Assassin's Creed Brotherhood: Early Thoughts

So much content to chew through in this game it might be awhile before I have done enough to say mostly finished.  So here are two bits of brotherhood so far one awesome, the other not so much.


Awesome Creed

The ability to summon your own squad of upgradeable assassins at damn near anytime, even during story missions.  Target a dude, hit L bumper and watch assassins dive out of every little nook and cranny to apply hidden blade to the targets face.
 
Its pretty much a screw you button. 

Combine this with the fact that they are pretty damn good at killing and, perhaps more importantly, not dieing compared to the average help you get in other games, makes these guys awesome.  Upgrading them is also a fun little management game of a sort, with the reward being better assassins.  The sheer joy of using these guys gives you plenty of reasons to get more and train them to max level, rewarding you with cash and items even when they aren't being directly used in your missions.  

Also they get smoke bombs and aren't afraid to use them


Brotherhood of Fail

Synchronisation really, really gets on my nerves.  Each mission has a secondary objective to achieve most of the time its a "Don't get detected" or "perform the assassination in this specific manner".  I'm okay with it the majorirty of the time, not requiring me to alter my chosen path significantly.  However it sometimes picks some of the most annoying and picky requirements that really hamstring what should be a fairly open game.  Given the wide variety of tools you get in the game and numerous ways missions can be done, why would you railroad the players down a specific route?

Mostly what annoys me about it is, if they rephrased it and relabeled it I would have been fine with it.  Being told part way through the mission that you have failed full sync and at the end being told you only got 50% sync makes me feel like I'm being handed the dunce cap and told you're doing it wrong.  If instead they called it extra/bonus objective and provided a more immediate but not essential reward, say cash or small items, I would have been fine.  I could have felt confident in doing the task if it suited me without feeling like I've failed to do the game properly if i choose to ignore it.

The last annoyance for this feature is that it doesn't really give you much.  Full sync gives you some cheats.  How nice, I suppose.  The other reward is the memory missions (very cool so far) which looks like you will inevitably unlock them as long as you do some full sync missions.  Not exactly a hideous drive to make you go over every last damn mission to get the fabled 100%.