Muddled storyline, repetitive missions and buggy controls ruin a beautiful adventure
More than a year later it was exciting to take on the role of Ezio again, but unfortunately this game soon became a chore for me. I think this is because the game offered more of the same as ACII and didn't carry it off nearly as well.
I play games for an interesting storyline, I am not interested in Multiplayer. ACII had an incredible storyline that kept me on the edge of my seat wanting to find out more about the aeons of struggle between the Templars and Assassins and what this means for the future (or lack of it) of humankind. It had a brilliantly imaginative script and better-written plot than most Hollywood thrillers.
Unfortunately ACB rushes through a muddled storyline that leaves you wondering what the whole point really is. I hated the ending of this game, and not because it left 'unanswered questions', but rather because I found it both contrived and confusing at the same time. ACII leaves you at a perfect cliffhanger point in a story arc, but this game just confuses matters and does not add anything at all.
Aside from the missions concerning Leonardo's War Machines, which are tense, nervous and fun, the missions are repetitive, especially for example, taking out the Borgia captains and burning down their Towers.
I, too had too many problems with the context-sensitivity of the controls shifting at inopportune moments that caused me to fail missions or lose 100% synchronization, especially in the stealth missions.
The graphics do look beautiful again, but are mired by unfortunate glitches in execution animations and cut-scenes that exhibit a lack of attention to detail that just was not evident in ACII.
The 'mini-games' of playing with shop investments, buying buildings for different factions, recruiting new assassins and allocating them contracts felt contrived and meaningless distractions from the main story.
If the developers had paid more attention to storyline and fine-tuning game-play rather than including pages of historical details (who is really going to stop a mission to read 1000 words about some monument), and padding-out with meaningless 'empire building' that is bettered suited to Facebook games like Farm-World, this could have been an incredible game. I await better from them with Revelations.