Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood online multiplayer - The verdict four months on

In the first of a new series of regular features, we choose a game released several months ago and investigate how well its multiplayer experience has fared, how the community has taken to it, and if you haven't taken the plunge yet whether or not it’s worth diving in to investigate now the launch hype has died down. Words: James Bowden

Game: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Original Release date: November 16^th 2010

INTRO
Online killing fields are normally open arenas of destruction. Explosions, gunfire and curse words ignite Internet connections and evenings are spent absorbed in adrenaline-fuelled bullet-spraying, praying and XP-hording. Conversely, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood tries to take a stealth experience into the realms of online competition, trading M16s for a sheath of throwing knives and asking players to hide among people instead of behind walls. It’s different, that’s for sure, but has Ubisoft Annecy’s talent for unique multiplayer game design created an online masterpiece, or have matches descended into madness?

THE PITCH (or: ‘what’s it all about, then?')
Brotherhood's online play is loosely based on the popular campus game Assassin, which sees willing individuals use mock weapons (water pistols and water bombs, for instance) to ‘take out’ designated targets until one player remains. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood’s multiplayer attempts to turn these weekend long Battle Royales into swift ten minute scuffles, while retaining all of the popular elements of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Players can only use a limited arsenal of weapons, choosing perks and abilities to compliment their style, but have access to the full compliment of blending and parkour mechanics that helped establish the franchise.

The game also started supporting killing with skill before a certain recent FPS, rewarding those who play with a more considered approach and helping them climb the leaderboards more rapidly than those who act like a loon. To make an online experience in which players don’t want to move, many thought of it as a fool’s errand.

THE REALITY (or: 'Is it any good, then?')
The good news is, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood works. It gels the core game’s ideas of blending in and social stealth with a smattering of challenging, objective-focused game types. When it’s all flowing nicely it’s an incomparably satisfying experience. When you’re silently eliminating targets and avoiding detection by your hunters, maximizing your score and denying your aggressors any points, it’s a wonderfully unique, methodically-structured gaming environment.

When it doesn’t work, however, it can be infuriating. When players frolic around on rooftops making themselves a target to their pursuer you’ll sigh in disbelief, while getting eliminated by the overpowered poison ability is controller-twistingly annoying and one of the few teething problems that still hasn’t been ironed out.

The biggest sin in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and one shared by many modern online titles, is that you need to rank up to become truly competitive. That said, once you’ve eased yourself into things the good begins to far outweigh the bad. Winning a match with half as many kills as the next player because you avoid death and plan your eliminations is empowering and satisfying, and learning how to employ the various abilities to compliment your tactics and a level’s geometry adds layer upon layer to an already thoughtful game.

Also worth noting is that the spread of wonderfully nuanced game types means you’ll always find something to enjoy, from solo contracts to team-based missions that reward true co-operation. There’s something sure to sell this unique experience to you, and they all work very well. When people aren’t buggering about on the roof tiles. The verdict, then? Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood works, and it works incredibly well. For something so experimental the moments of infuriation are to be anticipated, but the overall experience is a beautiful, unique, intelligent multiplayer game.

THE COMMUNITY
There are always people playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, in Player Matches at least. However, finding games to join can occasionally take a while… The issue stems from the numerous DLC packs, two free and one premium, which segregate the community. Once you get into a game you can often sit in matches as they rotate endlessly but that initial search can sometimes take upwards of ten minutes, if you connect at all. There are always players, but the game’s connection algorithms and DLC separation mean it can be hard to reliably enter matches quickly. That said, even at non-peak times we were able to join a match eventually, it just took a little searching.

Players rarely talk in matches, and if you want to get the most out of the highly tactical team game types then it’s best to bring a friend, although Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood’s gameplay is somewhat tailored to the mute solo artist and as such, this isn’t so much of a problem. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has an active and vocal community elsewhere, though. The game’s official forums are full of playful banter and discussion about the game, with regular updates in its multiplayer sub-folder every day.

A contingent of Brotherhood’s more hardcore players seem to be looking further afield for their entertainment, but then this may make it a more appealing prospect to start playing now, knowing the game isn’t full of people who know all its intricacies, swings and hidden-blade-concealing roundabouts. DLC There is one piece of premium Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood DLC, entitled The Da Vinci Disappearance. It's available for 800 points on XBLA and around £6/$7 on PSN.

To call this pack essential is an understatement. While the majority of high-level players have migrated to it, making the competition significantly stiffer, the new Assassinate and Escort modes are two of the best ways to experience this unique game, with Assassinate being the undisputed best mode in the entire offering.

THE VERDICT
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood remains a wonderfully unique multiplayer experience. There’s unlikely to be anything quite as different and polished as this until the next Creed, and it’s arguably even more playable now than it was at launch thanks to the IQ of the average player being seemingly higher than it was in the opening month, evidenced by less rooftop-loitering dimwits. Its gameplay is delightfully measured and cerebral when compared to the typical testosterone-filled multiplayer environment, thanks to its incredibly meticulous and thoughtful design, and it’s a blast to play both as a solo agent and alongside equally malicious friends.

As long as you can cope with the occasionally long waiting times to get into a match, the small climb you need to make to get truly competitive, and a few elements that are still in need of fixing, like the aforementioned overpowered poison, then Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood deserves to visit your disc tray on a regular basis, if only to show developers that a multiplayer game can be this demanding and intelligent and survive in the modern multiplayer scene.

Website: http://assassinscreed.us.ubi.com/brotherhood/

Twitter: @UbiGabe

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Ubisoft

Words: James Bowden

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