Review: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood by Oliver Bowden

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm always slightly dubious whenever I start a video game book adaptation. they're rarely anything special and they're often very forgettable reads. So I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed reading Brotherhood.



From the beginning, Bowden's style felt a little flat and a little unimaginative, add to that his sometimes clumsy structure. There were the occasional random changes in POV which just seemed awkward.

As I read through the first few chapters I felt like I was simply reading through a log of someone playing the game. "I did this challenge/ quest, then there's a cut scene *insert subtitled dialogue copied off screen*, then I did this next quest..." you get the picture. That threw me a little and I was a bit let down. However, after a few chapters it felt like Bowden had found his stride and warmed to the idea. It became less of a log of the experience and more of a novelization of the game although the clumsiness didn't disappear. As I read on I found myself becoming engaged in the story, despite knowing essentially what happened already - I haven't played the game, although I have watched a play-through of it. The story of Ezio Auditore's fight to eradicate the evil Borgia family's influence over Italy moved along in an exciting and interesting way, adding a little flesh to the bones of the Brotherhood game. You get to see a little added material through this book - some of the bits and pieces that link the individual "memories" of the game. An enjoyable experience for the majority of the book.

But, as I got closer to the end of the book it started to feel like Bowden was rushing, almost like he'd totally lost interest in the project. As I reached the last part of the book (it's divided into three parts) I was finding pointlessly short chapters; for example, chapter 59 is one paragraph long and a paragraph that could have easily been added to the previous chapter. This almost lazy and pointless extending of the chapter number did annoy me a little as it just seemed unnecessary.

But I can say that these things didn't hamper my enjoyment of the story and the book as a whole.



I was pleasantly surprised by Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. It's not amazingly written, but it's rather enjoyable. It's very much a nerdy gamer's book so if you've never played the games or don't really have that much of an interest in them then I would stay away from this one, if I were you...



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