Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

spoilers

For those astute readers out there, you may have noticed that I didn’t post anything last week. Of course I assume everyone who reads this blog is astute as well as ridiculously good-looking and beloved by their peers. However, it stands to reason that some of you may be more astute, more beloved by their peers and ridiculously good-lookinger than the rest and I’m going to assume that it was you who realized that I failed to post anything last week. I apologize, but such is the power of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

In case you have never played an entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, they chronicle the timeless struggle between the Templars, a shady group of knights who are hell bent on ruling the world, and the Assassins, who want to enlighten all of the people on Earth. They focus specifically on a man named Desmond. He is forced in the first game and volunteers in the subsequent games to spend time in a super high-tech chair called The Animus. The Animus allows Desmond to access the memories of his ancestors through his DNA. Desmond was selected because his family dealt with a device called a Piece of Eden which everyone wants to get because it could turn the tide of the war. This is the very, very abridged version of the story, but I don’t need this post to become a book.

What is really cool about these games are how they meld historical settings with a science fiction narrative. Most of the time spent in these games are in the past, reliving the memories of Desmond’s relatives. The first game dealt with the crusades while the newest games, including Brotherhood, have been set in Renaissance Italy. Ubisoft has used this opportunity to tie together many different historical figures and locations into a rich mythos along the lines of a Dan Brown novel. It seems everyone in history was either a Templar or an Assassin, including Leonardo da Vinci and Nicco Machiavelli.

Now, I am not trying to make up excuses, but the Assassin’s Creed games more than any other series can get me to do side quests. I am generally not a completionist (Bioware excluded) but these games have such compelling side content that it’s difficult not to try and beat it all. In this game, I realized it was going to be impossible way too late. I decided I was going to beat it today, no matter how many puzzles I skipped and I did, though slightly to my chagrin. So I admit that I only beat the main story of this game and never even touched the multiplayer. It was simply too large for one week (combined with school and a somewhat lost weekend especially.)

Moving on from my hack excuses, Brotherhood has certainly lived up to the pace and expectations set by previous titles. It is a polished, compelling game which builds on what the previous installments have created. The game is set almost exclusively in Rome (with the exception of some fantastic commando sequences,) which really grounded the experience. While the different environments were well-made before, it was sometimes easy to forget exactly where you were and some of the environments felt more polished and thought-out than the others. With Rome, everything feels right and like the developers really got every detail down. In conjunction with a fleshed-out, Renaissance Roma is a near-future Monteriggioni where Desmond and his Assassin friends are using the Animus. In previous games, you only left the Animus at predetermined times. Hell, I don't even remember if you could leave the Animus at all in the second one. In Brotherhood, you can leave the Animus at anytime, forging a much stronger bond to the present-day characters. Before this game, it was easy to forget that you weren't really playing as Altair or Ezio, but as Desmond controlling these characters. Now, you know exactly who you are.

The fighting system has been improved somewhat. Though everything feels essentially the same, Ubisoft has added a kill streak system. Though sharing the same name, this is nothing like Call of Duty's kill streaks. All this means is that, if you kill an NPC and then instantly start slashing at another, it will be an instant kill. This can continue as long as you don't get hit and there is another NPC to target. Its a minor change, but it makes the fighting a little more fluid. New weapons have also been added and some refined, like the pistol. None of it is particularly special, though I really enjoyed the crossbow. With its silent bolts, it quickly and quietly got me out of some sticky situations.

Other aspects of the previous game have returned. The building improvement from the last game has been brought back though to a much bigger scale. Instead of fixing up a small castle town, you are improving Rome herself. However, while the sheer size of the task was impressive and the fact that you could buy the Colosseum was really cool, the fact that the buildings didn't change (unless it was a shop) was something of a letdown. When I saw that you could buy landmarks, I was hoping for some kind of change to it. Instead, it just added slightly more money to your revenue stream. I didn't feel like I was improving anything. Subject 16's puzzles, one of my favorite and least favorite parts of the last game, have made a comeback and I love them and hate them for all of the same reasons. Though the puzzles I got to were as fun and challenging as last time, the search for the way to activate them was as annoying as ever. Major landmarks are not marked on the map, so finding the buildings with the glowing hole thingy (no more glyphs) that start it were annoying. I couldn't even do the puzzle because of how time consuming and frustrating it was to actually start the puzzles.

Speaking of frustrating, the controls still need tweaking. While I love the parkour aspect of the game and it is one of the things that makes the series unique, I found myself yelling out in frustration more times than I or my girlfriend would like because Ezio jumped in a weird direction that made no sense while in free-running mode. Nothing is more annoying than accidentally jumping off of a bridge into a canyon mid-mission and being forced to start that mission over. Another thing I didn't particularly enjoy and what really stretched out my time was a new 100% synch with missions. There are secondary objectives with almost every mission now which contribute to unlocking repressed memories that Ezio has about his ex-girlfriend you see for two seconds in the opening sex sequence in the Assassin's Creed 2. I didn't really care about these sequences but, again, this game series has a habit of making me want to unlock everything, so every time I didn't get a 100% synch I wanted to tear my hair out. It was all very frustrating.

These gripes are not an enjoyment killer though. Maybe it was for me, but I had some time constraints (which I ignored but whatever.) The truth is that this is the best entry in a great series of video game that is only getting better. I respect this series for its interesting narrative and its platforming roots so much that I can overlook its annoying control issues. More than that, even, I think I respect these games and Brotherhood in particular because of what it does for games as a medium. Video games are traditionally not particularly reflexive. They're referential, for sure, but they don't really reflect in any significant way on what games are. Assassin's Creed is, in essence, a game about games. Desmond is playing his ancestors through a device which is very different and yet not so different from a video game console. He loses himself in this time and place and has to complete certain objectives or else he loses. That's a video game. Really, the Assassin's Creed games are structured so that you are playing as a man who is playing a video game. Though it doesn't really go much deeper than that and avoids a lot of issues that I personally have with where video games are now, it is a step in the right direction to simply raise those questions of control and ask the question, even in broad strokes, of what is a video game. I think this needs to happen a lot more if we are to advance this medium into a real artform. This is something I will probably get into more detail with soon. I kind of rushed this review but really what is there to say? This is another great historical sci-fi genre bender that keeps upping the ante and i didn't even get to finish the Subject 16 puzzles because of various distractions and time constraints. Go buy it and find out for yourself.