Ah, Roma. Once my grades were done, you have consumed my life.
But that's how I roll, so this is neither a surprise nor a seal of quality.
To sum up: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a third person sandbox parkour simulator where the player (typically an Italian aristro who schmoozes with Da Vinci, but sometimes a kidnapped ninja barkeeper) gets to kill people in Renaissance Rome. Enzio (the aristro, not the barkeep) is a leader in a secret society dedicated to supporting freedom and stopping the Knights Templar from... doing something bad. Whatever the opposite of freedom is? Oppressing? Governing? Being aware of economics?
It's basically irrelevant. They are bad guys, and the game makes certain that you know that, so that you can be the "good" assassin, in an order of good guy assassins. Because, I presume, Assassin's Creed was just too good of a name to pass up.
But is it a good game? I'm going to go with a qualified "yes".
First, the qualified part. I'm very tired of hearing about grand conspiracies that engineered the fall of nations, great events, et cetera. Impassioned young revolutionaries make me wince. This game is full of them. In Assassin's Creed II, that was less of a "thing". Enzio was growing up and becoming an assassin, so the rhetoric tended to stay in the background. Now, he is older, and has learned the lessons of the past, and he talks about them. Constantly. So does everyone else.
Gameplaywise they add some improvements (you get to recruit locals and they are baby assassins who function, in essence, like another weapon). I enjoy the fairly accurate Rome of the 1500s, it feels like a real place. The use of famous pieces of art and real history is fun and appeals to the teacher in me. Solving spotting puzzles based on historical photos and art made me go back and check and see if the Easter eggs are really there (they aren't). Rome is as well crafted as Venice and the other cities were. I compared a map of Rome IRL with the in-game map and they look pretty similar. It looks like it really was a good city to go sprinting across roof-tops.
I'm still on the fence regarding the auto paurkor functions, when running down a hall I often end up trying to climb the walls, which can allow the person I'm trying to pursue escape. At the same time, I only notice it hitching about every hour or so, which mean for every two minutes I spend forcing the camera around and running up the wrong damn wall, I'm spending fifty eight happily leaping about. It's certainly an improvement on Prince of Persia's acrobatic railroad. The mechanics work fairly well to support the sandbox aspects of the game.
While I enjoy rebuilding Rome, the real reason I bought this game was to train up my assassins. The "Brotherhood" in the title is there because Enzio recruits assassins to his cause and uses them as weapons as well as sending them out on missions. They are a fun weapon, and good money generators. I feel the system lacks depth, but that is just because of my love of deep economic sims.
((meta: On my second draft, I decided to take out the bit on video games as art and my own dislike for conspiracy. The new version makes it seem less like a pet peeve and more like the characters are always talking instead of showing. Both are true, the second is more valuable to my imagined readers. I polished up some transitions, though I think I still have a first without a second wandering about in there. I really only had a couple of minutes to work on this, so I left it fairly abrupt, this is so I can find what I'm doing next time))
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