toblix

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Recommended Posts

It's bound to happen with a series that has been so popular and prolific, but i can't imagine playing these games out of order, with how weird and nested the mythology for the series is becoming.

Of course, if you don't care about the story, that's not an issue.

Personally though, i've been pretty into it, and it's an interesting experiment if nothing else, to see such heavily serialized story-telling in what has become such an enormous franchise.

It's kind of the Lost of video games.

Yea, I could care less about the Desmond story. Slightly less so with Ezio. I just enjoy the open world stealthy stuff.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If that's the case I definitely recommend you get AC2. I've been playing Brotherhood and am really enjoying it, but I do think AC2 has the edge.

The main reason is like I'm sure we've mentioned a million times in this thread now, Brotherhood takes place in a single city whereas AC2 features a good half dozen such as Venice, Florence, and even a small part of Rome. While Brotherhood does a very good job of giving Rome's districts a unique character, it really doesn't compare to AC2's completely separate cities which are all extremely distinctive and feel totally different to one another.

With that said, Brotherhood's Rome is denser when it comes to things to do so it's not like there's less gameplay — it just feels better having a more expansive amount of space to explore rather than being confined to a single city.

So far I also prefer AC2's story, which seemed more focused. Brotherhood's is a bit more all over the place, with a lot of overlapping and reliance on having playing AC2 to recognise characters and their motives. Also I think the fact the story is intertwined with several cities again works well and carries it better.

Basically AC2 and Brotherhood are blood brothers, to the point where Brotherhood essentially feels like an expansion to AC2 rather than a game of its own. So rest assured, whatever issues you had with AC1 almost certainly aren't in the superb AC2. :tup:

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Unless your issue was "FUCK! I wanted you to walk along that damn cable, not jump off the roof three inches to the left of it and fall 5 stories! I fucking hate you, directional controls!" That's still there, and seems to be just something that has to be tolerated from the series at this point. As much as I love all things AC (hell, I replayed 1 in November and still thought it was rad) that is goddamned infuriating.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Unless your issue was "FUCK! I wanted you to walk along that damn cable, not jump off the roof three inches to the left of it and fall 5 stories! I fucking hate you, directional controls!" That's still there, and seems to be just something that has to be tolerated from the series at this point. As much as I love all things AC (hell, I replayed 1 in November and still thought it was rad) that is goddamned infuriating.

I had a lot of trouble with that at first, but after playing three of these games, i find it doesn't really happen to me anymore.

The biggest hurdle to overcome was realizing that i didn't need to sprint all the time. You can still run plenty fast outside of the free-running sprint, and you won't have the contextual free-running making you do random things you didn't want do.

Sprint only when you want to free-run, when you know where you want to free-run, and it all kind of clicks into place.

As a random aside, I have to say, i'm fairly impressed that these games have become as popular as they are, because they don't strike me as very accessible games. (In fact, i've watched people struggle with them.) I mean, they're great, absolutely great games, but they're also convoluted as shit. Step back and think about all the layers of contextual control going on there, it's a little bit insane. Combine that with the weird nested, serialized narrative, and i don't really understand how these games have done as well as they have.

The power of marketing, i guess? The marketing for the games has been very good. Or the promise of being a sick medieval assassin is just that powerful. Or both. Probably both.

It's easy to forget how completely strange and risky that first game seemed.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Weird that this thread has activity just now; coincidentally I got to borrow a friend's copy recently. The white matrix wall of "you can't go here yet" is really pissing me off. I just want to take out Borgia towers and play monopoly, why cap the amount of that I can do without progressing the story?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Weird that this thread has activity just now; coincidentally I got to borrow a friend's copy recently. The white matrix wall of "you can't go here yet" is really pissing me off. I just want to take out Borgia towers and play monopoly, why cap the amount of that I can do without progressing the story?

It's extra annoying because the amount of time between having access to the full map and ending up locked into the end-game phase is fairly short, and the point of no return isn't super, super clear. The game dumps you back into a post-game free-roam after the credits have rolled, but... egh.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now