Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (PC) Review - PAGE 1

Ubisoft released their third entry in the Assassin's Creed universe late last year on consoles, to universal praise from the press and fans alike. Since then they've been working on a proper PC version with all the bells and whistles the audience expects -- rewards for the patient, one might say.

The game is here now at last, so I've taken a look at the technical aspects to see how it fares against its console counterparts. If you're looking for a verdict on gameplay, story, and so on, check out our Xbox 360 review from series expert and assistant editor Lydia Sung right here.

DRM & Uplay

First thing's first: like many, I was strongly turned off by the heavy digital rights management (DRM) present in Assassin's Creed II (which required a constant Internet connection for play), and as such, neglected to pick it up. While Ubisoft was very pleased at the effectiveness of the piracy deterrent, it seems to have done more harm than good, as many suspected it might. This is the logical message to take, anyway, as it's since been lightened to an online check at startup only, and happily, Brotherhood is actually DRM-free -- there's not even a disk check for the retail version.

If you are connected, however, there is online and exclusive functionality packed in here through Ubi's Uplay system which adds value: extra content, a friends and messaging system, achievements ("Actions"), auto-patching (one patch has released already), and an exclusive "investment" feature (an in-game stock market, essentially, with rewards of game currency and items to be had -- very cool). All of this is optional, of course, and if you like you can neglect to sign up and just play the superb Story Mode offline.

In any case, Ubisoft seems to have seen the light (at least somewhat) and realized you can't hurt piracy by being a hardass (not without hurting your customers a great deal, too, at least), but you can by offering more value for money -- naturally, pirates will miss out on a lot of the goodies, as they're tied to legit accounts, while paying customers will feel taken care of.

Fine tuning

As you'd expect, the level of refinement here is much more in line with Assassin's Creed II than its predecessor, which was far from a great port (the uproarious 11-button quit system has been replaced by an efficient quit to main menu or desktop system, here).

Menus all feel tuned properly to higher resolutions and the keyboard/mouse setup, including the radial weapon menu which is responsive and easy to access. The only exception I've noticed is the Animus Desktop screens which neglect to support the scroll wheel (would be handy for reading all that background information) -- a minor quibble, however.

If you're the type to Alt-Tab between your game and various other programs at any given point, Brotherhood has been coded properly for it, with very smooth transitions and no issues.

Lastly, on a formidable hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM, here), load times are practically non-existent.

Options, options, options

Seeing as you're reading this, there's a good chance a long list of graphics options in your PC games excites you maybe more than it should. Brotherhood has a reasonable amount, and also seems to scale pretty well, too. In the comparison below, note the significant differences in texture, shadow and anti-aliasing quality, to name a few items.

System requirements are moderate (see the game profile in the top left); if you call yourself an enthusiast, you should have no trouble maxing this, even with normally taxing options like shadows and anti-aliasing, as I didn't with a 1GB 5770, 1055T X6 CPU and 8GB RAM.

High, medium, low settings; click to enlarge. High resolution versions can be found here.

Apart from graphics, mouse and keyboard controls are highly customizable, and you can also pick from presets designed for keyboards/mice with two or five buttons or just keyboards (two setups for the latter).

Tweaking options appear to be non-existent, unfortunately (or at least thoroughly hidden), though introductory movies can be easily skipped by moving the files to a new folder.

Notably, a 5.1 sound card is recommended, though there is no option to enable 5.1 sound. The audio itself is more than sufficient; using the Corsair 5.1/7.1 USB headset (which has its own driver built in), I hear no significant difference, but have no real complaints, either.