Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, First thoughts from the Fellows

Aug 27, 2010

Goodmorrow! ‘tis time for more First thoughts from the fellows, this time I shall let Mr Beans Mackenzie take the lead, take it away sire!

Tom’s thoughts:
When we first noticed the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood area I’m pretty sure we nearly pissed ourselves with excitement. Both Steve and I just couldn’t wait to see what was inside the closed off area and hopefully get hands on with the game. But then we noticed the queue, and by golly it was long, and not only that but people were also sitting down. This was a clear sign that if we wanted to get in there with the game we needed to wait a considerable time. Thankfully the next morning we managed to get in before the riff-raff and get in near the front. Thank God for press-passes. So in we went expecting nothing more than a trailer or two and so we perched our bums on the stool things and watched the demo. As soon as the guy started rabbling in German me and Steve looked at each other and thought “Oh God, what the hell do we do?” We kept with it none the less and watched the screen.

The first trailer was a played run-through of the attack on Ezio’s villa, similar to trailers seen on the internet. The demo showed off a wee bit of horse riding and some cannon firing on the battlements, all of which is just fine, but nothing too special. Then a bit of combat occurred, which was as smooth and well designed as you like, pretty much what we expect from an Assassin’s Creed title. After this another gameplay trailer popped up. A previously unseen trailer I believe. This trailer showed the use of commanding your fellow assassin’s in order to eliminate potential threats. At one point the assassin’s and Ezio synchronized their attacks, which was very impressive indeed. If this whole command mechanic works as good as it seemed then there sure is tons of fun to be had in single player.

And so the trailers/demos were over. I looked to Steve and said “Well that was awesome” and of course he agreed. Expecting to be hustled out for the next group we left the darkened room. Once we emerged we noticed consoles, controllers and the man went “now you can try the multiplayer“. My God we were amazed. So me and Steve grabbed some consoles and got playing. Of course it was in German, so actually starting the game was rather tricky, along with learning the controls and figuring out what to do. We both chose our characters form the selection (me being the hooded Butcher type guy and Steve being an Ezio-esque character). We also got to choose special abilities which allow for different tactics when it comes to hiding and assassinating. We were soon told that we had to hunt down another player, with the vicinity to that player being indicated by the radar at the bottom. Not long after that we realised that not only we were we meant to kill, but also other players in the room were tasked to eliminate us. There were a couple of adrenaline filled points where I had about two enemies following me whilst I pushed through crowds and scurried over rooftops to try and find some sort of hiding spot.

This game type was amazing. It was honestly one of the best multiplayer experiences I have had, despite it being only for a few minutes. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood offers a completely fresh multiplayer experience. The whole hunt and be hunted element leads to some frantic moments to beat opponents to your target whilst trying to avoid assassination yourself. I really enjoyed the whole experience and am incredibly impressed by what this game has to offer. Definitely one to look out for!

Steve’s thoughts:
Much like Tom mentioned, I was fixed with a dropped jaw expression when the bloke in the booth started wagging his face in German. “Noooo, I wanted to know about this game but now I’ll know nothing!” is what I believe I said as I raised my neck as high as I could, blocking the view of the chap who spent 465 years on New Vegas who happened to be behind us. Yes I did that on purpose, childish maybe, but he irritated me…

ANYWAY! The game intro they showed was pretty grand I must say. Controlling cannons to take down the enemy army’s… um… moving tower wotsits, was a very cool thing to watch. It looked kind of easy to aim but to be honest, that guy behind the little desk had probably done that bit of gameplay a few hundred times by then, so if he missed it would’ve been a tad embarrassing for him.
Once that cannon bit was done with he moved onto combat and my god it was so fluid, I didn’t think a man stabbing another man in the chest could be like art but Ezio glided from kill to kill with waltz like rhythm and it was somewhat mesmerising. Granted, I will probably get a sword to the face 8 times when I try that but ignore that. Another great thing I noticed was when he was fighting the Brutes, I hate those things, making my counters not count! *Shakes fist* He disarmed one of the Brutes and killed him quite… BRUTEally – HAHAHAHAHAHAJKGJUFYIERr5y – *cough* After he did this, I watched him aim at the other one and swing the controller downward in a sharp motion, this made Ezio throw the axe right into the face of the other guy, very very very tasty and I am so looking forward to teaching those guys a lesson.

As for the other piece of gameplay, it looked easy to pull of these great group assassinations with the help of this brotherhood. It was actually very funny to watch at first because Ezio gives a little whistle and then an assassin comes from nowhere and eliminates the target. After a few minutes though, you realise that this is exactly what you needed when you were on one of those missions where there were so many guards around, that all you could do was attract the attention of them all and just hope you could jump on the target before you were hit. It should make it so much easier to actually pull off the perfect silent assassination.

As we left the cinema area and saw that we were able to play the multiplayer, my face probably regressed to when I was a child receiving my Power Rangers Megazord for Christmas, I was over the chuffing Moon! I won’t dither on about the details because Tom has explained most of it, but basically I chose whoever looked the coolest and then I pressed X again on an ability loadout that I didn’t really want, but I had no idea what I was doing because it was in German. Never the less I ended up with a black and red assassin with a smoke bomb and the ability to blend, blending did zero but the smoke bomb got me out of a few sticky situations.

I spent the first few minutes of gameplay not knowing how to run because in the second game its RT/R2 but here its RB/R1, so yeah that was embarrassing. However once I knew what I was doing I was a killing machine, honestly! In the end, Tom and I topped the scores as first and second… I was second because SOMEONE pounced on me before I was about to make a decent kill, TOM… No hard feelings though eh. *Dramatic music*

All in all, this game will be epic and another sure purchase for me because I would buy it just for the multiplayer, seriously.