Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood(Nintendo Switch) Review

This was a game I remember buying on a Boxing Day sale in 2010 and at the time I recall liking it, however time has made me look on it with less fondness. After beating the game again for the first time in 15 years, that apathy I got was warranted. It's hard to deny, coming from a guy who really disliked AC2, Brotherhood is better but not by much, it's tolerable because it's much shorter and certain aspects of the game is streamlined but it's not anything that fits into my criteria of what a good game is.

Be warned, if you play the Nintendo Switch version, there is some bugs and glitches in that version all though I mainly suffered one game breaking bug. 

I'll begin with with the story and I will admit, the opening hour of the game does an okay job at setting the stakes even if it does have a bad habit of trying to make Ezio look awesome like him easily winning over a married woman and him winning over Caterina even though they never knew each other for that long. There is also the fact that the whole "Desmond prophecy" that Minerva told him about in the Vault he forgets almost as soon as its brought up again. I also liked that Machevilli scolded Ezio for not killing Rodrigo, might set up some conflict between the two or seemingly it does. 

When Ceasre Borgia shows up, he's portrayed very well, he kills Mario, destroys the Villa and has Ezio battered and almost got him killed. The way Machevilli was selling Ezio and by extension the player on how villianous later on does a good job at possibly foreshadowing as how much of a threat he could be. It reminded me of how Ramirez was describing The Kurgan to Connor MacLeod in the first Highlander after The Kugan's inital assault on Connor. Machevilli is also set up as a guy who seems to admire Ceasre and might possibly play both sides to get what he wants.

This is pretty much where my praise for the story ends. From here on out, after Sequence 1, there is some intrigue on who's side Machevilli is on but everything Ezio does always goes according to plan, he never once makes a mistake, never gets anyone killed. Despite wanting to kill Ceasre for Mario's death there is no conviction in Ezio to want to kill the former. He never argues with anyone and when it happens, Ezio is always the one to be put "over" by the end of it. Claudia seemingly resents him for not always being there for her, but then she willingly joins Ezio without much resistance. La Volpe distrusts Machevilli but that never leads to anything terrible. Caterina needs to be rescued from the Castello but never does anything afterwards, it was entirely pointless.

All that intrigue and foreshadowing with Machevilli is all just a lie. To add the final nail in the coffin, the big bad Ceasre Borgia never does anything to annoy Ezio and by extension the player after Sequence 1 and doesn't even know that the people on his team are dead when Ezio and his allies kills them all. He then starts to throw tantrums and shouts so much that he makes Cobra Commander from the 80s G.I Joe cartoon jealous. All display of dominace Ceasre shows at the start amounts to him just being an overly entitled kid who thinks he's way cooler than he actually is. I already zoned out of the story when it turned out some random NPC with no character or personality was the traitor and not Machevilli and the latter was on the side of good the whole time. 

To compare to other Ubisoft games, Crawford Sterrick in AC Syndicate would always react every time a major Templar died in the story. Ghost Recon Wildlands would give the player short optional videos to watch for the player when you make a blow to El Sueno's operations. Just Cause 3 would also have the villain, Di Ravello get annoyed and angry every time the player would reach story milestones. ACB could greatly benefit with something like this. 

Once again, like AC2 this is not an excuse plot, so I can't ignore all this. At the same time, maybe it's "play the game, skip the story". Yet again I can't.

I will praise the graphics and art direction in that the game does look very vibrant and colorful. However a big issue is that like the Venice portions in AC2, the scenery can start to get boring and samey after a point, I also got bored traversing the Rome countryside since there isn't much in the way of buildings to climb. 

The gameplay as a whole is basically, "AC2 but with even easier and more ways to break the game".

For example, the chain killing system does make combat look much more over the top and flashier, but here's where the problem lies, that's all it does. Every enemy encounter just involves the player killing one enemy and then going on a killing rampage with barely any effort. Maybe you need to kick a guard from time to time but they still go down very quickly. Enemies on horseback could provide a challenge, but just press the grab button and then you can kill them every enemy can be countered with ease. Enemies can grab you but it's easy to break out of by just a quick press of two buttons. Combat provides so little geniune challenge.

So now it's up to stealth, it hasn't changed since AC2. No crouch button, no cover button and no whistle and noise making ability yet again. The stealth tactics you can do are hiring prostiutes for stealth sections with crowds. For traditional infiltrations, it's mainly playing ring around the rosey and holding the fast walk. Biggest improvement is that killing from the front seconds after an enemy spots you won't lead to a fail state. One big gripe I have is that the stealth kills in the Ezio games does not have the, "quick yet stylish" flare that games like Unity would have. 

The stealth can now also be cheesed with the addition of the crossbow and if that isn't enough, recruit enough members to the assassins guild, and you can get arrow storm which clears out all nearby guards with a hold of a button, this works on assassination targets too. So now stealth has no challenge. You already have one "win button" with the crossbow but you also have another win button with arrow storm. It's also on a cooldown and it doesn't even reset after death either so it's a crutch you can always rely on. 

You can also renovate Rome itself but the problem is, main missions give you money, Borgia Captains require very little effort to kill since they have higher health than regular enemies, but can be beaten the same way, if you can't already kill them through a stealth kill. Once, you renovate enough places, the player will be rolling in money but at the same time, you are probably better off not even engaging in all this since it already makes an already easy game on a base level even more so. 

It's also rather silly to me that climb leap needs to bought even though it's an ability Ezio already knows how to do physically and never needed a tool to use beforehand and while the parkour system is interesting with wall ejects, side ejects, climb leap and the ability for controlled descent, like AC2, it never leans you into actively using these the abilities. 

Overall, I find ACB more tolerable than AC2 but not by much, sure it's more streamlined and flashier but not a lot of the latter game's issues are addressed to make a geniune improvement. It seems the multiplayer was a big reason as to why this got released as a standalone game without it's inclusion in the Ezio Collection, this is now all the more obvious.