Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Ubisoft's gone a lot deeper with this one than the short turnaround time might lead you to expect. While the adventure may be primarily focused on a single city, Rome is enormous - three times the size of Florence in the last game, apparently - and the guild you're slowly piecing together is far more exciting than a limp meta-game to break up the drainpipe scampering.

Brotherhood members are recruited by winning over likely candidates in the city who need your help, and from there you'll have to send these NPCs out throughout Europe on contract assignments to train them up. It's a mixture of RPG levelling and gambling, by the looks of it, as you're always running the risk of getting promising recruits killed if you become impatient and send someone out to do a task they're not ready for yet.

Once they're fully levelled-up, the fun really kicks in, and you can start using your assassins in-game as Ezio goes about his own business. It's a stylish twist on special attacks for the most part, if a mission we're shown, drawn from later in the game, is to be trusted: Ezio's making his way into enemy territory, and after scoping out the perimeter defences, a whistle is all it takes to bring his brotherhood in to clear off gunmen lurking on the rooftops.

Hitting the streets, he can then call in an airstrike of arrows to take out perimeter guards, before ducking into a church to pull off an assassination using a crossbow, just one of the game's new weapons. (The crossbow works like a charm, too, seamlessly pulling the camera in close for over-the-shoulder targeting, and relying on a silvery line-of-sight reticule.)

Once outside again, a third and final whistle brings assassins dropping out of the sky to take on the Swiss guards that have cornered you, and it's only as Ezio saunters away through the fighting that you'll probably realise he only personally killed one man during the entire mission. When you're the best, it would seem, you can sit back and get other people to do your dirty work for you.

Calling in the brotherhood is currently mapped to the bumpers, and its implementation looks to be fairly contextual. It promises to tie into the puzzling aspects of the earlier game's assassinations, as you scope out your targets, look for weak points to exploit in the security, and then move in as elegantly as you can, and it adds a real touch of class to proceedings.

Rather than being the trainee, forever proving yourself, Brotherhood promises to deliver on the fantasy of being the man in charge - the person at the centre of it all who gets jobs done without ever breaking his cool. You'll have to build up your guild quite a bit to get to this level of omnipotence, however, and it's worth remembering that the brotherhood is merely a new tool amongst all the old reliable stuff, too.