At this point I am hoping for a minor miracle to occur in Assassin’s Creed 3. As I began to have my fill of the vast and sumptuous recreation of Rome, 1503—reimagined here as a virtual playground for a free-running open-world do-gooder—and turned my attentions to the resolution of Ezio’s now overly drawn-out saga, I was thinking what a surprise masterpiece Brotherhood turned out to be. A scant two hours later I was sitting with my mouth open during the game’s endless credit sequence hoping that everything that had just transpired was a cruel joke. Wishing, in short, that I had missed something.

What happened to get from sheer enjoyment to despair? Sit down by the fire and let me tell you a story.

Let’s begin with Assassin’s Creed 2, 2009’s game of the year and amongst the best games I have ever played. It was a sprawling world, full of beauty and murder, love and revenge, mystery and revelation. The designers had taken to heart the criticism of their first outing, namely that there was too little to do save chasing flags in their beautiful recreation of the Levant. So they added side quests diverse and varied, and a richer and more complex crowd AI. They added a cryptic series of puzzles designed to haunt visually and stimulate your inner conspiracy theorist. True, they seemed to have sacrificed something of their central premise, the tactical assassination simulator. Yes, there were plot holes as the timeline advanced. Perfection is always just out of reach.

I had assumed that Brotherhood would be a minor coda to Ezio’s story, a novella of bloody revenge on the Borgia with a unique and genuinely thrilling multiplayer experience added on. Imagine my surprise when it started something grander—effortlessly picking up minutes after the end of AC2. Ezio is principally confined to Rome, with only brief, linear excursions out into other locales, but that can be overlooked in a game on as tight a release schedule as this one was. They’d somehow jammed even more sidequests into the basic open-world formula, now replete with factions, faction quests, challenges, puzzle-lairs to overcome, chases to be had, lost memories uncovered, treasures and flags to be found, shops to be reopened, and Borgia district HQs to be overthrown. My oh my, and we haven’t even touched on the titular rebuilding of the “Brotherhood” of assassins beyond La Volpe and Machiavelli.

The storytelling is good, but tends to get lost in the details. I was sold on the mechanic of rebuilding Ezio’s familial fiefdom at Monteriggioni in AC2 on the grounds that having a base of power is precisely what an ambitious family wants, but making the whole of Rome a similar treadmill is pushing it in the extreme. I adore the brotherhood minigame, even if others didn’t appreciate its “Pro Football Manager” aspirations: you have a little screen where you outfit your charges and send them out on quests. Numerous times my wife would walk by and I would gleefully announce that I was playing “dress-up with my little assassin toys”. Having Assassin allies in town with you makes for some of the most compelling gameplay moments ever devised: Ezio silently raises his fist at the right moment; a eagle cries; and in the blink of an eye that squadron of guards between you and your target pitches over, silently cut down in a hail of arrows. Ezio rushes past into the Borgia compound and it is all over for Captain di Pietro. It’s exactly the sort of gameplay I was expecting to have presented to me, not the poorly conceived city management or insufferable War Machine sidequests. Free roaming is a blast, as ever, as is sizing up the best approach to taking out the Borgia lieutenants.

Back in the real world, Desmond, Lucy, Sean, and Rebecca are hiding in the ancient Auditore estate in Monteriggioni, and you are allowed more freedom to explore your surroundings than ever before. By obtaining access to your companions’ email accounts, you can trace the evolving relationships between your tight-knit little group; the writers have managed to forge convincing and compelling characters here (Desmond’s milquetoast aside).

So where does it all go wrong, then?

Well… in the designers fascination with their details, for a start. It is strange that in an “Assassins Creed” game one should conduct no assassinations save those on sidequests, n’est-ce pas? I thought that perhaps they were saving all of the intense stalking, infiltrating, and assassinating action for a thrilling climax where Ezio wrings his revenge (or tries to) from the Borgia, but instead everything goes completely off the rails instead.

The later chapters of the game are a laughable effort to convince you that there is a mercenary-fueled war happening in the outskirts of Rome and a series of bizarre, barely-interactive sessions of drawn-out dialogue and “combat” with the Apple of Eden. Mysterious cutscenes with strange pronouncements rule the day. One of the Borgia announces that “no man can kill me” like he’s the Witch-King of Angmar. Later, Ezio peers at the Apple, sits up, and concurs, starting a new and bizarre end sequence. (Spoiler: you kill Cesare. Meaning what the what was up with his Witch-King thing?)

In fact, there are few missions that evoke Assassins at all: infiltration, stealthy combat, concealment, etc. One entire chapter is a series of missions without chronological pause while you infiltrate the Castel Sant’Angelo, but Hitman this is not! At each mission break everything around you is reset. There’s little to no tactical planning to be done, and certainly no reward for doing so. Then you charge around invincibly wielding the Apple, then charge around some more in some other random place, then you zoom back to the present, mysterious things are said, a new faction introduced, and [REDACTED] happens, which is all highly disappointing.

So over the rails it went, slowly and inexorably throwing out all the goodwill it acquired. I noticed that the lead designer had left the company, and the game certainly plays like they ran out of his original notes, ran up against the deadline, and just threw a bunch of poorly conceived psuedo-mysterious plot twists in there for good measure. Sorting through that rubble to find a manageable story for AC3 will take a minor miracle.

So here we are. Great environment, great open-world gameplay, wonderful characterization of Desmond’s friends, excellent “Brotherhood” stuff. No tactical gameplay, no sense of being an Assassin, really. Ezio is more like an agile, indestructible force of nature. The series would be better off, gameplay-wise, by rediscovering its roots: it should be possible to recreate the experience of being an assassin. You build up a target profile, pinpoint their habits and preferred locations, scout the area, and choose your path to the target. Like Hitman, there should be numerous pathways to victory. All of the other stuff is necessary polish, but it should be in service to getting better at the core mechanic: using your parkour skills to stealthily approach someone and offing them for the greater good.

As for the story, I think we’re in trouble. There are now factions within factions and mystery people reinserting Desmond into an animus at the end, and I’m more than a little concerned that they’ve taken things to the LOST level where nothing can possibly make sense anymore. Complex mystery stories are good; adding additional complexity and mystery just because is bad.

Sad though I am to say it, AC:B gets a C-. Should’ve been so much more.

I should say a few words about the multiplayer: it is superlative, capturing so much more of the drama and tension the medium deserves than the single-player it isn’t even funny. I normally despise playing MP, but AC:B is the best MP I’ve played since Infiltration for UT. I hope it survives. The game’s multiplayer rating is an unqualified A.