When Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was getting multiplayer, many people – including myself – thought that it was a meaningless bolt on that would distract the developers from creating a solid single player experience. Too many games recently have had an added multiplayer component when often, it just doesn’t work. While that could be true come the final build for Brotherhood, the initial verdict determines that this multiplayer is in no way pointless. For starters, this multiplayer has a back story, something quite rare. Abstergo Industries, the modern-day Templars, have built the animus program to help train their agents (I didn’t say it was going to be a great story). Having managed to get some play time with the multiplayer, I must admit, at first I didn’t quite understand what I was doing – but this was my own fault in truth as I chose to ignore the tutorial and just wanted to get straight into the action, a foolish mistake that proved to be.

Once I had the knowledge that I couldn’t just kill any of the players and that I was given a target for a reason, the game instantly became very tense. Whenever you spawn, a target is determined, with your aim to track down and kill said target. In order to gain more points, you have to take them out as stealthily as possible. While doing this though, you have to keep an eye for anyone acting suspiciously as they may be trying to take your life. Cleverly, Ubisoft have made it so that every non-aggressive AI character looks like a human-controlled character which means that a deadly strike can come from anywhere. Add in the fact that they have also made the AI act like a human-controlled character and that you can have multiple pursuers at one time into the mix, you have a truly panic-attack-inducing experience. As I’ve said the AI is really quite superb. They run, turn around and do pretty much everything apart from climbing that can convince you they are human controlled and make you assassinate the wrong character.

If a pursuer exposes them to you, there are two things that can offer you help in escaping them. The first is something called ‘chase breakers’, which are activated only when you run and are easy to spot as they glisten, which could be a gate, door, hanging plant or a rather cool zipline that slings you up onto the rooftops. The second item comes in the form of abilities; you gain them as you go through the fifty levels multiplayer has to offer. These abilities can range from disguising your appearance to throwing down a smoke bomb. However, not all of these abilities are defensive as you can unlock poison and the trusty hidden gun. Making a pre-emptive strike on a pursuer by using the circle button will stun them, and as a result will not only halt them from killing you but it also cause them to lose the contract on you in the same way that escaping from a chase sequence does.

Obviously, to make the multiplayer fair, Ubisoft have scaled the combat down to only including the square button to assassinate and the use of trigger buttons for the offensive abilities. This builds up a lot of tension as you get closer to your to your target ready to perform the fantastically animated executions. In an attempt to make the game more balanced, the Canadian developer made it so that multiple Templars can be after you depending on how well you are doing.

Customisation is the norm for most multiplayer games now and Brotherhood is no different. There is the usual visual customisation like unlocking different skins but there is also, as mentioned before, abilities, perks and streaks. Streaks are both kill and death orientated. Death streaks tend to help you recover from your bad luck by such things as resetting the cooldown of your abilities to enhancing your compass precision to help track down your foes, whilst kill streaks tend to give you more experience points. Perks are like abilities but do not have a cooldown period after they have been used meaning they are ever-present. Enhanced autobash gives you the ability to knock down more NPCs than normal while perks like Blender morph an NPC into a clone of yourself when you blend into a group of people.

Despite having some problems using the stun attack, I had great fun playing even though it was truly nerve-racking. It would have been nice to have a go at some of the visual customisation but that means I also have something to look forward to, along with the complete levelling system and unlocks, when the game is released on November 19 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.