I realized something about the Assassin’s Creed games playing this… I guess you could call it an “expansion”. The franchise is essentially a collection of “hardcore” mini-games strung together by a setting and story.

At the very least, that’s pretty much all Brotherhood manages to be. This isn’t exactly a condemnation, but the story hasn’t really changed or added anything to the continuity for me. Not for Ezio, at least, the Italian assassin you control for most of the game. There is some world building done with Desmond and the other characters in the “modern” world, but for the most part very little has changed (I should note that, at the time of this writing, I have yet to complete the game).

What Brotherhood amounts to is an excuse to jump in and simply play more Assassin’s Creed with a few new missions and mechanics. In truth, most players would be fine enough just replaying Assassin’s Creed 2. The only significant addition in Brotherhood is, well, the Brotherhood (a poor name considering most of my fellow assassins are women). Being able to summon recruits to help out in a battle is surprisingly rewarding, especially to see them performing executions and other advanced maneuvers the mercenaries are not capable of. Yet most of the time you’ll have them sent off to do missions around the world, returning with money.

Which brings me to what I really want to discuss about Assassin’s Creed. There is nothing truly fun, or even complex, about sending your assassins around the world. You have a map with quest descriptions and different difficulty levels, and that’s about it. You assign your different assassins to different targets based on their level, watch their experience increase and then boost what few attributes you can. Very little of it makes a difference, and it is a pretty rote affair.

Yet there is something enjoyable about it.

Extra Credits recently had an episode on the word “fun”. In the episode, and in past episodes, they describe experiences as “engaging” rather than being simple playtime level fun. The word “engaging” is the best way to describe Assassin’s Creed. There’s something about it that can pull the player in, suck them into this replication of a world, and engage them without necessarily being fun.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects of the game that are fun. There was a moment in the game where I found I could exit to the outside world as Desmond and are provided a limited amount of time to do nothing more than explore the environment. Being able to hop from rooftop to rooftop, creating yourself a new unconventional pathway through the world, is certainly fun to do. It is part of why I enjoyed that simple ten minute excursion. There was nothing there. No guards, no NPC’s, no objectives, no nothing. You just go out and you wander the world.

Maybe “fun” still isn’t the right word, but I managed to enjoy myself.

Most of the game, however, is certainly “engaging”. You’re always thinking in Assassin’s Creed. You’re analyzing the world and how to interact with it. Should you wander the streets and blend with the crowd? Or perhaps you should climb the rooftops? Oddly enough, it was always easier to climb rooftops in the first Assassin’s Creed, something I greatly appreciated. Yet Assassin’s Creed 2 reversed it a bit. Guards are much more lenient on the ground now, yet the guards on the rooftops are a lot more trigger-happy and strict. Fortunately Brotherhood brings in the crossbow, a weapon that is capable of killing guards in one shot without alerting anyone in the area with the loud bang of the pistol (you know, the function of the throwing knives in the first game before they nerfed them to Hell and made them worthless).

Being “engaged” is also why a player may still enjoy their time with Assassin’s Creed even though Ubisoft seems to have trouble differentiating “challenge” and “annoying”. The games always start out well, putting you in a race against time, or forcing you to follow a target, or putting the player in a restricted area where they cannot be spotted.

Then they decide to start combining a lot of these “challenges” together. You have to follow someone through a restricted area that happens to be littered with guards. Or you have to perform a race against time where there happens to be a lot of guards around that will start shooting at you and knocking you off buildings because you’re running. Or throwing you into a restricted area with guards at just about every possible turn.

Assassin’s Creed tends to go for making itself harder rather than more challenging. I’ve discussed these two words a bit in the past, emphasizing that making a game harder doesn’t necessarily make it more challenging. Making a game harder is just a step towards making it more impossible, which is not the same as making it more challenging. If you want to increase challenge, then give the player less time to accomplish a task.

Oddly enough, Ubisoft already came up with a method to allow players to optionally change the difficulty for themselves. Each memory sequence has a “synchronization level”, and it achieve full synchronization you have to complete a task a certain way. This is optional, though. As long as you get the main objective then the sequence is complete. Full synchronization just provides a slightly greater challenge, such as accomplishing the task with a certain weapon, under a certain time limit or without losing a certain amount of health.

For some reason, though, despite the frustration (especially towards the end of the game), Assassin’s Creed remains engaging. In truth, I believe that has something to do with the sense of progress, the lack of which only helped ruin Darksiders 2 for me (which I will discuss later, and is also a bit tragic as it really is a better game than Assassins’ Creed: Brotherhood). Every time you accomplish a task the game lights up and informs you of your progress. This triggers, or engages, something in our brain and urges us to continue forward.

I have a theory that the Assassin’s Creed games would make for excellent psychological study in users and their interaction with video games. I imagine people enjoy being productive. There is a sense of satisfaction when you can look back and say “yeah, I did stuff today”. How nice and neat the house looks after cleaning it, or perhaps how clean and presentable the lawn is after mowing it. This, perhaps, is the biggest reason Assassin’s Creed can be such an addictive experience. You not only have a large playground, but the game provides a lot of feedback towards progress. How close you are to rebuilding Rome, how many feathers you’ve found, how many Borgia flags you’ve collected, etc.

The only problem is it feels like there is less reward for doing these things in Brotherhood. Some side missions give you money, and purchasing and renovating parts of Rome get you an increase in income and discounts at shops, but feathers, viewpoints and flags have gone right back to yielding little reward. You’ve found all the feathers? Congratulations, you get nothing.

Part of progress is feeling a reward for your effort. This is why fans were so angry after collecting all the flags and getting nothing more than an achievement in the first game. All that time spent searching and hunting and there was nothing to show for it within game.

This, in essence, is what Assassin’s Creed is all about, though. You sit down, power it on, and you do some stuff for a while. It may frustrate you. It may put a smile on your face. Either way, you’ve got plenty to do.