Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - When In Rome

Released just a year after Assassin's Creed 2, in 2010, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood has been aptly described as Assassin's Creed 2.5 ever since it came out. While that's a fair moniker, keep in mind that this is still a full fledged game. Where I spent 37 hours in Assassin's Creed 2, I spent 31 in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, having finished the main stories and all of the side missions in each game. Brotherhood continues the story of Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, the charismatic assassin who spent the last game avenging the execution of his father and brothers, dismantling a Templar conspiracy, and retrieving the Apple of Eden. At the end of the last game Ezio made a fateful decision not to kill Rodrigo Borgia, the head Templar and also Pope Alexander VI, only besting him physically before taking the apple and entering an ancient temple.

This game begins where the last game left off, with Ezio reeling from the odd visions presented to him in the temple and escaping the Vatican. He returns to Monterrigioni, his villa, which is attacked only days later by Cesare Borgia, the Pope's son, as he campaigns through Tuscany and Romagna. Cesare steals back the Apple, kidnaps Ezio's love interest Caterina Sforza (also in the last game), and leaves Ezio wounded and unconscious, his uncle Mario dead, and Monterrigioni in ruins. If you thought all that was getting a little complicated, we also catch up on the modern day, where Desmond and gang just escaped a Templar attack on their base and drive to modern-day Monterrigioni, now a historical site and small village, where they set up the Animus in Ezio's old sanctum.

It's in this early section you actually get to play Desmond as a full fledged character for the first time in the series, free-running through the ruins of Monterrigioni, finding a way into the Assassin's sanctum, and bonding with Lucy along the way. I really appreciated all of this, I think the modern day presents an interesting story and I like the way they tie it to events hundreds of years before in the Renaissance. The more active role Desmond takes in this game was one of the first things that impressed me, and the modern day sections felt much more interesting than in prior games.

The game really starts when you wake up in Borgia (read:Templar) controlled Rome around 1501 and begin exploring the city. Rome is the only fully explorable city in this game, as opposed to the five cities (really only two big ones though - Florence and Venice) presented in Assassin's Creed 2. While Rome is significantly larger than any of the cities in Assassin's Creed 2, and it has its moments (I especially enjoyed this game's rendering of the Colosseum) of awe and discovery, I felt like it was less impressive than either Florence or Venice in the previous game. I think this probably has something to do with a reality of the time, Rome was still struggling from a couple rough centuries and wouldn't really begin to be restored until later in the first half of the 1500s by a little known artist known as Michelangelo (among other architects and artists - but Michelangelo was responsible for an impressive number of restorative projects). Nevertheless, it stuck out to me.

That point being made, Rome is still an extremely impressive feat of open world design by Ubisoft Montreal. The massive number of NPCs in the city make the city feel lived-in, the availability of horses and fast travel points make the large map very navigable, each section of the city feels distinct and real, and the addition as in the previous game of information pop-ups addressing major landmarks and geographic sites help make everything feel grounded in the actual history of the city. Rome is an ancient city of great importance to the Western world, and it truly feels like it. I greatly enjoyed the time I spent clambering over Rome's rooftops, ruined temples, aqueducts, and cathedrals, and while I contend that Venice and Florence were more impressive cities, I think I probably had more fun with Rome overall.

To make a point that goes down sort of the same track, this game feels much more limited in scope than the previous game. It takes place over only a handful of actual historical years (1501-1503 as far as I could tell, skipping ahead to 1507 at the end of the game) and includes a lot less meat to the ain story than Assassin's Creed 2 does. The number of actual main character assassinations are limited to single digits, whereas I felt like I was assassinating a new major character every sequence in Assassin's Creed 2. There are less sequences, and the story is more straightforward. There were still impressive setpieces and missions - the first infiltration of the Castel Sant'Angelo particularly comes to mind - but overall this game does less in the way of story and epic storytelling than Assassin's Creed 2 did.

While the main story flags somewhat, the side missions are what really make this game shine. And while in previous games the side missions felt somewhat detached from the main story, in this game it feels like everything funnels into the main goal - defeating the Borgia in Rome. There are a series of missions revolving around Thieves, Courtesans, and Mercenaries which explore a number of different gameplay scenarios and challenges and feel fresh throughout, offering a variety that is genuinely impressive for a game that is basically just free-running, fighting, and tailing. There are also the Leonardo missions, missions undertaken for Leonardo Da Vinci to destroy a number of war machines he's built for the Borgia army. There are four of these missions, and each one feels fun, challenging, and ends with an exciting setpiece moment wherein you get to use the machine. There's a series of memories which flashback to moments in Assassin's Creed 2 in which Ezio is newly revealed to have come across Cristina, his love interest from the very beginning of the game. These memories are bittersweet and have a tragic ending, and explore a character I had hoped to see more of throughout the entire last game, so I really appreciated them. Genuinely some of the best writing in the game.

Then there are the Romulus Lairs, this game's versions of the Assassin Tombs from Assassin's Creed 2. While the Assassin Tombs in the previous games were cool and offered some interesting platforming challenges and opportunities to explore landmarks, the Romulus Lairs in Brotherhood are absolutely awesome. They explore a cult of Romulus worshipers being paid by the Borgia to terrorize the populace of Rome and generally do Borgia dirty work. Each one is set in a Roman historical ruin, like under the Colosseum, buried Temples, or in the Pope's burned down residence. They offer lengthy, sometimes challenging, and always interesting puzzle challenges, as well as some fun fights and a couple cool gameplay sequences. And they end with the Romulus armor award, which just looks cool as hell and makes you feel like an avenging angel straight out of ancient Rome. I loved the Romulus lairs, and ended up wishing for more of them.

The game has an economic element which is basically a scaled up version of renovating Monterrigioni in the previous game. I don't really have much to say about this. It was fine, it offered a little bit more for someone who likes to check off boxes on the map, and it gave me something to do with all the money I was collecting. But it felt mostly unnecessary, and I found it really weird how lopsided the rewards were. Purchasing a shop for about a thousand currency could net me hundreds every real-life twenty minutes, but purchasing a landmark for tens of thousands of currency netted me only like 40-50 currency each twenty minute period? Truly weird. The coolest thing about this was the one viewpoint you can only access by renovating an aqueduct, but other than that I wasn't particularly interested, though I did 100% Rome's renovations just for the sake of it.

Of course, this is an Ubisoft game, and an Assassin's Creed, so there are towers and outposts to deal with. The game features a number of Borgia towers that are basically big Borgia outposts scattered across the map. You get near one, assassinate the Captain in charge, then climb the Borgia tower and burn it down. Some were harder, some were easier, but I don't think most of them were particularly interested and mostly it was an annoyance clearing them out so I could unlock the viewpoints they protected. It was particularly annoying that some of them were locked behind sequences early on, so I couldn't go ahead and clear them out before progressing to a certain point in the main story.

Once the Borgia towers were cleared out, the game allows you to begin recruiting assassins. This was cool, and I liked the ability to call upon assassins in combat or missions, which helped get me out of some hairy situations, and stealth some missions that would have otherwise been much more difficult. You can also send your assassins on contracts across the European world. The contracts seem to have a sort of overarching story, or at least were an interesting minigame wherein you take the Templars on across the continent, but they didn't really hold my interest as much as perhaps the developers hoped. I don't think I maxed out any of my assassins. I did like the little homage to the first Assassin's Creed wherein the way you recruit assassins is by accomplishing a much more limited number of 'save citizen' missions.

Once I'd finally cleared all the side missions, annihilated the Borgia towers, renovated Rome, retrieved the Romulus armor set, built a new Brotherhood of Assassins, and assassinated a few key players in the Borgia leadership, it was time to go after the Pope and his son Cesare one final time. One person I haven't mentioned yet is Lucrezia Borgia, the Pope's daughter and Cesare's love interest (you figure that one out for yourself), who is well animated and voiced but generally isn't critically important to main events (it would have been satisfying to kill her after watching her torture Caterina Sforza, but I don't think Ezio kills women). You watch Cesare kill his father, beat Cesare to the apple of Eden, and steal it back for yourself, using it in a sequence of missions to kill Cesare's soldiers, alienate him from the Cardinals and the Roman military, and force his arrest. Then, several years later after some Navarrese noble (we're on the Spanish-French border here, for those of you who don't play too many Paradox games) lets him out to lay siege to the fortress of Viana, Ezio fights his way through the Battlefield to kill Cesare personally. Roll credits.

But wait! Credits do not roll. Instead we get another awesome segment with Desmond where we figure out that Ezio hid the apple of eden in an ancient temple somewhere under Rome. We get a cool section where Desmond parkours through the modern ruins of the Colosseum, explore the modern Basilica Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, which was allegedly built over the ancient Temple of Juno, and access that very same Temple of Juno after some truly weird visions. Desmond appears to be communicating with messages left behind by some sort of precursor race, the same one which warned Ezio at the end of Assassin's Creed 2 of an upcoming disaster that Desmond had to deal with. These messages seem to only be accessible to people with Eagle Vision, like Ezio and Desmond. After a sort of annoying final puzzle, Desmond and gang uncover the apple of Eden, which forces Desmond to kill Lucy. Roll credits. What the fuck?

Revelations better have some answers for me. Overall, this game was a lot like Assassin's Creed 2, and that's a good thing. The main story is a bit more limited in scope, as is the open world, but that's made up for by some great side content and modern day segments which include a lot more interactivity. Brotherhood moves the overall story forward, although without providing much more in the way of answers, and reinforces my connection with both Desmond and Ezio as characters, along with many of the supporting characters like Lucy, Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Ezio's sister Claudia. It didn't feel like a chore at any point while I was playing it, which can sometimes be a downfall of open world games, and generally solidified my enjoyment of this series so far. So I give it the same rating as Assassin's Creed 2, 4.5/5.