Ubi unveils AC: Brotherhood multiplayer

Ubisoft has finally unveiled the first of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer modes. It's called Wanted, and it sees the historical shiv-'em-up venturing online far more successfully than the last game's DRM ever did.

Wanted is available for up to eight players at a time, and sees you hitting the streets of Rome to carry out contract murders. Every match will begin with each assassin being given a rival player to track down and take out, and the game keeps tabs on who's the most deadly and balances itself accordingly.

That means that if you're handy with the steel - a bit like Warren G - you can expect to have four or five hooded menaces heading your way to mess things up for you fairly regularly. APB works in kind of the same way, but you can't almost certainly climb up guttering while wearing a ruff in APB.

As with every other multiplayer game made from now until the day the sun explodes or a nearby galaxy tears the Milky Way to pieces, there's an XP system in place, allowing you to customise your character and upgrade things as you level up.

It's worth mentioning that, in keeping with the tone of the single-player game, Wanted won't just reward you for kills but for the style with which you pull them off.

Cowards will be pleased to hear that you'll also be showered with points for successfully running away from danger too.

It's brilliant stuff by the looks of it, offering a devious competitive twist to the main game, while revelling in the standard Assassin's Creed business of scampering up the wall of a building and titting around in haystacks as you fight on a range of maps covering various districts of Rome.

Ubisoft's apparently had people working on multiplayer content for well over a year, and you can expect all of the different modes to incorporate free roaming, free running, and "social stealth" to some extent.

Fans of the series' fiction, meanwhile, will be interested to hear that you're actually playing as a Templar in Wanted, as you take on the role of an Abstergo trainee stuck in one of those Animuses you may have run past during Assassin's Creed II's slightly wonky opening sequence.

Please dress accordingly, eh?

Oh, and check out our Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood single-player preview and the E3 trailer below, too.