Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Awesome. I am a fan of the Assassin's Creed series. I love the parkour, mainly because I lust to acquire the skill to do it. I love the hidden blades of Ezio and Altair, the story is intriguing if a little vague and the characters are believable and for the most part, like-able. Sure, Altair was about as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper, but that was kind of the point. He was taken from his family as a child and trained to kill. It's all he knows. He's basically a sociopath at the beginning of the game and as we move him through the game, he turns into a person. It's called character development. Sure he doesn't have an Arabic accent like all the others, but hey, its the Animus 1.0. It's still in beta, cut it some slack.

Anyway, Brotherhood takes everything that was awesome about part 2 and makes it smoke crack. There are new moves, the ability to use projectile weapons with your sword/dagger equipped and of course the lovely hidden blades. Now, I've not finished it yet, so I haven't trained any assassins, but the whole point of the game is to take over Rome and build an assassin's guild. Epic stuff here people. You also get to rebuild Rome, much like Monteriggioni in 2. Also, if you like, you can explore Monteriggioni in 2012 as Desmond by exiting the Animus. There are things to do as Desmond, such as check your email, which may prove useful and maybe give some insight into the other assassin's minds. There are also relics to be found around the town, left over from the siege at the beginning of the game.

The main new feature, and probably the one I've spent the most time messing around with is multiplayer. I don't play console games online often, mostly because I can rarely find people playing the same game as me (lookin' at you Prey). I think I've progressed to level 4 in the past couple of days but it is awesome. I've only played 2 different game types; one where it gives you a target and vague compass directions to him. You get to choose one of the deadly characters, stalk your victim and kill him or her while trying to avoid the bastards trying to kill you. It's sweet. The other kind of game is a team game. The first round one team tries to kill the other and the second team tries not to die and the second round is vice versa. Not as good as the other, but still cool.

Anywayyy...that's pretty much my initial thoughts of the game. May say more after I beat it and progress farther in multiplayer but I probably said everything I needed to right there. If you like AC, BUY THIS GAME.

UPDATE:

Finished the game. Upgraded all my baby assassins to master assassins and tore ass through Rome with them. Awesome. I don't think there's anything that's quite as satisfying in these games as calling on your assassin brothers to rain arrows down onto a group of guards that are in between you and a target.

On a side note, the ending was just as confusing as some of the others. Assassin's Creed 3 had better be a 40 hour game to explain some of the shit they've put me through.