This is the hardest that Assassin's Creed has ever chased Uncharted. Tombs are now main quests, reflecting Ezio's characterization as a scholar-adventurer who loves finding rare books that lead him to keys that unlock a library, who writes letters detailing his activities to his sister, and who falls in love with a bookseller. Missions tend to be tightly scripted setpieces, with lots of fixed camera angles and action-packed cutscenes.

Assassination and brotherhood management, an activity Ezio grows increasingly weary of, is mostly side activity that seems to inconveniently intrude upon his quest for knowledge. But at least provides opportunities to use the ridiculously bloated toolset that the main missions rarely call for.

Constantinople is one of the best cities in a series, and the new hookblade moves make it a joy to move across. They even seemed to have tuned up the returning moveset, because I encountered way fewer control issues during fast-paced chases than I did in AC2 and Brotherhood.

I really love Desmond's first person puzzle platformer with walking sim narration. The character writing in this game is excellent, and the three storylines always have satisfying thematic echoes of each other. Desmond needs to learn the difference between himself, Ezio, and Altair, but you can see why he got confused in the first place: they all deal with similar problems in their lives.

It's a very somber, contemplative story that is a great setup for the tone of AC3... when Desmond arrives at The Revelation, he doesn't even learn anything new. The struggles of all three heroes just led to another redundant backup message. It's not uncovering secret knowledge that brings these men peace, but understanding each other. Desmond looked to Subject 16 as a guy who knew all the answers, but he too is just a guy. All Clay really wants is a conversation about something real and mundane.

The Ubisoft open-world formula is calcified here. The charismatic sicko villain has taken over the region as illustrated in a big opening setpiece, and it's on you to liberate zones by clearing forts while collecting resources for upgrades. This one also has a strong economic focus, with Ezio able to purchase every building in Rome like it's Fable II.

As the first major outing for this style of design, Brotherhood actually does pretty well. There's a good variation in quest design, with Leonardo machine missions, flashback missions, faction missions, and vr challenges spicing up the returning tombs, assassination contracts, and glyph puzzles. I do think it's funny that there's a special higher-budget category for assassinating multiplayer characters.

All the new abilities are a massive improvement on AC2's kit. Activate subweapons by holding attack, speed up combat by stringing combos, do horse flips and horse-to-horse assassinations, throw spears, have no fewer than five ranged options, glide across the city in a parachute.

The recruit system in particular is so simple but also so perfectly tuned. It really never gets old to press one button and have a recruit appear from a hiding spot 0.5 seconds later to kill a guy. What unfortunately hasn't improved is the movement controls, which inevitably buckle in any high-pace situation.

One advantage of the game's structure is that because all the game's side activities feed into Liberating Roma, the main quest and side content feel cohesive in a way a lot of open worlds don't. Despite being a bloated Ubisoft open world, Brotherhood actually has a strong sense of focus to it: the Assassins are coming together to ruin Cesare Borgia's day.

After the disorganized brotherhood of AC2, it's nice to see this game's focus on the mundane organizational problems that occur among the leadership clique of a growing organization. Rivalries, suspicion, resentment, disappointment, strategic disagreements, romantic tension, cheesy reconciliations. It's low-energy, but kind of works as a workplace drama, which is also the genre of much of Desmond's storyline.

Maybe the most well-done narrative element is the subplot that Ezio is a 40 year old man who is getting tired of casual sex and would really like to settle down with someone like Caterina Sforza, but she's not into it. He's always seeing women in the streets that remind him of Cristina Vespucci, the one that got away. It's surprisingly tender for a series that rarely trades in subtlety.

The multiplayer component is sadly no longer online, but it was extremely cool in 2010. Multiplayer would be worth five stars on its own.