Having been pleasantly surprised with the single player game, I decided to have a go of the multiplayer tonight and its also pleasantly surprising. They've actually managed to make it in such a way as to discourage random chaotic murder so the game is a careuul balancing act of stalking and evasion.

Anyone up for a few sessions (360 version)?

I don't have it, but please post your experiences with it. I'm genuinely curious as to how well they managed to take a single player game and translate it into something that works for multiplayer.

I have the PS3 version so I'll have to pass. But having played the introductory mission it does look promising so I may have to actually try playing the multiplayer at some point despite my hatred of playing online.

This provides a good description
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/07/assassins-creed-brotherhood-impressions/

I'd be up for some, but I haven't played the mode before. I'm still up for it, though.

By the way, I think Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood may be my favorite game this year. Yeah, the advertising for the game was pretty terrible leading up to it, but they seem to have learned their lesson in ads since. Here I thought it would only be a multiplayer game, but Giant Bomb started talking about the single player and I realized that I should ask for the game for Christmas. I've been playing it along with Dance Central steadily over the break.

I wouldn't recommend that anyone plays it without playing the second game, though. You'll miss the significance of certain events without that base of knowledge from it. Don't worry about the first one, though. All you need to know is expelled within the opening few seconds of II.

Doesn't it always end like this? http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/11/19/

Eh, only sometimes.

Well its smaller scale, only 6-8 actual players, so there's a lot of wandering AI using a mix of the same models that the players are using so you can't just hunt down the one player using the courtesan because there's dozens of them. You have to follow your fairly vague radar which is a circle with a coloured wedge pointing in the direction of your target and it expands the closer you get. That leads to lots of investigating to ID your target, careful stalking of your target trying to surprise him (rushed kills are low scoring kills) whilst trying to tactfully avoid other people hunting you down.

As a quick example, imagine you're playing Wanted (the games equivelent of a free for all deathmatch) as the courtesan and you've been given the target of a doctor. He's a long way from you so the radar points you in the right direction but is a really thin wedge. You take off at a sprint to make up some time, the radar wedge growing steadily wider as you approach until it's taking up the whole radar, you're within about 10 metres. As you round the corner, you see 3 doctors in the courtyard and you're not sure which is which so you have to observe and wait for the target to give himself away, because you need to evade your pursuer, you blend in with a small crowd that includes another courtesan cynically using her as bait. The doctor gives himself away just as your pursuer arrives and begins to give chase. Dropping a smoke bomb to disorient him and stop him following you, you dash over and slit the throat of the doctor, fulfilling the contract and gaining you a good chunk of points before dashing around the corner to hide on a nearby bench whilst your pursuer speeds off in the wrong direction, eventually losing you and the points to be gained from the contract. He also loses about 10-15 seconds waiting for another contract to be assigned and can do nothing but try to evade the people trying to kill him.

Its a long way from the chaotic stab-fest I suspected it'd be, very nice surprise.

Hmm, that does sound promising. What I loved about AC and AC2 was that playing things as a chaotic stab-fest was usually the worst way to do it.

i tried it out after finishing the single player, not expecting to think a massive amount of it, but i love it, im hooked, currently level 32 i think