Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Its Buggy Ending

Posted by brandon in Reviews on Dec 7th, 2010 | 1 comment

Oh Assassin’s Creed, you managed to sour what was on the whole a great gaming experience with a slapped-together ending for the third time now. (I’m not counting the handheld games in the series. They all were slapped-together.) I finished the story portion of AC Brotherhood last night (Dec. 6th, 2010) and like the previous two games, the ending left me scratching my head as to what the hell happened to the game. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (ACB) was exactly what I was wanting: more AC2. They kept the same Italian local and cast (just moved to Rome) and they added new mechanics and fixed some of the glaring UI and playability oversights from the second game. There’s a crossbow now, which finally gives you a one-hit kill from a distance, you can ride horses in town and you have a group of up to 10 assassins you can level up and call on to help you take out guards. I had more fun playing ACB than any game since Ryu ga Gotoku 4 this March. ACB is a great game. I loved the city, the set-piece battles were a lot of fun and there were even more things to buy.

But the final two memories, which only account for maybe 90 minutes of gameplay, are pretty subpar considering the quality of the rest of the game. I’m used to Western games having more bugs than Japanese games do, but ACB annoyed the piss out of me. There will be SPOILERS in a couple seconds, so if you haven’t finished the game and want to be surprised, stop reading.

In sequence 8, you find where Cesare has hidden the Piece of Eden and after you get your hands on it, combat goes from being fun, fast and easy with your blades equipped to being excruciatingly frustrating while you have the Apple of Eden in your possession. While holding the Apple, you can’t use any items or other weapons. The Apple drains your health as you use it, and you have to run around like a child on a sugar rush until the Apple refills your health back up. The game also didn’t make it clear that you need to charge the Apple up and then attack. I kept tapping the attack button to use the Apple with limited success. It never occurred to me to charge it up until someone told me that’s what I needed to do. So for most of memory sequence 8, you’re tracking down Cesare’s remaining allies and killing them with the Apple. At one point your in the Colosseum and one of your targets runs out of the area and you can’t get to him to attack. Gotta restart that memory all over again!

At the end of 8, you’re just about to get your hands on Cesare when he’s arrested by the Papal Army. Cesare apparently is saved by his own army, and Ezio has to go and finish him off. You suddenly are on a battlefield, which I was able to get into right away, but that fight is ended prematurely by the computer and you wake up and everyone is gone. You make your way into Cesare’s new compound and you have your battle to the death with him, only the game decided to freeze him in an idle animation and wouldn’t let me attack him after a certain point. I had to let the guards kill me so I could start over. I finally get the kill cut scene and instead of stabbing Cesare, he flings him off the top of this castle. But instead of following the bad guy you’ve been wanting to kill all the way down till he splats satisfying against the ground, the game stutters into “memory synchronization mode” and you don’t even get to really see the bastard die. After looking forward to eventually murdering this bastard who killed my uncle Mario for 20 hours or so, the satisfaction of killing him in revenge was taken away from me.

AC2 did this same thing where they transported you to a place you had never been to in the first 90% of the game to do the big finale. The build-up to the final boss fight was much better in ACB, but ultimately, the final boss fight from AC2 was a more satisfying end. But that’s not all, Desmond comes out of the Animus with a location for the Apple of Eden. The team follows Desmond’s memories of Ezio and they reclaim the Apple. The platforming that Desmond does is fun, although I kind of wished he could’ve used that blade he is carrying against someone in battle.

Here are the SUPER SPOILERS.

After Desmond touches the Apple, he is driven by Juno, I suppose, to murder Lucy. As soon as he kills her, he passes out and the fucking credits roll. The fucking credits. I thought the first AC had a bad ending, but this was terrible. There was no climactic build-up to Desmond killing Lucy even. There’s a slow awkward sequence where he moves towards Lucy even though you might not want to, and the game forces you to kill her. I didn’t want to. I don’t know why I’m killing her. Juno’s spouting some cryptic nonsense in my head and she drives me to kill Lucy. The forum trolls are saying Lucy must be a Templar, and maybe she was undercover. I don’t know, and Ubisoft is so terrible at storytelling that I don’t think they know what they’re doing either. It’s such a dumb idea to keep me in Ezio’s world for 95% of the game, where I wind up caring about him and his struggles, only to pull me out for the last 5% where you make Desmond murder his friend and don’t explain one damn bit about it. If you want the player to care about Desmond, you’ve got to do more with him. I play Assassin’s Creed games for parts Desmond is reliving, not the parts Desmond is living. After Desmond gets into the Animus at the beginning, there isn’t a single reason to get out unless you want the trophy for checking your email or finding an artifact in 2012. You can just play through Ezio’s memories straight through. Ubisoft learned that people like that stuff better and cut Desmond’s bullshit. At this point, they either need to make Desmond’s part longer and more entertaining, or just lose it altogether.