Review: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 22 June 2016

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (3 of 5)

ACB is not a bad game.  But it mostly just adds busy work.

The traversal mechanics are the same.  They're just as boring when you're scaling the umpteenth tower.  And they're just as frustrating when the character does things that make no sense, wasting the player's time.

The combat is mostly the same.  It seems easier, but it's been long enough that maybe I just forgot.  They add a bunch of weapons and tools you don't really need.

The main addition to the combat is the ability to call in trainee assassins with a single button press.  I didn't need it much, so I didn't use it much.  But a couple times when I was trying to tail or chase down a target and just needed some guards out of the way, it was pretty cool to be able to have my recruits jump them and get back to the task at hand.  It was less cool when they wouldn't despawn and I had to revert to an earlier checkpoint, but open world games are always janky.

They were also one of the sources of busy work as they needed to be sent on missions every ten minutes or so to get enough XP to level up.  As idle / incremental games go, it was pretty bare bones.  But I still became kind of attached, trying to make sure I didn't give my first two assassins (Paulo AKA Grape Face and Carlotta AKA Blondie) too many babysitting missions and being happy to see them kicking butt when called into to main game.

The other main source of busy work was the economy.  Buy businesses to get an income to buy more businesses.  Invest in businesses you already own to potentially make money but also to earn trade goods which you otherwise only get out of chests and off of one enemy type and are required to complete "merchant quests" to get some of the best gear, which you don't really need because the game isn't that hard.  Blah.

And don't take my statement that the game isn't hard to mean I want it harder.  My character often didn't respond as he should in combat, so harder combat would only add frustration.

To sum up, recruits were kind of cool.  The rest of the game was a dish twice reheated with a side of busy work.