Just finished Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood today.
Damn, the story teams for this series really love ending them on abrupt or major cliffhangers.
Overall, I enjoyed this entry, I think content-wise its better than AC2, but there’s a couple changes in world design and story I didn’t quite like.
The more and more I used the Assassin Recruit feature to clear guards in my way so I could stay stealthy was very cool.
I kinda thought Rome was just OK, but it feels kinda different from AC2’s three cities. As it’s all one big map, and you’ve got one quarter dedicated to developed urban areas, one quarter with ruined and dilapidated buildings, and half a map of flat terrain where you’re gonna want to use a horse to get around faster.
Not my thing, That’s what Origins turned me off of it – the distinct lack of Parkour needed to traverse most of the map.
The story itself was uhh okay.
Given that it follows AC2, unfortunately they have to follow up Ezio’s triumphant “no, I won’t kill you” to Rodrigo, ridiculing him and putting him at his lowest point (and possibly leaving him to die and suffer at the entrance to the Eden Vault that he can’t open) and immediately has him somehow escape and run off to be Pope again off-screen once you walk back into the room from the last game.
Also, this one is focused on a revenge quest again, but honestly less captivating and less notable than the last entry.
Basically, Rodrigo has a son! And he’s your typical power-hungry, loves-violence-too-much bratty evil son of the big bad guy.
He’s ruthless and scary, and honestly I enjoyed what he brought to the table, but I liked the last game’s Mysterious Puppet Master vibe to the villain.
Also the revenge plot felt a little like treading on familiar terrain, though little of Ezio’s motivations seemed to revolve around that conflict like it did the last game, and focused on a completely different “we must liberate Rome for the people”
There were a bunch of other things I quite enjoyed though!
You get much longer, actually gameplay-centric sequences as Desmond and you can parkour around with him a bit.
One is a bit of a hub-type area in a neat little modernised version of Monterrigioni (neat to see cute modern signposts and cars dotting the area you’d become familiar with in AC2.
The other is the Collisseum near the end of the story, bit more of a linear platforming challenge.
I really enjoyed how nearly all the side quests are tied into the central “liberate Rome/inspire citizens to join your cause”… I do think the take too long to introduce the Assassin Brotherhood mechanic to the game, but it’s a fun little meta-game you can run in the background to level up recruits and improve them for using in-world.
And nearly all the side-missions have some narrative hook or relation to the main quest too, which is a much better motivator for me to seek them out – as AC2 only had Races, secondary Assassinations, Beat Up missions, and Courier missions, but they were all very basic and samey overall.
This one has various Assassination/Tailing/Races type missions, but each has some extra dialogue flavour to it.
Plus there’s Leonardo’s War Machines missions that take you to a unique small location to destroy his machine, but not before using it in a fun vehicle destruction tour. The Flying Machine Cannon was my favourite.
There’s even missions that expand upon Ezio’s love Caterina from Ac2, who got sidelined after the main plot picked up.
I’ve still got some side missions I wanna get through, and there’s also a bonus set called “The DaVinci Disappearance” set just before the final mission to get into.
Otherwise, yeah, pretty good game overall!
Next I think I’ll try out Mirage’s free 2hr trial, just gonna skip all the cutscenes and get into the story later on. I just wanna see the modern-throwback gameplay.
I’d love to hear more of @Heisenberg’s thoughts on the classic games in the series.
I’m definitely not gonna go through the whole thing, but at least up to the end of Desmond’s story…
