The Ezio trilogy just might be the most overrated trilogy in gaming.
I've finally completed Brotherhood, a game I was kinda dreading to play because just looking at it, it's just more AC2 and AC2 already dragged out reaaaaallly hard, but alas I pushed through it. Luckily for me Brotherhood is much shorter, likely because dev time was extremely short.
So, collectables and 50 million side missions are back, they're mostly all repetitive and boring as hell, so you'd be wise to ignore it all. I actually liked the idea of rebuilding Rome and went through a lot of that, but then I realized I'm doing the exact same thing over and over again and I'm getting extremely fatigued. I did a handful of Leonardo missions which were actually pretty cool, some other side stuff, I built up the brotherhood and got them all to max level, but I really started to get bored of it all, so I decided to just play main story missions to get this over with. This also means I didn't complete the missions to unlock the special armor, nor did I complete the post-launch content, but honestly man it's all so repetitive I don't care.
The story of this game is extremely simple, evil man and his army takes over Rome, destroy him and his army to clear Rome of his rule. That's it. I also HAVE to note that the main bad guy from AC2 does literally nothing the entire story, then towards the finale he is just murdered in a cut-scene by THIS games main villain. The guy that literally ordered Ezio's family to execution gets killed by someone else. Pretty shit writing there. When I inevitably beat this games bad guy, I found it to be pretty unsatisfying. I just don't care about him, he's a generic power-hungry villain with nothing interesting going on, so yeah, story is mid.
Whereas AC2 was filled to the brim with fetch quests, this game has a ton of trailing missions. It's like every other mission you have to trail or follow someone who walks around 20% slower than you, it's just boring. There were some good set-pieces and moments but overall just pretty meh missions overall, they're also all plagued by this "full-sync" system where you have to play a very specific way, and if you mess up the full sync you have to completely restart the mission. Because of this, I tried to ignore the full sync best I could, as there's no way I'm gonna fully replay missions just to get a full sync.
Talking about the map, I actually prefer just having one big map than having 3 or more like in previous games, it made scouting eagle towers feel pointless whereas here, while it was also pretty tedious, it at-least had some merit. I also liked the idea of the Borgia towers which are admittedly just some early "Ubisoft outposts," but once an area is cleared of Borgia control, there was still Borgia patrols everywhere, bit of some ludo-narrative going on there. The map of Rome itself kinda sucks tragically, the city section is un-intuitive as it's just faster to run around on the ground than to hop around on buildings, and the rest of Rome is a barren and empty place. you'll mostly just be riding a horse which is again, boring. I believe parkour has been really downgraded because of the mapping. Rome was a pretty big let-down, AC1 and 2 featured much better cities.
I don't wanna ramble on for too long, so I'm gonna try to conclude my thoughts; Brotherhood is essentially just a standalone expansion pack for AC2, it continues the story in an unfortunately mediocre way, and any new ideas such as the brotherhood are welcome but could've been executed so much better, I reckon if this game had more dev time it would've been a substantial upgrade. I'm surprised so many fans call this trilogy the peak of the series considering AC2 had a lot of flaws and brotherhood hardly innovated. I'm excited to go to Istanbul next though!
Side note: This game did not work for my PC no matter what fixes I did! Would suggest not buying it on PC right now.
If you wanna see my rankings as I go through the series, click here.
I've finally completed Brotherhood, a game I was kinda dreading to play because just looking at it, it's just more AC2 and AC2 already dragged out reaaaaallly hard, but alas I pushed through it. Luckily for me Brotherhood is much shorter, likely because dev time was extremely short.
So, collectables and 50 million side missions are back, they're mostly all repetitive and boring as hell, so you'd be wise to ignore it all. I actually liked the idea of rebuilding Rome and went through a lot of that, but then I realized I'm doing the exact same thing over and over again and I'm getting extremely fatigued. I did a handful of Leonardo missions which were actually pretty cool, some other side stuff, I built up the brotherhood and got them all to max level, but I really started to get bored of it all, so I decided to just play main story missions to get this over with. This also means I didn't complete the missions to unlock the special armor, nor did I complete the post-launch content, but honestly man it's all so repetitive I don't care.
The story of this game is extremely simple, evil man and his army takes over Rome, destroy him and his army to clear Rome of his rule. That's it. I also HAVE to note that the main bad guy from AC2 does literally nothing the entire story, then towards the finale he is just murdered in a cut-scene by THIS games main villain. The guy that literally ordered Ezio's family to execution gets killed by someone else. Pretty shit writing there. When I inevitably beat this games bad guy, I found it to be pretty unsatisfying. I just don't care about him, he's a generic power-hungry villain with nothing interesting going on, so yeah, story is mid.
Whereas AC2 was filled to the brim with fetch quests, this game has a ton of trailing missions. It's like every other mission you have to trail or follow someone who walks around 20% slower than you, it's just boring. There were some good set-pieces and moments but overall just pretty meh missions overall, they're also all plagued by this "full-sync" system where you have to play a very specific way, and if you mess up the full sync you have to completely restart the mission. Because of this, I tried to ignore the full sync best I could, as there's no way I'm gonna fully replay missions just to get a full sync.
Talking about the map, I actually prefer just having one big map than having 3 or more like in previous games, it made scouting eagle towers feel pointless whereas here, while it was also pretty tedious, it at-least had some merit. I also liked the idea of the Borgia towers which are admittedly just some early "Ubisoft outposts," but once an area is cleared of Borgia control, there was still Borgia patrols everywhere, bit of some ludo-narrative going on there. The map of Rome itself kinda sucks tragically, the city section is un-intuitive as it's just faster to run around on the ground than to hop around on buildings, and the rest of Rome is a barren and empty place. you'll mostly just be riding a horse which is again, boring. I believe parkour has been really downgraded because of the mapping. Rome was a pretty big let-down, AC1 and 2 featured much better cities.
I don't wanna ramble on for too long, so I'm gonna try to conclude my thoughts; Brotherhood is essentially just a standalone expansion pack for AC2, it continues the story in an unfortunately mediocre way, and any new ideas such as the brotherhood are welcome but could've been executed so much better, I reckon if this game had more dev time it would've been a substantial upgrade. I'm surprised so many fans call this trilogy the peak of the series considering AC2 had a lot of flaws and brotherhood hardly innovated. I'm excited to go to Istanbul next though!
Side note: This game did not work for my PC no matter what fixes I did! Would suggest not buying it on PC right now.
If you wanna see my rankings as I go through the series, click here.