From: Ubisoft/Ubisoft Montreal
Style: 1-player action (8-player online)Matt Miller
I stride through the cobbled streets of Rome.
The Pantheon rises to my left, majestic and ancient.
Citizens crowd around me, providing cover as I move closer to my target.
He stands speaking to a group of guards, oblivious to the danger stalking him.
His role in the conspiracy is a minor one - hardly worth my notice.
But he must pay for his crimes against my family, no matter how indirectly he was involved.
I raise my hand in signal.
The woman I recruited weeks earlier drops from the rooftop where neither I nor anyone else saw her hiding.
Her hidden blade cuts deep into his neck, and the man falls before he knows what has happened.
Ezio Auditore is a master assassin, but before now his missions were almost always completed in isolation. Brotherhood introduces a new wrinkle.
The power Ezio now exerts reaches far beyond what he can touch with his sword or strike with a throwing knife.
The assassins are spreading their influence across an entire continent, and he sits at the head of the movement.
Gameplay starts by clearing your enemy's influence over the city.
As you kill the Borgia family's minions and burn their fortresses, the populace becomes rebellious and more willing to aid your cause.
Once they've given you their allegiance, these fervent recruits will act upon your directives.
Ezio can also send them on missions across Europe and Asia to gain experience.
When they return, you can upgrade their equipment to create even more powerful allies.
The progression system is easy to grasp and has just enough complexity to be interesting without overshadowing the action.
By the end, the men and women you pulled from the streets will stand at your side as fully initiated members of the order, and the sense of power they offer is sensational.
Even without these new brothers and sisters, Ubisoft addressed one of my biggest complaints from the last game - combat.
The action strikes the perfect balance between careful defensive counters of the past games and new, lethal offensive capabilities.
One-strike executions string together in a vicious dance, and combining taps and holds of the attack button let you mix different weapons.
Ezio's villa upgrades have also been transformed into a more robust economic simulation.
When Ezio comes to Rome, it has fallen into decay.
As he retakes the city, he can revive it by investing in shops and banks and repairing infrastructure.
A boarded-up square of storefronts full of kneeling beggars will become a bustling marketplace.
Though there aren't a huge number of story missions, each is designed to offer a unique encounter.
Mission structures are more choreographed than in past games, asking you to follow particular checkpoints.
The loss of freedom is worth it for the great scenes this enables, like the assault on the Castel Sant'Angelo.
Every mission now has a "full sync" challenge attached, like killing a target with a certain weapon.
Since you can now replay missions, there are plenty of reasons to go back to nail that perfect kill.
Many of the secondary missions are equally engrossing, from the puzzle-laden lairs of Romulus to the trips beyond the city borders to help Leonardo with his engineering dilemmas.
Though the story may be short and the plot isn't as impressive as the last game, the cast of characters is captivating.
The game ends abruptly, and it feels like Brotherhood could have had several more sequences.
Layered on top of this single-player experience is a multiplayer game.
The Templars are using their Animus machines to train new recruits, and players adopt the role of these trainees to wander the streets of Renaissance Italy as they learn the arts of subtlety, cunning, and murder.
In the tense and highly replayable Wanted mode, players each have one target and one pursuer.
This simple paradigm gains complexity by encouraging stealth, rewarding well-executed kills and demanding smart strategic movement over twitch mechanics.
The progression system awards your exploits with new character skins, abilities, score bonuses, and even game modes.
Filled with new gameplay, storylines and mechanical improvements, and multiplayer, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is far more than an expansion.
Though Brotherhood lacks some of the sense of discovery and newness that characterised Assassin's Creed II, you'll uncover a host of new thrills.
The series remains one of the most exciting properties in video games, and Brotherhood fills an essential step in the plot as the conspiracy-laden story continues.
