Assassin’s Creed® Brotherhood

I came into Brotherhood expecting a polished but safe follow-up to Assassin's Creed II, and what I got instead was something that somehow packs more into a single Roman map than most open-world games manage with three. The moment it clicks, somewhere around the time you're burning a Borgia tower to the ground, calling in a whistle-kill from a recruit you leveled up yourself, and parachuting off the Colosseum without breaking stride, you realise this is a genuinely well-constructed action sandbox. The single-player runs deep. You are Ezio Auditore, older and considerably more lethal than in the previous game, now operating out of Rome with a full Brotherhood at your back. Combat rewards aggression over the passive counter-spam of earlier entries, chain kills flow between enemies smoothly, and the arsenal is solid: hidden blade, daggers, smoke bombs, guns, parachutes for fast escapes. The Assassin Recruit system is genuinely addictive, sending trained agents on contract missions across Europe while you take territory by hunting marked Borgia officers and burning down their towers. Between that, the underground tunnel fast-travel network, the guild challenges, and the property investment loop, the completionist checklist is borderline oppressive in the best way. Playtime can stretch past 30 hours if you engage with all of it. The main story is shorter than AC2's and slightly less memorable for it, and freerunning on the rooftops, while still fluid, shows its age on some of the wider street-level geometry where Ezio occasionally decides to climb a market stall instead of a wall. Those are minor complaints against a very solid package. Now for the part that actually hurts to write: the multiplayer is effectively dead. When it was live, it was one of the most original online modes ever shipped. Eight modes across maps including Florence, Castel Gandolfo, and Rome, all built on a single cat-and-mouse concept where you hunt a target while someone hunts you. NPCs populate the maps dressed identically to player characters, so the whole game became a psychology exercise: move too fast, act too predatory, and your cover breaks. Wanted was the purest version of this, free-for-all, everyone both hunter and prey. Scoring rewarded style over speed, and the progression unlocked new disguises and abilities that shifted your build. Ubisoft shut the official servers down in 2022. A small community is working on private server revival, but that is experimental at best right now, so if multiplayer is why you are here, temper expectations hard. On PC, Brotherhood ships with The Da Vinci Disappearance DLC included, which adds eight single-player missions and extra multiplayer content that was a paid add-on on console. The PC version also dropped the always-online DRM that plagued AC2. Controller support is partial, so if you are playing on mouse and keyboard the right-click secondary action modifier takes a session or two to feel natural, but it is manageable. One firm warning: do not start here. Brotherhood picks up directly from the AC2 ending and assumes you know every character. Without that context you will be lost inside the first hour.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

Be the first to comment on Assassin’s Creed® Brotherhood.