A disappointing ending brings down an otherwise great game with meaningful changes to the gameplay
Brotherhood sees Ezio move to Rome in an attempt to recover the fabled Apple of Eden from the Borgia's, who at the start of the game invade Monteriggioni and kill his uncle Mario and steal the Apple after our hero retrieved it at the end of the first game, thus begins a lot of wall climbing, assassinating and generally looking cool.
If you have ever played an AC game before, especially Assassins Creed 2, you will feel instantly at home with Brotherhood. The controls, animations and movement all feel exactly the same – and as solid – as previous entries and the ability to pretty much pick up where you left off and have everything be instantly known to you increases the immersion factor ten fold.
There are, of course, some new twists for this entry in the series. Ezio has some new toys at his disposal, such as the infinitely useful crossbow, the interesting but highly underused parachute and poison that is much faster acting. There is also the matter of rebuilding the shattered Rome into something resembling a real city and reopening the blacksmiths, tailors, doctors and art shops scattered throughout the city.
There are a lot of these shops and Rome is surprisingly large, so it can take awhile to open them all. This large also presents the games first problem, in that at the start, there is a little too much to do. A couple of story missions in and a good chunk of Rome is open to free roaming with a lot, and I mean a lot, of secondary things to do and buy and you are given very little context or instruction on what you need to do save for an objective marker on the map.
This can mean you are distracted almost immediately by secondary objectives to accomplish, buildings to buy and shops to open. Admittedly, buying said buildings and shops means your income increases with each new purchase, meaning at some point money becomes no issue at all, a little more focus on the story at the beginning of the title would have made the whole thing feel more cohesive.
On the plus side, the missions are varied and very exciting at times, ranging from using a very early tank prototype, to bombing runs in Leonardo's flying machine to sneaking into the Vatican to rescue a damsel in distress. Your never short of things to do in Brotherhood, especially when that tantalising sub-title comes into play.
Ezio wants to liberate the world from Templar rule, not just free Rome from the clutches of the Borgia's and so after a few story missions the ability to recruit assassins is unlocked and one of the games best features can really take hold of you. Recruiting new assassins is a matter of heading towards the relevant marker on the map and saving a citizen from being attacked by guards. This puts them in your debt and they are recruited to your cause.
More assassins can be recruited by destroying Borgia towers which involves killing the captain stationed there then setting the tower on fire. This really taps into the completionist in us all, as there are only a set number of towers in the game and destroying them really makes you feel like you are winning the war.
Destroyed towers become guild towers, which along with the pigeon coups scattered throughout the city allow you to send your recruits on missions across the globe. Each mission has a different difficulty, but also give XP which levels up your assassins and eventually leads them to become full members of the order.
There are, however, a few problems with this system. The hardest missions, with a five star rating, are simply not worth attempting. Even once your assassins have reached full status, the possibility of success meter for these missions rarely goes above 50% and even then it is not far past this mark. While, yes, they are the hardest missions and should reflect that, all other missions are pretty much always won once the success meter gets above 70%.
This means that it is better to grind out lower level missions with higher rated recruits as you can pretty much guarantee success. If a mission is failed, that assassin is killed, and spending hours training a recruit only to have them killed without fail on the harder missions is just plain annoying.
It can make the process of levelling up your recruits a longer process than it needs to be, but it still works and works well. The recruits, assuming you haven't sent them all out on missions, can help Ezio when playing normally too with a tap or hold of the right bumper calling them to help take down opponents or having to launch a deadly arrow storm which instantly kills any guards around you.
Combat has taken on a new form in that it is much more fluid, in a similar vain to Batman: Arkham Asylum, as a point of the stick and a tap of 'A' will see Ezio flow from one kill to another like the highly trained badass he is supposed to be. It is very cool to watch, though remembering to take your finger off the trigger to get him to do this can be an issue.
The final addition is a change to way synchronization works, as now rather than just finding high towers to look out, each mission comes with a sub-mission that lets you net 100% sync. These can be something like 'complete the mission in less than 8 minutes' to 'only use the hidden blade' to 'use the assassin recruits to kill your target'. It adds a new level of strategy to the game, though can lead to a lot of restarts.
The biggest problem with Brotherhood, unfortunately, is the story. While it is better than nine out of ten games on the market today, AC2's was much better, and Ezio had a much clearer goal and his development was much more understandable. Here, Ezio is at the peak of his abilities, he knows everyone he needs to know to get the job done and the sense of discovery is completely gone.
The bad guys are cool and the sense of brotherhood in Ezio's guild really does show through, but story simply isn't as strong as it could be and the end of the game is hugely lacklustre compared with the brilliant ending of the previous title. Even the stuff set in 2012 with Desmond and his crew cannot revive it, though it does setup some very cool future titles.
In short, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood is an excellent game let down by a few niggling problems. If this is your first stab (see what I did there?) at an AC game, then you will not be disappointed, but series fans may find the story boring. There, however enough changes and improvements to the gameplay to make this the best playing game in the series, and from here, so long as Ubisoft stay on the ball, things can only get better.