Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Guide Play Part 21-KJS
0It's been a while since I've revisited a relic of my younger days that used to keep me up late.
It's only been 7 years since this game came out. My lack of age is really showing right now, isn't it?
Yeah, I'll admit it, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is an old favorite of mine. My first game for my PlayStation 3 was Assassin's Creed and this girl in my class let me borrow every subsequent AC release. I even asked her out. She said no. I'm a lonely man. Anyways, let's review this game!
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood takes place exactly right after Assassin's Creed II, both in Desmond's and Ezio's storyline. Desmond is being hidden in a new location while the Templars keep hunting him and his Assassin gang down, while Ezio realizes the consequences of NOT killing the main villain of the last game and has to fight his much more evil and powerful son.
The story in Brotherhood is... alright. There are some highlights here and there like saving "Jesus" from being crucified, disguising yourself and your battalion as French soldiers to infiltrate a fort, and especially the final level in Spain are some real stand-outs. But the interweaving drama between these climactic moments is pretty dull. It's like Lifetime entertainment's take on what "drama" is. For some reason Claudia hates Ezio and La Volpe randomly doesn't trust Machiavelli. These subplots come out of nowhere and are so easily solved it makes you wonder why they were problems in the first place.
While the story isn't A-grade material, what always attracted me to Brotherhood and had me replay it three times (yes, this is my third time playing this bloody game in 7 years), was Rome. This is, in my opinion, one of the best Assassin's Creed sandbox locations in their whole library. If anything even comes close to Rome, I'd say it's the Carribbean Sea from Black Flag, but that's a debate for another time and place. Rome has some real atmosphere to it.
Rome feels like a dead city with real culture that's had a new culture come by and forcibly build their own monuments and villages on top of it. The poor live in the ruins of Roman architecture while the wealthy live in their Italian villas within the main city. Rome feels very interconnected and the music that changes whenever you go to different sections of the map gives the sandbox a truly unique flow. This is one of the most alive sandboxes I've ever played in an open world game.
Of course, a great sandbox doesn't carry a game. And, unfortunately, this is one of the greater faults of Brotherhood. As a sequel to Assassin's Creed II it doesn't do a whole lot to improve the gameplay as a new installment. You can ride horses inside cities, maintain your own brotherhood, and have a new plethera of gadgets and gizmos at your disposal... but the core gameplay isn't changed that much so the new features feel really tacked on and make the game a f***-ton easier.
The new counter system breaks any challenge in combat you could ever have in these games. It ranks weapons in stores like there's a difference between weight, power, and deflection but you can kill the same amount of guards in a fight with just your bare fists because of the counter system. If you kill one guard you can chain kills until everyone lies dead around you. Where's the challenge in that? Where's the fun?
The Brotherhood mechanic also takes away a lot of potential fun. You can now train assassins to go across the globe and perform various tasks... that you can't watch. And when they return you can have them kill your targets for you. But, again, where is the fun in that?
That being said, the micromanaging you do through Rome by maintaining your Brotherhood, buying out businesses and ruins, and going on various side-quests always managed to latch its talons deep into my brain. There's something about mindlessly running around and performing small tasks to accomplish a greater good that makes me forget about how mundane and terrible my own life is, and then I don't have to worry about the swirling abyss that is my inevitable death and I... oh god... no... NO! NOT AGAIN!
*ahem* Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a precursor of what was to come to this franchise that has been slowly drained by Ubisoft to this day. They keep thinking that "innovation" is just "adding some more sh** on top of the formula" and it works in this game. Assassin's Creed II was more like the child in the front of the class that took notes and got a fair B for its great effort, while Brotherhood is sitting in the back and just follows its friend's lead by barely scraping away with a C. And that's pretty much was Brotherhood is. Good... but not as good as Assassin's Creed II. A decent experience that has lost its charm and magic it used to have over me as these years have passed. I'm giving Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood a 6/10.
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