Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted

When asked to do an in-depth criticism of a recent game, I thought, ‘It should be something I’ve completed ‘and ‘it should be something I liked’ so it would be easier for me to right about. At this point in time though I hadn’t actually beaten a game in a while, I was slowly playing through a few different ones but hadn’t really gotten into anything. So I decided to play some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the third console game in the Assassin’s Creed series (One of my favourite series this generation, alongside Uncharted). Over the weekend I spent at least two sleepless nights playing it (I just couldn’t stop) and finished it Sunday, which just shows how much this game pulled me in and addicted me to it. The Game is part Stealth, part Action-Adventure, part Open-World sandbox type game, published by Ubisoft and developed by their Montreal studio, with the multiplayer developed by their Annecy studio.

The Basic premise of this game, as with the other two games in the series, is a modern day war between the descendants of Templars and Assassins that, using advanced technology and genetic memories, search for powerful and ancient relics. Using the Animus, these memories can manifest themselves as actual experiences for the people using them. Playing as an assassin, much of the game is focused on sneaking around and killing people from the shadows, but there is much more to it.

Ezio Auditore and his band of Merry Men (and one woman)

You Play as Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, a Master Assassin in 15th century Italy. The game is divided into various DNA, or memory, strains, each containing multiple missions to complete. The missions vary from assassinating various people of power, to simply following someone without being spotted, or pick pocketing someone. Also littered throughout the game world are many side quests and things to collect, doing these unlocks better weapons or armour, and sometimes even extra, hidden, pieces of story. A personal favourite side quest is the subject 16 strain of missions, where you’re tasked to find hidden areas where you must solve puzzles and reveal cryptic messages from another user of the animus, although not essential, it does add a lot to the experience for anyone who is interested in the game’s story.

Throughout the game you will collect many different types of objects, and even people, to use to help you achieve your goals or to just play around with, which can be a lot of fun. There are light and heavy weapons, which are best suited for close range combat, although you can throw some of them. The light weapons are inherently faster, but the heavy weapons are much more powerful. There are also sidearms that can be used as well, but compared to the other weapons they don’t stand out as very useful. For ranged attacks you have the option of throwing knives, a small pistol, or a crossbow. The pistol and the crossbow function in very much the same way, you charge it up to target an enemy and then one shot kill them, as long as you’re close enough, but the throwing knives don’t need you to charge to throw them, but if you do, you can target three enemies at once, and it’s still instant kill. There is a limit to the amount you can hold, but you can easily refill at various shops using florins (the in-game currency) or looting dead bodies. The most fun weapon is by far the hidden blade, which can be upgraded into the dual hidden blade (for twice he killing goodness) and have poison added for some fun effects. I must admit though, the poison isn’t very useful and not something you think of, considering how easy to is to kill people normally. This weapon allows for various ways to kill, as long as you aren’t detected by guards you can instantly kill them, either hanging from a ledge, hiding in a hay bale, or even jumping from a building. The hidden blade is also one of the most recognizable items from the game, and is the only weapon usable in both the memory sequences and in present day.

Along with the weapons there are a few supplement Item’s that also help Ezio out, such as the armour, which increases his resistance to attacks and adds more health; the armour can be broken though causing a loss to maximum health but can be repaired, for a price, at blacksmiths. You can also get smoke bombs, which help distract enemies allowing you to either assassinate them quickly or run away with ease. New to this game is the addition of Parachutes, which allow you to jump from the highest building and gently float down, you can even assassinate from them.

Also to help you are the various factions around the cities, the courtesans, thieves, mercenaries, and of course, assassins. All these factions, with the exception of the assassins, can be paid to help you distract or fight the guards, but unless it’s for a mission, you’ll generally find them fairly useless as the assassins far outshine any of them. The assassins guild allows you to recruit citizens to help you fight, each can go on missions to level up and earn you money, and while they’re not away can be used, for free, to kill people, and if you have enough, they can instant kill every nearby enemy, which sometimes feels game breaking, but can be quite helpful when you need to get away.

They can and will kill everything in your path

Brought back from Assassin’s Creed II is the ability to purchase many different buildings around, which increases the amount of money you earn every 20 minutes. The Blacksmith sells weapons and armour, as well as repairs them. The Painter sells treasure maps, and of course paintings (if you want something to fill your art room. The seamstresses will sell you different sized pouches to let you carry more ammo and parachutes, as well as allows you to dye your clothes a variety of color. The Doctor sells you potions as well as poison and finally the banker allows you to check your completion as far as collectibles go and receive your money. Oh, there’re also stable, but other than spawning horses, are fairly pointless, it’s not often you’ll need a horse, especially in the location of the stables.

In addition to all this wonderful stuff there are also many hidden items in the game to collect. There are feathers, treasures, flags, and scrolls of Romulus. Each of these things are scattered about the city for you to find, and each gives you something useful in return. Unlike many games, where it’s impossible to get all bonus items until the game is completed, and then there’s no point, I found that you could collect everything and still have plenty of missions left, making the time spent to find these things actually useful. The scrolls of Romulus are definitely the best to find as in order to get each one you must complete a difficult but fun plat forming oriented level.

In my opinion the user interface is fairly well designed; you may think a futuristic HUD in a historical setting looks out of place, but it fits in perfectly with the games core concept, plus the fact that there’s no HUD when you actually play in modern times is a nice touch. Each element is very minimal, so there’s no real clutter and you can easily tell what everything is. The map menu gets fairly cluttered, but the different markers can be turned on and off however you wish, a small thing, but it’s very helpful. My one problem is there are so many different menus and sub menus to go through to get where you want. An example being, if you want to check your progress with a guild, you must enter the menu, go to the DNA (Maybe not where you think you would find it), scroll to secondary memories, and then guild missions, then courtesans, and you will arrive at your destination. Controls, for the most part work well, fighting uses the face buttons, and you can do specials while holding r1, including counter, a still overpowered move that normally kills in one hit. Holding r2 brings up a wheel of weapons to use, which is easy to choose from, and you can map them to the d-pad.

My biggest problem with the controls is that in order to run at full speed, and jump across gaps, you must hold x in addition to r1. This makes it difficult to turn while doing this as my thumb is currently occupied, so I normally have to stop running, change angle, then continue, which has resulted in me just walking off a building more than once. Also circle is used to drop from buildings, but many times makes you jump on the nearest person, the is annoying when that person is a guard and it instantly set all other guards to alert and a chase ensues. Speaking of guards, I believe their AI has improved since the past games, they are very good at chasing you down, and can free run just as good as Ezio, although it’s still ridiculous how easy they give up the search once you escape their sights. You can jump off the tallest tower, right before their eyes, and jump into a bale of hay and they’ll have no idea where you are, although I guess that’s more of a game mechanic, because it could be annoying to be chased around the city for hours.

A simple HUD, but all you need

The music in Brotherhood is very good at setting the mood for what’s currently going on. A walk in the countryside has nice peaceful music, while, in contrast, a chase from guards can raise your heartbeat. It’s not particularly outstanding but it’s good for what it’s used for. One thing that might really get on your nerves is the few amounts of dialogue that the NPC’s use while you run around the city. Sure sometimes it’s ok, like when it’s someone delivering a big speech to random onlookers, but most of the time, it’s the same thing reputed ad nauseum. I believe I’ve heard both “That man must be drunk” and “I have never seen a stranger man... truly” at least a hundred times each. At one point it was even so bad that you could hear three different onlookers saying the same thing. Other than these random NPC’s the story driven dialogue is outstanding to me, each voice is unique with their own little charm, Some even made me laugh out loud, which doesn’t happen too often.

The story is really the main reason I keep coming back to the franchise, my love of conspiracies, history, assassinations, and to some extent, time travel, all rolled into one. I think it’s great how they can integrate real-world events so well into this game, to make some people think, ‘hey, maybe this actually could have happened’. That being said, although this game did have its highlights, for the most part I was a bit let down. Not because of the quality of the story, but more an absence, there was decidedly less story advancement when compared with either Assassin’s Creed I or II. That may be in part because this isn’t technically a full sequel but instead a continuation of Ezio’s story from Assassin’s Creed II, but they still could have added more. I did like how they had a recap of the previous game though, and not too long so you could quickly get on with the game but still have a good refresher if you hadn’t played Assassin’s Creed II in a while, or ever. More so in this game than the past two though, you play as Desmond (the actual main character of the series) in modern times, and the story does advance there a fair bit, one point even left me speechless, but the game just had to end in a cliff hanger.

Although I did greatly enjoy this game, there were many parts where I was thinking of things that should change. Firstly are the guild assignments; many times they’re just the same boring activity again and again, it would either be better to change it up or remove it entirely, as it doesn’t add much to the game. There are some quests in the game that require certain items to complete; most of the places you find items are treasure chest, but after opening every single one in the game, I still needed some; apparently you need to loot bodies for some, this gets annoying and makes it so an easy quest to get an item takes till the end of the game, when you already have something superior. One more small thing to remove would be the fact that after you get everything from Leonardo Da Vinci, his marker still appears on the map and you can talk to him, and every time he says “You already have everything I can design for you” and walks away; I believe that once you have everything he shouldn’t show up again on the map. Now some things to add: Definitely the option for some sort of glowing trail to your next objective, there have been many times where I run straight for a marker, only to find it’s one foot in front of me and 100 feet straight up an unclimbable cliff. Another thing to add, or I guess change, would be how to run; I mentioned before that holding x gets annoying, I feel as though it would be better to just have r1 put you at a full sprint and hold x to go slower.

Shooting from close range works too

The graphics in this game, although they surpass the last two games by far in quality, the draw distance is just terrible. As you wander through the city you can watch things pop in and out that are mere feet from you. I was willing to forgive this based on the fact that it’s technically a computer simulation, but it does happen in the “real” world too. Also, there were a few times when I got stuck inside some objects because I ran to them before they loaded, I was able to escape so I didn’t have to restart, but it should still not have been possible in the first place. I only had to restart the game once when it froze, which is good considering it was on my PS3 for nearly 48 hours straight.

In conclusion, this game has taken from the previous two games in the series, learned, and improved upon them. Although there are a few technical problems, some annoying NPC’s and a few useless additions that really don’t need to be there, this game is very enjoyable. I managed to get addicted to it and forego doing homework to complete it (although technically it was homework) which speaks volumes of how good it is. I can’t wait to play the next game in the series, which better be soon (stupid cliff-hanger).

Wow, that got much longer than I planned.

- N. Gale