Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Magic of Assbros!

I’ve recently been engaging the trials and tribulations of video game sequels en masse. I’ve been uncovering just how unfounded the critical praise that was heaped upon Dead Space 2 was, and I’ve been discovering just how amazing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is. And in the process I’ve seen, through Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, or Assbros as some like to call it, just what should be in a sequel.

A brief disclaimer: I’ll be writing about Dead Space 2, it’s failings as a sequel and its unintentional contributions to video game humor at a later date. Today I just want to write about how amazing Assbros is.

See, a great video game sequel adds to what made the original great while retaining the kernel of that greatness, the center around which the game functions and flows. Portal 2 is a great example of this, where the core of Portal (amazing, innovative problem solving where the environment was your enemy and your ally) was retained and expanded (what if you could play with the environment and set up new and fun ways to use the environment to your advantage?). Assassin’s Creed was a great game. A bit underappreciated at the time, sure, but revolutionary and smart. It’s focus on fluid gameplay was so powerful and well executed that I still sometimes go back to the original for its uncorrupted simplicity. Not that the sequels aren’t great, with their tremendous feature load and focus on diversifying the action and allowing players to restructure unlockables more thoroughly. But Assassin’s Creed itself was a pretty incredible game, loaded with a fun new game play mechanic.

Then Assassin’s Creed 2 rolled about and I was worried. Would the game play of the original feel crowded by all the bells and whistles AC2 added on to it? Would the focus on combat, the focus on making it easier and more flowing and faster paced, ruin the occasionally plodding, extremely polished action of the first Assassin’s Creed?

My fears were unfounded. Assassin’s Creed 2 totally grasped what made Assassin’s Creed great, and it even took the time to make its ridiculous story a little more ridiculous and awesome. It even took the worst part of Assassin’s Creed, Desmond, and made him more enjoyable to be. All in all it was a great game, and everything a sequel should be. It even let you become a little bit of a robber-baron, allowing you to establish an estate, acquire allies and fund the daily functions of your villa.

But it was also the product of a nice, relaxed development schedule compared to many games. It didn’t revolutionize its engine at all, which allowed it to focus on expanding the original engine to include little ridiculous things like flying machines and firearms and the like. It took all of that time and all of the tools that it already had at hand and used them to make a well crafted, well executed improvement on an existing product. I had no such hopes for Brotherhood, which took all those tools and turned them towards yet another iteration, a seemingly minor one at that.

And it turns out that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is actually kind of a minor iteration of the second Assassin’s Creed. You can play through it and only occasionally use the tools and toys exclusive to Assbros. But if you do this you’ll be denying yourself a great deal of the fun it provides.

See, Assbros relishes in the old while introducing a single new idea: the idea of having allies you can call upon whenever you wish. Well, mostly whenever you wish. There are occasionally missions that will bar you from using your sneaky friends, usually indoor affairs where they’d ruin the incredibly challenging requirements entailed by some of the “full synchronization” elements of missions. But for the most part you’ll actually be encouraged to press a button and make three dudes teleport out from hay piles and murder a bunch of guards. You’ll literally just press one button and witness your allies fucking shit up.

It’s a rewarding mechanic, due largely in part to the Pokemon-esque process of building up those Assassins and turning them from raw recruits into practiced stone killers. It’s neat enough to have teleporting killing machines at your beck and call, but it’s that much cooler to have teleporting killing machines that you shaped the training of, who you sent off to disrupt the efforts of Templars courting the favor of Queen Isabella and the Czars through a variety of at times hilarious missions (beat up a beggar is a repeatedly available mission in many cities, at times a very difficult one at that). By the end, despite seeing them only a handful of times in person, I felt a connection to each of my little Assassinos. I liked to see just who leapt out when I called, and I sent specific agents on specific kinds of missions. When my stable was full I was proud of the army I’d built around myself.

And this is all layered atop a fantastic engine, the one you know and love from the original Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2. There’s a period, towards the end, where the new mechanics eclipse the old, but it’s brief and forgivable. As far as new mechanics go it’s far from the worst thing I’ve experienced in recent memory. And the conclusion of Assbros, while trite and silly in the tradition of Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2, has a fantastic buildup that doesn’t disappoint.

I’m always prone to separate Assassin’s Creed games from their stories, partially because their stories are so purposefully over the top and simultaneously serious. It is clear that you’re meant to chuckle at the ineptitude of the doctors from Abstergo who are constantly hunting you for your “special brain,” but the relationships between characters sometimes grow quite serious, tone-irkingly so. In a game where you’re the Italian playboy who is best buds with Leonardo da Vinci it’s a bit jarring to also deal with things ranging from lost love to an international conspiracy centered around Greek Gods who built superpowered fallout shelters. But for the most part Assbros continues the tradition of getting a chance to have its cake and stab it to by keeping any given segment from getting too long, and with the exception of the ending, the cryptic emails and exploration of the present-day villa the game hangs together quite nicely.

In fact I’d say it’s the perfect example of what a sequel should be. It takes the original design and adds some nice things to it. It doesn’t remove what you loved from the original formula, but it gives you some neat new bits to play with. It doesn’t overcompensate for some of the shittiness that the first Assassin’s Creed set in motion and which the series has as a whole continued to supply, but it brings a lighter touch to some of the more blah aspects of the first two games. And the option of only attaining partial synchronization is a welcome one, although it’s one I certainly didn’t take advantage of. It did have the end result of giving missions a built in Easy Mode that I could just use whenever, and I appreciated that it was there.

All in all there is nothing to keep anyone who enjoyed the first two Assassin’s Creed games from enjoying Assbros, though I would, as with most great series, recommend starting at the first and working your way there. Assbros is well worth the journey.