Video Game Review: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

Xbox 360 - Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Review

WARNING SPOILERS!

Once again you take up the role as the assassin, Ezio Auditore da Firenze in this sequel of Assassin’s Creed II. Brotherhood takes place immediately after its predecessor, starting in the vault after the talk with Minerva. After escaping Rome with a little help, the gamer is taken back to Monteriggioni where Ezio tells his family, Mario, Caterina and Machiavelli about what happened. The next morning, the villa is attacked by Rodrigo Borgia’s son, Cesare. He defeats Mario and kidnaps Caterina, but not before one of his soldiers shoots Ezio. In revenge, after getting his mother and sister as well as some villagers out of there, Ezio rides back to Rome where the game takes place. While in the present day, Desmond and the other make it to modern day Monteriggioni to hide from Abstergo.

While the other Assassin’s Creed games have you traveling between cities, this one takes place strictly in large Renaissance city of Rome. You have three modes of travel: on foot, on your trusty steed, or through a fast travel tunnel system. Now everyone knows that on foot consists of running or walking and scaling buildings. That’s fun if you want to screw around with a few of the roof guards or avoid unnecessary circling around the city. The tunnel system can only be used when you find the tunnel entrance in the area and pay to have it renovated. It can be a great help when you are going from one side of the map to the other. But the fastest way to travel that is in between them is riding your horse. Now you can basically steal any horse you want or get them from the stables and whatever horse you were on last will be the horse that is called to you when you whistle. The best thing this time around with the horse, is that you aren’t getting a notoriety raise every time you run someone over. Major plus in my book.

Ubisoft also took the idea of building your finances with the construction of the villa and took it a step further in Brotherhood. In this game, you have to unlock the doctors, merchants, landmarks and aqueducts in order to rebuild Rome from under Borgia’s rule. To do this you must destroy each Borgia tower in the area and its captain. Once that is done you are able to unlock everything, including faction buildings for your allies.

Yes, the factions are back in this sequel. The courtesans in Rome are left without a leader. Claudia, Ezio’s sister, steps up as an Auditore and decides she will help her brother by leading the courtesans in Rome. Along with her, La Volpe is back with his thieves and so is Bartolomeo with his mercenaries. With the help of fellow Assassin allies, Ezio is able to rebuild the Assassin’s brotherhood back to its full strength.

Rebuilding the Brotherhood is one of the most interesting parts of the gameplay. Ezio saves citizens from the Borgia guards, who in turn give their skills over to the Brotherhood. As the guild grows, you are able to send Assassins out on missions in order to gain money and objects needed for shop quests. These shop quests allow you to gain better armor, more room on your belts, and better weapons. Not only that, but when you gain a certain amount of members into the guild, you are able to summon them to assassinate your targets for you. They literally come from nowhere to help you. There is one move called the Arrow Storm. This move brings in a barrage of arrows from the sky killing your target and the surrounding enemies. The best thing about this move, is that when you use it the kill is not linked back to Ezio in anyway. So you can move through the fight without getting anyone suspicious, unless you join in on the slaughter of course. But you must beware when you send your assassins out on missions and against guards. If they are not strong enough, you will lose them permanently.

One thing Ubisoft added that made this a really unique Assassin’s Creed game was the multiplayer aspect. And this multiplayer is not something that was just added on to the game. Ubisoft explained that the multiplayer is the Abstergo operatives training themselves to be able to catch Desmond and his assassin friends. There are three different types of multiplayer games. First you have the normal free-for-all which is labeled Wanted. You get a target, while trying to stay away from people targeting you. The second is called Alliance. This game is three teams of two people. One team hunts the other while being hunted by the third. The last game-type is called Manhunt. In this game there are two teams of four and you take turns hunting each other. Now the multiplayer in this game isn’t just focused on the quantity of your kills, but the quality of them. This is an assassin game and Ubisoft really embodied the game in their multiplayer. The only thing that bothers me is that it takes a bit long to find and start a match.

The Brotherhood is an excellent finish to Ezio’s story and a nice bridging gap to Assassin’s Creed 3. Desmond’s story also continues when he finds out where Ezio’s Piece of Eden is. Not spoiling the end, let’s just say that you will need to play Brotherhood to understand Desmond’s story in AC3. Overall Brotherhood is a game where Ubisoft took into account what the player liked and what they knew they needed to fix and did just that. There might be minor repetitive missions, but you will always have that in almost any game. The gameplay takes a new violent and enjoyable twist. For example countering with your sword is libel to get the guards head blown off with the gun in Ezio’s gauntlet. The added aspect of managing your own Assassin’s guild was unique and enjoyable. While the story gave you side-missions, you could easily bypass them for the main story which really rounded out everything for Ezio and those associated with him. Even if you don’t like Ezio or his story, I definitely recommend this game for the intricate gameplay and guild order.

9.8/10

Video Games | Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood | E3 2010: Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Movie: Tekken 2010

Going into this movie, I wasn't expecting it to be like the game. Video Game Movies hardly ever are. So I entered this with the basic knowledge that has always been consistent. Jun Kazama has a son named Jinn who is Kazuya Mishima's son. I told myself if they messed that up, then this movie wasn't worth the trouble. Luckily they did not disappoint me.

In this movie, the world's governments fall and eight major corporations take over dividing the world up. North America was taken over by the company known as Tekken, which is the equivalent of the Mishima Corp since it is run by Heihachi. All together these companies are known as Iron Fist. They hold a competition called the Iron Fist Tournament.

After Tekken kills his mother, Jin Kazama enters the open call in order to gain revenge. He ends up in a 1v1 fight with Marshall Law. Now I don't know about you guys, but in the game this guy is a Bruce Lee knock off and annoying as hell to beat. This first real fight scene is pretty good. I'm even counting when he flashes back to when Jun was teaching him as a young kid. Well as we know he beats Law and goes on to be Jin, the people's choice, for the Iron Fist tournament.

Well the fight manager who then become Jin's manager is actually Steve Fox. Now in the game, Fox is a boxer who is an attention whore, so seeing this grunged down version really made me enjoy the character more. When they enter Tekken City and the tournament they meet the other fighters. Among them are Raven, Eddy Gordo, Nina and Anna Williams, Yoshimitsu, Dragunov, Rojo and Brian Fury. Now when I first saw this line-up I looked at the other characters in the game and shook my head. Really...they could have had a better lineup in this game.

The first fight in the tournament is with Raven and Eddy Gordo. Now I got to give props to the actor for Eddy, because he did his capoeira fantastically. But Raven...he is suppose to be a ninjutsu master, and damn it I would have liked to see some of the ninjutsu moves. I mean hell in the game he has this vanishing trick he does, can a brother at least get some nun-chucks in here? Some ninja styling please? All I saw from Raven was a bit of kicking and blocking up until he pinned Eddy and just whaled on him.

Next was Rojo and Jin, this was a little more exciting. Steve Fox gives Jin a bit of advice, but it doesn't help that much. It is only when Jin gets his ass beat and remembers his mother's training does he come out on top. And Rojo's whole two liner about about 'Do you know where you are, this is Iron Fist!'...this was totally unnecessary. I suppose at the end of this fight is when we see what the game considers 'Devil Jin' where he gets so pissed, he can almost not control himself. But unfortunately that's all we get, his anger not the full package.

Jin then gets close to his fellow competitor Christie Montiero. Now there is nothing wrong with Christie's character in the movie except for the fact that she is labeled a capoeira fighter and when she fights Nina...she does none! That was about my only complaint with her.

Now before Jin came to the tournament it was alluded to that he was intimate with a girl named Kara. What pissed me off was that they totally forgot about Ling Xiaoyu, who is supposedly Jin's love interest and childhood friend in the game. If you are going to focus the movie solely on Jin Kazama, you have to bring in the people that will build up his character development and Xiaoyu is one of them. The other being his rival Hwoarang...but I'm not going to get into that.

Now after all the bull, Kazuya takes over Tekken right out from Heihachi who is played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. I suppose they needed one famous person in there and they thought 'Hey, let's get the guy who played Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat. I mean he played a villain in that movie why not this one?' He didn't even need to act in this one. It actually looked like he was pissed he was put in that role, like they had promised him the roll of Kazuya or something then said sorry but we got this other dude doing it. But the role of Kazuya was so underplayed. All you saw of him was he was either screwing the Williams whores or being a douche in general. Kazuya is a man of action, he would be in the tournament not sending whore-class assassins and Jack-units to do his dirty work, he'd do it himself. Especially if it was to go after his son.

The martial arts in this movie is really as played up as it could be. The only time you see it is in the ring of the tournament. But I suppose in a society like that, that is the only time you would do any real martial arts. The other times it is like 'Holy shit they have guns run for your lives!'. And I'm not saying that it was bad, when they did have martial arts it was good...but it could have been better.

All in all, the grunge feel of the whole scenario was a pretty good play on how the corporations rose up and how they got this tournament, but the character development was terrible. For a movie based off the a Fighting Game, it lacked a lot of fighting. I would have enjoyed a bit more fight scenes than the club scene where Jin gets it on with Christie. I mean other than Jin's abs, Christie's ass, and some of Steve Fox's mild wit...I can say I'm glad I didn't buy this movie.