Heretical Review: Assassins Creed: Brotherhood

I wasn't sure if I should let myself calm down or not before I posted this review, because if I write this while this angry, my opinions will be slightly skewed. But fuck it, life isn't interesting without a bit of emotion.

Now, a week ago when I got Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, I was thinking, hmm, if it's worth thinking about much I might write a blog review of this. Turns out, it was so far down the other end of the spectrum that I can't gush out praise for it, but instead will vomit bucket-loads of vitriol, because ARGH*)(^&$%$%&^*&^&(^*^&!!!!” God damn this game. Okay, so it's no Dark Souls; that's genuinely hard. This is just irritating and, frankly, not rewarding enough to warrant the effort required to finish. A lot of people will point out that I'm a PC gamer and that I was probably playing with a keyboard, and you'd be right, I was. I refuse to play a game on PC with a controller, because (seeing as how the keyboard is the dominant interface on the PC) if you're going to port a game to one, you bloody well better make it work with a f*cking keyboard.

I was really looking forward to this after Assassins Creed 2, which I loved even though it didn't handle all that much better. It did the same clever trick of luring you in with the simple, flowing agility of Ezio before crowding your fun out with clunky new mechanics that, yes, add layers to the game, but then also proceed to smother you with them.

No amount of PC-rubbishing can explain away this or the piss-poor ending to Ezio's contribution to the plot. It's spoiler time people, but if you haven't played the game already you probably never will, so listen up.

The password was seventy two.

Not forty two, no, but still bloody English. In an alien temple. Buried under Rome. It was a mystery built up from the beginning of the game and then blurted out in some incomprehensible anticlimactic burble by the annoying British guy.

We came to that part very suddenly in the last hour because Ubisoft seemingly got bored of making the game and decided to accelerate you through a gloopy narrative mess that leaps from place to place, mission to mission, entirely robbing you of the sandbox experience that gives the game its freedom. Oh, and during this locked-out linear final hour of game play, I was STILL getting reports that new missions were available. Was I given the chance to abandon memory and try them? No, so I have no idea how Ezio's pointless flashbacks within flashbacks with a generic female character played out. Badly, I suspect/hope. I can't blame the creators for this, as it reeks of money-men pushing for a quick release.

You will notice that most of my complaints revolve around this section, all of them in fact, because the game is still built on a solid concept which it takes full advantage of, bringing back many well-known elements from both of the previous two games, and adds the new dynamic of the Brotherhood – your own trained assassins. Not to mention the multiplayer, which is exquisite. However, to quote Yahtzee (and yes I went to grab this directly from the Borderlands video on Zero Punc): “A great game must be able to stand up on single player alone”, so for the purposes of my venom I am going to conveniently ignore it.

By the time I'd finished with Ezio and returned to the real world with Desmond and co I was just waiting for the game to end and growing more and more frustrated as Desmond (apparently so inexperienced with his manic jumping abilities that he pays even less attention to the direction of the arrow keys than Ezio) leapt off walls at ridiculous tangents that were nowhere near where I was telling him to go. All this did was lengthen the game and draw out my rage.

In the end I didn't actually complete the Assassins Creed: Brotherhood. I got so angry that I calmly took the disk out of the drive, sensibly placed it in its case, and then tidily put it back on the shelf next to Dragon Age 2 and... and... – wait, I only own one other game that's disappointed me this much.

I resorted to Youtube, skipped past the final irritating jumpy bit and saw the ending. Now, there is a slight nag of regret here, because during the cut scene the last activity you get to have with the KEYBOARD is a command to press any key. Doing so stabs your love interest with the hidden blade. That was pretty sweet, and I do wish I'd got to mortally wound her myself. She had so better die though, as I've one-hit armoured walking tanks with this weapon, so if she can take it in the chest and keep going my face is going to bruise my palm.

Up to that point, all I wanted to do was stop playing and install Crysis 2, which arrived today. So toodleoo Ezio, its time I get on with what (proper) PCs were made to do – get raped by the Cry Engine.

Ahhhhhhhh...