Assassin's Creed Double Pack: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood & Assassin's Creed Revelations - Xbox 360

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Ubisoft took a slightly different tack with Brotherhood than it did with Assassin's Creed 2. Rather than jumping forward another few hundred years, the company continued the story of the last game's protagonist. Things pick up exactly where the last game left off, though it's an older, more experienced Ezio than we saw in the last game.

Many of the core stealth and free running mechanics that marked AC2 remain in place – a fact that won't be upsetting many series fans – but a couple of crucial new elements have been brought in. Firstly, as suggested, you can recruit new assassins. This brings a new element of strategy to the game, as well as a new layer of characterisation. As you recruit new allies, you'll be able to send them off on missions around the city to further your cause against the Templars and line your pockets, as well as get them to offer support on your own missions by providing distractions or even fending off attackers!

Also new to the series is an online multiplayer element. It revolves, as you might expect, around assassination. In the Wanted mode, players are assigned someone to kill and have to do it in the manner they would in the game – using stealth and agility. While they're out trying to kill another player, however, someone else is trying to kill them. Alliance takes this mechanic and throws in team-based cooperation, while Hunter sees one player trying to take out a target while all the others try to stop them.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations allows the Renaissance hero to find the last pieces of the Apple of Eden jigsaw puzzle and solve the mystery that has haunted him for years. He does so by traveling back to where the struggle between Templars and Assassins began - Constantinople, during the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

As well as the usual weapons at Ezio’s disposal, you get to play with a new toy called the Hookblade. It can be used to grab and chuck enemies around and line them up for some spectacular assassinations - but it goes far beyond combat. Rooftops are now littered with zip lines that can allow Ezio to sling himself down at high speed (with the added bonus of assassination from above).

You can now create your own bombs in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations too, with black markets in the city selling ingredients for you to mix in various bomb shops to build the explosive for whatever situation you want.

Not only that, but you get two assassins for the price of one - Altair, the protagonist of the first AC game, is back and in fine form.

While the last Assassin’s Creed game introduced the Brotherhood (which makes a return in Revelations), the big new concept here is the Dens. Dens are hotly-contested areas in which you have the option (or in some missions, requirement) to attack to gain some ground against the war with the Templars and Byzantines. As well as attacking and taking dens, you'll be charged with defending them. These missions see your own areas get challenged by enemy forces. This is probably the biggest change to the Assassin’s Creed formula - tower defence gameplay from the third-person viewpoint of Ezio, the Den commander!

In short, there's plenty of Assassin's Creed: Revelations - both familiar and unfamiliar - to sink your blade into.