted.
Brotherhood has all of these cool new features, but does it actually fix many of the problems I had with AC2? Not really. Again, AC2 did have really good core principles and I love the formula both these games have. It’s the minor annoyances that pile up though. Hello there combat that’s janky as hell and some of the weirdest controls I have seen. Where you gotta hold a trigger to perform a counter, but other times you don’t so Ezio does not do what you want him to at times. Hello there movement controls are equally as bad and sometimes you end up leaping to your death. Mission variety is still good, but it feels less varied than AC2 and I would argue it’s worse. AC2 was the game where one chapter had you soaring through the air using a flying machine Leonardo De Vinci constructed. All the while the city is surrounded with giant flames and then you land atop a grand cathedral to assassinate your target. Then another chapter had you playing party games all for it to not matter in the end and have you steal a mask, sneak into a party, leap onto a boat, and stab your target in the face. Some missions were bad, but it’s the exciting ideas that kept things nice. Brotherhood has assassinations, trailing missions, combat missions, and the usual.
Some of these are just downright poorly designed. One chapter has you collecting uniforms to disguise a bunch of men so you can storm a fortress. It was so exciting. My men were all dressed up and we were ready to take them by surprise. I then spent the next ten to 15 minutes walking through the streets, because if you go too far from them you fail the mission. However, you gotta eliminate guards ahead because if you don’t they see through your trap and the mission fails, but if I run too far the mission fails either way. So what the heck did you expect me to do here? One mission has you forcefully drag a woman along to open Caterina’s cell. Occasionally she breaks from her restraints and runs away. Why not just knock her out, loot the key, open the cell, and toss her in? These missions aren’t terrible and for most of the time I was still having fun. It’s just when the game dipped it dipped hard. So mission design hasn’t changed all too much, but what about the story? How does it serve a follow up to what is by a lot of fans one of the best narratives in the series? It’s pretty good. It gets the job done and it’s quite engaging from beginning to end. It’s a good narrative and has good payoff.
Here I go another one of my ramblings though. It shares the same sense I had with sequels like Horizon Forbidden West and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth in that all of the important character building and introductions were done in the first entry. Everything they wanted to do was done, so there’s little to no room on improving the characters besides showing what they do this time. We already got to see Ezio go from naive street boy backed by a rich family to a bloody assassin who’d do anything for revenge. Then see him find new friends and guardian figures who were basically family to him. The plot is all about revolution and standing up to powerful figures. It’s still good, but we already did that in AC2 but better. There was a whole scene that had Ezio stand amongst a public crowd and talk about destiny and life. The main villain is less interesting now and I would say more annoying. A cartoonishly bad person who is angry all the time and f*cks his sister for some reason. I’ve complained a lot about Brotherhood. You can tell I prefer AC2 more. This game doesn’t do much, but that’s not surprising for a franchise that used to have yearly entries. However, I still really like this game. It’s exciting, does a good job at delivering more, is more beautiful, and above all fun. What matters at the end of the day is that I had fun, and that’s why I still recommend this game despite all of the flaws I saw in it. In the end I am going to give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood an 8.5/10 for pretty good.
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