‘Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’ Flick Through Review - More of the same, now with Real Estate

I played another Assassin’s Creed game. I’ve made it my quest to battle through the whole messy series - although it will have to sit beside all my other self-inflicted quests. Kingdom Hearts, reading through everything Stephen King ever wrote. I don’t make my hobbies very fun for myself any more, do I?

Anyway, last we left off with Assassin’s Creed was the second game in the series which I genuinely really enjoyed. The narrative felt like it moved at breakneck speed, the parkour felt smooth and natural and the combat was simple - if a little basic. To buy into the meme, I felt like an assassin. I was along for the ride with the Desmond side of the plot as well.

Then Brotherhood appears on the scene. Releasing in 2010, just one year after Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood uses its predecessor as a jumping off point. Ezio is in Rome. The last game saw him acquiring the Apple of Eden, a relic from a super powerful race of divines who speak to Desmond through the Animus. We start with him choosing to stay his blade and escaping with the Apple only to have the beautiful manor that I spent hours upgrading in the previous game exploded by the Borgias. A full assault on their stronghold sets us back and lets us begin all over. Sure thing.

And then we get to Desmond and the nothing plot going on over there. The current assassin movement are hiding in the modern day building site that was once Ezio’s stronghold. Underground, they let Desmond trawl through Ezio’s memories to find out where the Apple of Eden ended up. The Templars are after them. Desmond has started to see the apparitions of his ancestors’ memories, as well as slowly inheriting their abilities. He is losing his mind - the others in his little band of rebels make it clear they know that this is a danger but this concern is never really given a chance to breathe. The player gets told about it and things continue as usual.

Ezio sprints around Rome and becomes a landlord, an addition that was a little strange at first. Instead of building up a manor, Ezio rebuilds the city of Rome that has fallen into disrepair under Borgia control. While a little offputting, and given no room to breathe or explained in the slightest, this suits Ezio. He becomes a hero of the people not just by occasionally killing a bourgeois official who is corrupting the city but by investing in the people and helping to add new doctors, tailors and blacksmiths to each region of the map. And the killing officials thing too. It’s a two-pronged approach to revolution.

Revolution is an appropriate word here. Ezio burns down towers on a rage-filled quest for vengeance and builds up an army of willing recruits who join the ranks of a new ‘Brotherhood’ (get it?) and who can be sent off to accumulate wealth or called into battle to tip the scales in our favour. This starts as a small tool in Ezio’s arsenal but I quickly decided not to use it as it became so insanely powerful to call in five allies who just cleave through any kind of difficulty that I was getting a lot less out of the game. I was a little grumpy about it, so I went and bought the Colosseum in a moment of rage. And this starts to invite some questions.

Ezio seems to have won the battle on the streets of Rome far before the ending, and I wasn’t even going through all of the side content. I had enough money to own whole districts, along with their monuments, aqueducts and shops. Where in the two previous games all of the little extras across the map felt as if they blended with the narrative satisfyingly (except the silly feathers, no I didn’t get them all, yes I will be eternally frustrated), here the only good side missions are the unique stealth ones for Leonardo Da Vinci where Ezio steals a war machine and gets a chance to use it against the Borgia troops. Some of the weird hideouts were fun, but this feels like cobbled-together assets. Looking at the total of the content here, it actually feels like a few extra missions for Assassin's Creed II that are packaged with a bunch of copy-and-paste stuff to make it worth the price tag and have a run time that matches the player's expectations. But the story behind those missions, whether through the memory haze storytelling device or genuinely poor writing, seems to have no pace. Ezio arrives in Rome and decides to cause an uprising, struggles against the overwhelming odds for a few moments and then commands a massive army, owns every tavern and brothel in the city and can complete the final mission using an excessive amount of tools. Crossbows, guns, and poison darts all make an appearance and it starts to confuse the overall feel that I enjoyed so much in the previous title.

I know that Brotherhood is the one that everyone likes. I had a good time, all in all. But the cracks are starting to show. People complained that the series became very samey and I’ve already started to feel the strain of trying to release a whole game in such a short time. The Ezio story wraps up quickly, after letting players wield the Apple of Eden - I didn’t realise how situational and underwhelming an extra-dimensional artefact could be. Cesare Borgia gets assassinated, and Ezio’s part is done. Desmond makes his way to a temple and the divine creatures enter his mind to tell him about the future and the coming apocalypse.

Then they take control of him and make him stab his girlfriend. The external plot, the overarching stuff that should really matter, is taking a turn into surreal nothing soup and I’m finding it hard to assume that Revelations will fix the problems I’m noticing. The combat has started to show its flaws and I feel like I even had more issues with precision when free-running across Rome. I shouldn’t be shouting “Why would you do that” at Ezio while I am controlling him.

But let me finish with a little specific discussion about one of the assassination missions. In Sequence 5, right before the story does a nosedive and speeds to the finish, Ezio has to kill the Banker who oversees the Borgia’s money. He surrounds himself with ‘courtesans’ and Ezio has to find his way inside a Pagan party with wine, smoke and nudity. The player has to use their own allied courtesans to wander in and distract guards where possible, or sprint for cover and carefully free-run their way inside. I want to call this something. Open-ended gameplay? Gameplay that encourages a ‘creative approach’? There has to be a term for this.

This is where Assassin’s Creed shines. The strange pieces of history with sleazy characters who indulge themselves at the expense of their people combined with political intrigue. Gameplay that offers a world of possibilities to Ezio. This is why I started on this quest. I hope there will be more of that to come, but the little pieces of it here are more than enough to make this game worth playing. At least worth ticking off the list. Requiescat In Pace, Brotherhood.