FTG Review: Assassin's Creed; Brotherhood

The campaign in and of itself would be worth the price, with the 20 hour campaign and the few tweaks made, but Ubisoft went and added a multiplayer to the game. The multiplayer concept in Brotherhood will be a new concept to most multiplayer gamers, with its slowed down and calculated multiplayer.

There game modes:

Wanted: Kind of like Free for All in a first person shooter, up to eight people are placed on a section with in an Italian city like Rome or Florence. When the match starts each player is giving a target to hunt, while another player is hunting them. The concept is to be stealthy and kill your target with out them knowing it was you. Of course you could go on a rampage and just run around recklessly getting kills, but you will most likely place poorly. You receive more points for the kill if you stay incognito than if your target figured out who you are. If you are the hunter, you are provided with a compass that helps in guiding you to your target and lights up when you get close to them, but don’t worry it doesn’t tell you who the person is it just gets you in the vicinity, you will still have to make the decision on who id the right target.

Advanced wanted: Much like Wanted, but the compass doesn’t give you the elevation of your target like it does in standard wanted mode.

Alliance: Same concept of Wanted, but this time you are separated into three teams of two and each team is giving a target, and your points combine for a team score.

Manhunt: Manhunt is the equivalent of Team Death Match, with two teams of four each trying to take out the other team.

When I first heard of the multiplayer concept, I was a little skeptical on how fun it would be to slowly walk around a map looking for one target at a time (Editor’s Note: And who wasn’t skeptical about the idea of an Assassin’s Creed multiplayer?). What I soon realized is that it is extremely fun and engaging. The matches are intense in the fact that while you are hunting someone is in return hunting you. Nothing made more exited as when I found my target and he did not notice me and I walked up and stuck my blade through his neck, but it worked to the opposite when it happened to me, on several occasions it startled me when I got stuck out of nowhere. Along with the players, the map is filled with NPCs (non-playable characters) that look identical to the players on the map, so choose wisely on who is your target, because if you hit an NPC your hunt is over and you get a new target. It is satisfying though when the person hunting you hits the NPC right next to you, and you get to walk away laughing.

Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood bring a fresh new outlook to the multiplayer experience that many will find fun and immensely competitive; even a die hard Call of Duty fan like myself has found it more enjoyable than playing the Black Ops multi-player. Only time will tell though if it has the staying power of the quick twitch action found in Call of Duty.

Overall the game brings the same solid concept found in the first to iterations of the series with a few tweaks here and there, and the addition of a solid multiplayer. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood should be on most hardcore gamers Christmas list this year.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood receives A 9.5 out of 10