Leveling Down

Ezio now has some help from his fellow assassins in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed II was one of the top games of last year, so it’s no surprise to see that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed II, is also scoring highly in reviews and doing well in sales. I’ve recently completed all I wanted to out of this game, and while I think it’s a good game, I can’t help but feel like it’s not as great a game as the reviews make it out to be. Hit the jump for my take on it.

Assassin’s Creed II …Part 2
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood picks up literally right where Assassin’s Creed II left off, and therefore, is not easily recommended if you have not played Assassin’s Creed II yet. The entire game takes place in Rome, and several of the gameplay mechanics that were improved in the second game also continue to be present in Brotherhood. However, the general storyline was a bit weak in Brotherhood – it seems like there was little character and plot development this around. The game starts off strong, but then as soon as soon as our protagonist Ezio makes his way to Rome, the storyline just becomes bland and uneventful. On top of this, the ending is quite abrupt, and the actual gameplay in the last section of the game was a complete shift from the rest of the game, making me wonder if the developers simply ran out of time with the game.

What’s sad for me to say is that I actually found Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood kind of a chore to play through and therefore had a hard time beating it. Like Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood implements a money-making aspect of the game by allowing you to purchase various merchant shops and such in order to “rebuild Rome”. While this mechanic was a lot of fun in the second game since you set all of these up in your base in Monteriggioni, Brotherhood now spreads all of the shops and buildings that you can buy across the huge map of Rome. Did I say the map was huge? It’s so large that I actually grew tired of having to push through crowds and slowly climbing up the sides of buildings to get through it. Fortunately, there are “warp gate” type structures around the map for quick traveling – without those, I probably would have given up playing the game completely.

The thing is, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is not unlike past Assassin’s Creed games – it’s still foremost a huge sandbox game where if you have tons of time and love everything Brotherhood provides, you will definitely get your money’s worth. Besides the primary storyline missions, you have various missions for the different guilds you recruit to your cause, assassinations of various targets, mysterious secrets to find on key landmarks, hidden treasures and collectibles, etc. In my “gaming prime”, I would have devoured all of these Crackdown-like time wasters and enjoyed the extra dozens of hours that all of these sidequests provided. But today, with so little gaming time I have left in my life, I can no longer afford to waste my time on these distractions – even though this game does provide maps for nearly all the collectibles in the game.

Taking down guard captains at the various towers in Rome allow you to rebuild in that area.

The Brotherhood
The biggest new gameplay feature touted in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is the brotherhood. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is the first game in the series that allows you to recruit new assassins to your cause, and up to 12 assassins can join you. The assassins can all gain experience and level up, allowing them to be stronger defensively and become more efficient killers. Unfortunately, their inclusion into the game doesn’t really add much gameplay. You can send each assassin on a quest where they disappear for several minutes, and if successful, come back with money, treasure, and experience points. If you decide to keep them around, you can call on the assassins at almost any time to take down targets of your choosing. While unnecessary, this new feature certainly adds more convenience to the gameplay, as the assassins are not automatically linked to you. For example, you can just walk along and tell the assassins to attack the group of guards ahead of you. Even once they attack, as long as you are not attacking, the guards don’t have any reason to think that you are involved so you can move along your merry way. Once called, the assassin meter must refill over time before you can call the assassins again. That little amount of new gameplay makes me wonder if the game was really justified in being called Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I guess it beats Assassin’s Creed 2 – Part 2.

Leonardo Da Vinci returns to provide for a few technologically “advanced” missions.

The Challenge Rooms
Even though the primary campaign can’t quite hold up to Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood does add in a Mirror’s Edge-like Challenge Room gameplay mode. In the Challenge Rooms, you are tasked with making it through various obstacle courses under a certain amount of time, killing enemies in a certain amount of time, etc. These can be quite enjoyable for the more competitive players, as you can see on the Leaderboards how fast your friends make it through the different Challenge Rooms and you can strive to beat their times. This was the strongest aspect of Mirror’s Edge, and while it is nice to see its inclusion here, I don’t know if gamers really find the mastery of the gameplay of Assassin’s Creed to be something they care to compete on.

Walking next to a computer-controlled character like yours can make it harder for your multiplayer assassins to figure out who to kill.

Multiplayer
One of the primary reasons why I decided to pick up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood in spite of my enormous backlog was the new multiplayer that the game was sporting. From what I learned, it seemed innovative and fresh enough that I thought it was worth checking out before the game hit the bargain bin. Therefore, most of my review will be spent on this portion of the game.

The primary mode in the game is Wanted, a “deathmatch” style mode that consists of six players dropped in a map where each player picks from one of several unique characters. No two players can choose the same character. Once the match starts, all six players spawn in a world completely populated with dozens and dozens of the same six different character models that the players have selected. Each player then has an assassination target along with a radar that indicates the general location of the target.

The most innovative and enjoyable aspect of this entire mode is to figure out how to differentiate your target from all of the AI characters that are the same as your target. You cannot defend against a kill, but because you are always trying to kill someone and often are a target as well, the game is suspenseful since you don’t want to run to give away your position to your target or the assassin hunting you down. Sneaking by your target and making the kill is quite rewarding, but what is even more rewarding is playing defense. When you set yourself up in a crowd such that your assassin kills an NPC standing next to you instead of yourself, I think that player loses points and no longer has you as a target. So playing defense is nearly as important as playing offense in this mode.

The match is score-based rather than straight up kill-based. You score points for getting kills, but you get more points for making stealthy kills (as opposed to ones where you just run up to your target and kill him), and you also score points for evading your assassin if they make themself known to you. As you score more points and move higher up the standings in the 10 minute match, more assassins are sent to target you. In first place, it is not surprising to find three of the other players all with you as their mark. Consequently, if you are in last place, you often do not have anyone going after you so you can focus on hunting.

The other two modes in the game are team-based, but neither of them can compare to the primary free-for-all mode. In Alliance, you play with a partner against two other teams of two. You and your partner are the same character, and because there are only two other opposing teams against you, the amount of fear and tension goes way down compared to the Wanted mode. In all of the games I played in this mode, none of the players would be stealthy – everyone would just climb up and use the rooftops to kill each other. The whole premise of stealth assassination was thrown out as players just ran after each other due to the lack of any real fear.

Manhunt is the final of the three unique multiplayer modes, setting up two teams of four against each other. One side plays the hunter and the other the hunted, so it’s similar to Wanted but one side solely is offense and the other side is solely defense. The two teams switch sides and try to amass points. I couldn’t even get a game started in this mode after waiting so many minutes so I can’t give my impressions on this one. By default, it’s basically a fail since I couldn’t even play it – and this leads me to how I feel about the multiplayer.

While the original Wanted game mode and even maybe the Manhunt mode could be quite enjoyable due to their innovation and semblance of being an assassin, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer as a whole isn’t worth sticking around for. The biggest problem with it all is the terrible matchmaking. I am a huge fan of matchmaking in all my multiplayer games, since it allows for you to play with your friends easily on the same team and eliminates the need to figure out a room to join, host, etc. I am NOT a huge fan of having to wait 10 minutes or longer to just get into a match. There’s a matchmaking option that is called something like “Quick Match”, which will put you in the fastest mode available. That thing still took me 10 minutes. So while I initially found the Wanted gameplay type innovative enough to want to keep playing it, I could not get over the fact that I was spending more time looking for matches than actually playing them. This was strike number one against Brotherhood’s multiplayer.

Strike number two appeared for me once I finally got into a match and discovered that I was a level 7 against a room full of level 30+ opponents. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer decided to try to implement the addictive nature of Call of Duty’s customizable equipment and perk system. With Call of Duty’s system I will argue that it is pretty fair since your starting equipment and perks are quite viable to compete against fully decked out high level opponents. Such is NOT the case in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – I was appalled over the fact that your level not only determined what skills you had available, but whether you were even able to use skills at all. To use Call of Duty again as an example, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood would be like if you were Level 1-10, you couldn’t use Perk slots 1, 2, or 3. If you hit Level 10, congrats – you unlocked Perk slot 1! I had no chance when I was in a room full of level 30s as they were busting out abilities and tools I had never seen before.

I thought that the pure multiplayer gameplay mechanics were enjoyable and stayed true to the series. Unfortunately, the terrible matchmaking, the imbalanced multiplayer, and generally weak multiplayer gameplay decisions (Seriously, three teams of two? That is one of your three primary multiplayer modes Ubisoft?) had me trading in this game as soon as I beat the campaign.

The multiplayer can actually be quite enjoyable when the matchmaking works and you play in a room with opponents your level.

Final Thoughts
The campaign was decent – it should be fun for fans of the second game that are eagerly looking for more. The second one is more enjoyable to play due to the deeper storyline and gameplay elements feeling more fresh and exciting. I almost feel like Brotherhood to Assassin’s Creed II is like BioShock 2 to BioShock 1 – not really necessary, new multiplayer that sucks, yet a competent single player for those that still love the series. With Brotherhood’s campaign being quite lengthy (and not always in a good way, I would argue), Assassin’s Creed fans looking for more single player will find Brotherhood worth the purchase just for its single player.

I still can’t help but feel that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood missed several opportunities to be an excellent game. A more captivating story, a more refined “Brotherhood” gameplay system, and a working and balanced multiplayer component would have all made this game more enjoyable. Maybe one year to make a sequel really isn’t enough time. Still, the lengthy campaign carries the game, and there’s enough going on with it that the game overall is worth playing if you aren’t tired of Assassin’s Creed yet.

Final Grade: B

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