1) Twelve Towers Shall Stand in Thy Way

The overarching structure of Brotherhood revolves around the 12 "Borgia towers" that are spread across Rome. So-named because they've been built by the Borgia family and indicate their stranglehold over the city, Ezio must infiltrate each tower and burn it to the ground. It's an interesting way to structure the game because the status of a Borgia tower can have a direct impact on the missions within its jurisdiction. If the Borgia tower still stands, expect guards to be patrolling the area. If Ezio has taken it down, however, the guards will have cleared out. That's not the only flow-on from completing a Borgia tower mission. Doing so will give Ezio access to the stores in the neighbourhood, and this time, items are unlocked at the stores as more and more of the same type are opened up. Opening up five of eight tailors, for instance, might unlock a new pouch or other accoutrement.

Each successful Borgia tower conquest also opens up a new slot for an assassin to join Ezio's guild. It's no accident that there are 12 towers and Ezio is able to have a maximum of 12 assassins by the end of the game.

Of course, the real question is – just how much variety will there be in each tower? Players don't want it to be monotonous to work their way through 12 samey missions. We really don't know how much variety there'll be at this stage, only having seen a small portion of the tower gameplay, but the team has talked about how the tower leader's temperament will influence how it will play out. He's your ultimate target, but if he's a coward – for instance, he'll try and flee. If he can get away you may have to wait until dawn or dusk (whatever's first) and a changing of the guards before you can try again. Will the next shift leader have a different temperament to the previous one? Guess we'll have to wait and see.

2) The Game Shall Be Historically Accurate... According to the Interwebs

Ubisoft Montreal's approach to historical realism is an excellent and practical one. Namely, "if you can find the information within 30 seconds on the net, then it should be accurate in our game," Mission Director Gaelec Simard told us. This means the game needs to adhere to the broader strokes of history, but not the minutiae that could bog it down. This is, after all, meant to be a piece of entertainment, as opposed to a Life During Renaissance Italy simulation.

Ezio's main mission in Brotherhood is to wrest Rome from the grip of the Borgia family, but a quick search online will establish that Leonardo Da Vinci at one point worked for Cesare Borgia, which means this has to be represented in the game. "We're putting a twist on it, in the sense that Leonardo is forced to do it, but he's still your friend, so he's kind of helping you underground," says Simard. "He's still a provider of inventions, [but] he's also going to be the reason you have to go and destroy some of his war machines that he's designed for the Borgias. They're our exotic missions, and there's a storyline behind that too."

3) BAM Shall Be Crowned the King of All Acronyms

Brotherhood is all about recruiting and using Ezio's guild of assassins, and the BAM, or Brotherhood Assistance Move, is the lifeblood of directing the assassins. Any time you call on them you're executing a BAM. Your assassins are paired up, so if you target a group of enemies it will be two assassins who appear to wreak havoc. The team has kept it simple, however – you won't be able to have custom BAM teams for different uses. Instead, "the BAM will always take your highest level assassins," says Gaelec, "so the leftmost BAM will always be your two higher ranking assassins, then it'll be in decreasing strength, so if you have the three BAMs available, the first one you're going to call is always going to be your best one."

You may not be able to customise your assassins' abilities to too great an extent, but as Gaelec explained: "You can put skill points in their armour and weapons. Armour will of course reduce the chance that they'll die, weapons they're going to hit harder and dispatch their enemies more easily. And then you can get more skills, so at first they start with just a hidden blade, then they can get the smoke bomb. If you have three BAMs and you hold the button they're going to send a shower of arrows – like we showed at E3."

4) Thy Assassins Shall Be Mortal

The assassins seem like they'll balance the game in the player's favour, right? Well, not necessarily. For starters it's going to take you a while to build up a few teams of two – as mentioned earlier you get one slot per Borgia tower defeated. Secondly, there's a cool-down time on using BAMs, so it's not like you're going to be BAM-ing it up constantly. Thirdly, you can send your assassins out on missions across Europe. In this way they'll be involved in shaping the wider course of history (concerning the Spanish Inquisition and presumably other significant events of the time), and will gain experience, but of course, they're not available for you to call on while away.

Using the assassins, then, is going to be a balancing act, and the more experience they have, the more powerful they'll be, but the more precious they'll become. Thus, it's up to the player to judge whether his assassins can take on targets – send them in to the slaughter and that's the end of them. Time to recruit replacements.

5) Thy Shall Specialise in Death From Above

It was incredibly satisfying leaping onto guards from on high in Assassin's Creed II, driving Ezio's hidden blades through two necks in one fluid motion. Death From Above returns with a vengeance in Brotherhood. For starters, when you unleash a BAM on enemies, if there are any buildings nearby your assassins will drop from on high – Ezio-style - to try and dispatch their targets, more often than not crumpling them to the ground in one smoother move. It's incredible to watch from a distance and promises to be hugely satisfying to unleash.

Of course, like the previous game, Ezio's able to pull off similar moves, and Death From Above is even more satisfying if you can pull it off in multiplayer. It's no easy thing, however, as standing around on ledges makes you easy pickings for players that are hunting you. We're expecting new moves too. As you may have seen in the Enter Rome trailer, Ezio can now leap from horseback straight into an acrobatic spin around a wire above him in order to drop down onto an enemy on horseback that was following him. Very cool. More please.

6) Thy Horse Shall Go Where You Go

One change that may not seem like a big deal, but that will have plenty of flow-on in the game is the fact that Ezio can now ride his horse within city walls. This isn't just handy in terms of mobility - it also opens up some really cool moves. Ezio can now parachute down from the top of a building to land neatly on the back of a horse, and can also leap from his horse to an enemy's horse and assassinate him in one brutal move. Having Ezio and enemies on horseback also means that missions and gameplay can be built around using the horses and horse combat within Rome, so expect even more mission variety.

7) Thou Shall Upgrade the City of Rome

Speaking of Rome, you've probably heard that there's a Rome upgrade system in the game. This obviously replaces the Villa upgrade mechanic from the last game, but has quite a few differences. The most obvious is that you can't upgrade what you don't control. Until an area is free from the tyrannical Borgias, you can't do anything with it, so taking down the Borgia towers is crucial. Everything in this game flows into everything else.

Just how far the upgrade system goes we're not sure. Will it contribute to the player's coffers? Will it change the look of the city? We don't know, but Rome is looking amazing. The team has gone to great lengths to include all the most famous – and plenty of the lesser known – landmarks, and for them to be all placed in the right positions. From the Vatican district and St Peters, to the fortress Castel Sant'Angelo, the Pantheon, the Capitoline Hill, the Forum, Circus Maximus, and – of course - the Coliseum.

"We already had the materials for Rome when we started the game," says Gealec. This was because the team dispatched staff to all the Italian cities to be featured in Assassin's Creed II before development on that game. "We also worked with books, historians and architects, so we tried to get as much info as we can about how the landmarks looked back then, find maps of the city in that era and from then on, we try to place the landmarks with the right relative position to one another, and then the streets and the rest, we created to fit our technical limitations and also our gameplay needs."

8) Stabbing People in the Back Shall Be Great Sport

Multiplayer in Brotherhood is shaping up to be pretty unique. Take the Wanted mode. Up to eight players are dropped into a populated area and assigned a target to kill. A rudimentary radar guides you towards your target, but you'll never be 100% sure which person you're after unless they're on their own or do something that an NPC wouldn't.

It's best to avoid the temptation to run everywhere, then, as that's a dead giveaway, and makes another player stepping up and cutting your throat all the more likely. Instead, blending in with crowds (there's even a special ability that can transform a group into your character model) or disguising yourself (again, there's a special ability to do this) can keep you alive for longer. As can using gates which close behind you when pursued, or tossing down a smoke bomb to make a getaway.

Playing it patiently has other benefits. This isn't a straight-up fragfest. You're awarded points based on the skill and subtlety of each kill. Running up to your target and stabbing him in the chest is only worth 100 points, for instance, whereas stealth kills from on high or undetected kills or pulling your target out of a bale of hay where he thinks he's hiding can be worth up to 700. The potential tactics in this one mode alone go pretty deep, and the better you're doing, the more people can be assigned to kill you, so it gets very interesting very quickly. We can't wait to see what the team does with the full multiplayer suite.

It's also pretty cool how the multiplayer game ties in with the single player. Multiplayer is essentially training for the Abstergo agents (aka the modern day templars) to brush up on their killing skills in order to hunt down Ezio. Yes, there'll be missions related to the multiplayer agents in the single player game.

9) There Shall Be a Veritable Bounty of Side-Missions

Guess what? It's going to be a serious side-mission-fest in Brotherhood. "All the mission types that we had in AC2 are back," says Gaelec, "but now we've packaged them, so there's the mercenary missions, which are assassination contracts, then you have the thieves and courtesans, we have the Machiavelli missions where you have to kill characters that are in the multiplayer game. The flags are back from AC1. We have a couple of feathers but now we've also gone back to flags, which fits into reducing the influence of the Borgias, and now we've added that if you see them in Eagle Vision they're going to be marked on your map, so then you can collect them later and they're going to be easier to find. The chests are also marked on your map. We have all the secret locations which were the assassin's tombs in AC2, but now there's another story related to them."

That's not all, of course. One other big part of the game are the new 'exotic' missions. We guess this means scaling citadel walls, running around a city leaping from rooftop to rooftop and then swan-diving onto an enemy from on high to jam a spike through his skull is considered 'normal'. Regardless, there are five exotic missions in Brotherhood. The sequence from E3 of Ezio manning cannons on top of battlements to take out approaching siege towers is one of them, while the naval cannon and using a Gatling gun on a horse cart are both shown briefly in the most recent trailer (below). The other two, along with other as yet unannounced side-missions, will remain a secret.

10) The Player Shall be Rewarded for Striking First and Striking Fast

Ezio may have a cadre of assassins at his fingertips in Brotherhood, but even on his own he's even more of a bad-ass than he was before. The team has rebuilt the combat system to reward players who go on the offensive. If you string together a number of attacks without getting hit Ezio will essentially be on a roll, which means he'll start dispatching enemies with ease and with stylish flourishes. These vary depending on the weapons equipped, so you might combo sword strikes and gun blasts, or sweep an enemy's feet out from under him with the crossbow then fire a bolt into his head when he hits the ground.

The brutality in combat steps up a notch in Brotherhood.
Of course, Ezio can still bide his time and counter-attack, and these animations are cool too, but it's good to see the player actively rewarded for a combination of skill and aggression. There's strategy to it as well, not just in killing enough enemies without being hit to go on a roll, but to use the streak to your advantage in other ways. Borgia tower leaders, for instance, will always block, so you need to open them up with a kick to do damage... or you can start an attack sequence with militia then progress to the leader once your streak is in full swing.

So there you have it, The Ten Commandments of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.