Hands-on shows Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer is fun, if unfinished

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was impossible to miss at PAX Prime last weekend, what with it's massive display and flashy booth.

We weren't only intrigued by the booth's spare-no-expense decor, though; we were also curious as to how Brotherhood's multiplayer was looking.

Choose your Assassin in "Wanted"

Before you start going around killing people in Wanted, which reminded us of a Deathmatch mode, you choose your Assassin. Each choice has its own set of abilities, one of which is allowing you to change your appearance to look like the NPCs walking around the city.

I picked the Courtesan, a female character of course, and my weapon of choice was throwing knives. Once I chose my deadly lady, I was assigned another player to assassinate. In Wanted, up to eight players are thrust onto a city map where each is assigned someone else to kill. The catch to this is that your target, like you, looks like any another other NPC in appearance while walking around in the map.

To help you counter the anonymity of your mark, the game provides you with a radar to locate the unfortunate victim; as you get closer to them, the marker inside the radar gets larger. However, while this may sound like it makes easy prey of your intended, the reality is anything but. It was still tricky to find the person I was trying to kill, because even though the radar showed my target's location, I had no idea who they were in the crowd unless they started acting differently than the rest.

Unless they were standing stock still, running, or just seemed a bit odder than the general populous, I had no idea how to differentiate between them and the NPCs meandering about the map.

Luckily, I figured out who my target was thanks to them looking a bit lost, but should I have chosen in error and killed an innocent NPC, the target would have vanished on my radar and I would have lost points.

Not only would this have happened, but I would have also stood out more to the person who had me assigned as their target. Drawing a lot of attention to yourself will, ultimately, get you killed, so you need to be slick and discreet.

If you're spotted by your would-be Assassin, you can try blending into a crowd. Should that not work, like Altair and Ezio before you, you can start running across the rooftops until in effort to escape.

Luckily, this never happened to me, and the demo - which lasted about 10 minutes - ended with me going about my merry way.

Was it fun? It was.

Still a ways to go

The demo's controls showed the game has a ways to go in terms of mechanics, as I had a bit of a hard time pulling off some of the killing moves I was used to doing in both Assassin's Creed 1 & 2.

I also got a bit confused while trying to get myself in the correct position to pull it off the kills. Part of this, assuredly, was down to frantically trying to finish my target without drawing attention to myself, but the build wasn't complete either; obviously, this'll be remedied by the time it hits shelves in November.

Still, even with a rusty demo and an unskilled Assassin steering the 360 controls, Brotherhood was fun; it's now in the top ten must-haves for the rest of the year.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is slated for release on November 16 and 19 in the US and Europe, respectively.