Impressions of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

Finished another game in the Assassin's Creed series. It's awesome.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is a continuation of Ezio Auditore's adventures. The new part starts where the previous part ended, in Rome. Most of the game takes place there as well. Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope at the end of the previous part, survived, escaped, and keeps scheming. But not for long: the real focus of the story is his evil son, who wants to conquer all of Italy and does not even obey the pope.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is beautiful and full of bright colors; they refined a lot from the second part. Graphics, gameplay, story, all of it. The game is short: according to Steam, I spent 14 hours on it while playing at a relaxed pace. Compared to the previous parts, that is very little.

The biggest new thing in this part is helpers. In the story Ezio leads the Assassin order and recruits new apprentices. All of Rome is divided into districts, almost all of them taken over by the Templars. Each district can be taken back: you enter the required area, the mission starts, and you need to find the Templar captain and take him out. Some are hard to take down, some need to be handled stealthily or quickly, otherwise they run away and you have to wait until the next attempt. Every captured district gives you the option to recruit one more apprentice assassin. You can point your apprentices at a target and they will quickly eliminate it. If there are many targets, they will dispatch some of them quickly and fight the rest with swords. They can die too.

The apprentices also have progression: the more experience they gain, the stronger and more powerful they become. You can also send them on missions. The stronger the apprentice, the higher the chance of success on missions, which are divided by difficulty. They get experience, level up, and bring in money from those contracts. If you have many apprentices, you can call in an arrow storm, and all targets die quickly, but the apprentice usage bar is fully consumed and you need to wait. Overall it is very cool: you can call them for help or simply tell them to clear the way so you do not waste your own time or get spotted. In missions, if a guard sees you, that is it, alarm and failure. If he sees an apprentice who takes him out, somehow it is not a failure :) And for recruiting new assassins, the mini-missions from the first part returned: save a resident from guards (or simply sic your apprentices on them) and done, a new assassin. All under the pretext of the uprising, the liberation of Rome.

The second cool thing is the tunnel system. Now you do not have to run across the entire city to get to a mission; as you play, you can restore wells like these and use the tunnel system to get where you need quickly. Convenient: you spend more time actually playing and less time running long distances.

There are also lots of battles, and they are cool, fun, and bloody. They added chained finishers: after delivering a fatal blow to one opponent, you can quickly pick another nearby enemy and finish that one right away too. It looks beautiful, spectacular, and bloodthirsty. The finishing moves became more varied too.

There are battle scenes in the story too.

Rome itself is full of cool buildings, but beyond those buildings everything is rather uniform and a bit dull. Though you do come across big temples that you can climb all the way to the dome. It is strange that there is a hole in the dome that lets you climb into the temple. Either there was some repair work in the plan, or it never rains in medieval Rome.

The story is awesome. The game is short, but very dense, and you can binge the story without getting distracted by side tasks like buying shops for profit. Assassins versus Templars, a new turn in the conflict. They even mixed in the French. On top of that, it gives you the full spread of mission types: mass battles, stealth, and much more. There are repetitions too: in the second part there was Altair's armor. To get it, you had to gather all the keys, and each key was obtained by climbing around temples and catacombs, a kind of puzzle. Here it is the same, only now it is the Armor of Romulus. I decided not to spend time on that and just play the story. The story does not let go, and the graphics became much better, especially Ezio, who is drawn very well, so it is pleasant both to play and to watch. Now I understand why fans of the series praise the Ezio parts the most.

The modern-day story follows the same direction as in the second part: the assassins are on the run, looking for refuge, digging further into Desmond's ancestors' memories to find artifacts. One of the refuges is the ruined villa where Ezio himself once lived.

What is strange is that in the story the Templars wrecked the villa many centuries ago, and it has apparently stood untouched ever since. That is odd. And nobody ever discovered the underground passages in it either. But you have to crawl through those passages while playing as Desmond.

So that is one very cool game. It is basically just a continuation of the second part, but a very cool one and perhaps more interesting than the second. Fixing earlier mistakes and improving what had already been invented, combined with an interesting story.