Assassin's Creed Revelations

Let's recap. The Assassin's Creed franchise started out with what many would consider a flawed masterpiece. It was groundbreaking in many ways, mainly in its story, but it just wasn't that fun to play. Then we hear it's going to be a trilogy, and Assassin's Creed 2 comes out, vastly improving on the original but still with some flaws. But oh no, now a trilogy is no longer good enough. Now the dollar signs are flashing in Ubisoft's eyes and soon the word "franchise" starts rolling off their tongues. And they figure, "Man, everybody loved Ezio so much more than Altair...let's just give them more Ezio!" And so we get Brotherhood, an improvement in many ways, but also a drawback in that it was essentially the missing Rome of 2 bloated up into its own game. Then once more the heads gathered together and they said "Okay...people still love Ezio, but there's nothing more to build off of. However, we still have one more year until 2012, which is the big important year in the game. So how about we make one more game, tidy up some questions so we don't have to spend that much time in the 3rd game talking about it, and call it good?" And thus we get Revelations.

You may get a sense at this point that I am not having the greatest positive reaction to this game, and you'd be right. Here's the thing. Two years were spent between Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, and the improvement was incredible. Now we're getting yearly iterations (not even counting the portable titles in-between) and the improvements are, shall we say, not as groundbreaking. Yes, the combat's a bit more fluid. Yes, the freerunning feels tighter and more responsive. Sure, the graphics are a little better. But in almost every other way the series fails to improve, or tries to innovate and ends up slitting its own throat. And you can't help but get the feeling that if they had playtested these ideas for another year, we'd be looking at a much better product. Not only that, but while the saying runs true with many games, I think it especially fits here: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." The wonderful thing about Assassin's Creed is how unique it is in its story and locations. Keep throwing the same thing at us year after year, however, and that uniqueness starts looking pretty stale.

So it is with Revelations. But Revelations doesn't just make the mistake of being almost identical to its predecessors. Oh no. It makes the mistake in that where it's different, it sucks.

SPOILERS HERE ON OUT. Ye be warned.

First things first. We start off right at the end of Brotherhood, where Desmond is trapped in a coma inside the Animus after falling to the power of the Apple and killing Lucy. His psyche is broken, just as Subject 16 was, between his own memory and his ancestors. Rebecca has loaded him into a basic program hidden deep in the Animus called the "Black Room". It appears as a small island with gateways to other memories, to help his mind start to sort itself out. But there's a catch. After unlocking all of 16's secrets in Brotherhood you discover that 16's consciousness has been kept in the Animus as well, and he's waiting for you on this island, obviously there to help, but in a mentally imbalanced kind of way. He basically reveals that in order for Desmond to regain consciousness, he has to finish reliving both Ezio and Altair's memories until they have nothing left to show him. But he has to be careful, as if the Animus catches on to him leaving the black room it will at best pull him back, and at worst, treat him as a virus and try to delete him. On top of that, there are 5 gateways unlocked by finding animus fragments in Ezio's memory that reveal more of Desmond's backstory through...very interesting ways (more on that later). Basically it's all one big setup to wrap up Altair and Ezio's storylines and reveal a bit more of Desmond and 16's pasts.

Ezio starts off in Masayaf, the location of the first game, tracking down the lost secrets of Altair. However, it has fallen into decline and is now controlled by Templars. Barely escaping, Ezio learns of the existence of a library in the keep that possibly holds a great weapon, and which can only be opened with 5 keys. The Templars have one, and the rest were hidden by Niccolo Polo, Marco Polo's father, in Constantinople. But in an Inception-like turn, each key turns out to hold the memories of Altair, and so during these sequences you're essentially playing as Desmond playing as Ezio playing as Altair. They tell the story of Altair's rule and fall and eventual return as leader of the assassins, and finish up his story quite nicely. Back in Constantinople, between retrieving keys Ezio gets caught up in a civil war between two brothers looking to claim the sultanship for their own, and of course discovers one is a Templar and does everything he can to stop him. You can probably guess the rest. Ezio routs the Templars, finds the keys, opens the library, learns a secret, and shares everything he has left to share with Desmond so Desmond can wake up.

As for Desmond's past, these five...challenges? are unlike anything else in the series. They most closely resemble 16's puzzles, but only in that they're segmented chunks of story you unlock sequentially by finding things on the map. In short, they're first person sequences where you hop on various geometric shapes and can place your own either bars or ramps to further progress your way through the level. Sometimes there are blocks of data you can't touch, sometimes there are areas where you can't place blocks, sometimes there are areas where your blocks will drift in a certain direction...Basically they're platforming-ish puzzles, each revealing more of the story of Desmond's journey from the Farm to New York to Abstergo. Don't make sense? I don't blame you. If you tried explaining that to me I'd go "What the fuck are you on about?" Just...google an image or something cause that's the only way you'll see.

Now, I have a lot of problems with this game and I'm going to try my best to dole out some good with bad, but here's where the bad begins. So, in both 2 and Brotherhood, collecting things in the world got you big reveals. Sure there's 100 feathers to collect, but there's a nice reward for doing it! Now there's only 10 feathers, and all you get is an achievement, but there's 100 flags and a handy cape for those! In Revelations...they do the reverse. There's 100 Animus fragments, and 10 memoir pages. 30 fragments opens up all 5 Desmond memories. After 50 you can see all of them on your map. And at 100...a trophy. That's it. A bronze trophy. It practically spits in your face, especially as there are 2 OPEN DOORWAYS past the 5 you unlock. But apparently those are just there to get your hopes up. The pages, however, net you the best armor in the game. What. You can imagine my rage when I spent all this time tracking the damn things down, only to have just the trophy pop up saying "Congratulations for wasting your time!" It was an especial insult because the Desmond sequences were very interesting, despite how weird they were, and I wanted more of them and more about Desmond. So fuck you too Ubisoft.

As for the rest of the game, it plays almost exactly like Brotherhood. There are two touted innovations this time around, however: the hookblade and bombs. The hookblade adds a little bit to your climbing reach and makes things speedier, as well as letting you zipline across the rooftops. Technically it can be used in combat too but the difference is mostly cosmetic (except for the ability to counter-steal, where you block an opponent's attack and steal their gold at the same time). Bombs come in three groups: lethal, tactical, and diversion. Lethal ones kill, tactical hinder your enemies in some way (smoke bombs, caltrops), and diversionary draw guards' attention somewhere else. You can technically craft like 300 different types of bombs depending on the shell used, the explosive radius, and the effect type, but pretty early on you'll realize maybe only 2 or 3 combinations for each type really matter. Overall I found them a welcome addition, as they added some variety to how to get through each encounter, but for the most part I would often completely forget about using them unless the game forced me to, which it would do very, very often. I understand you want people to use this new mechanic you put a lot of time into, but forcing them to play a mission where bombs are the only way to get full synch? Especially the only epic mission in the game, namely the one they showed off for E3? Not cool.

Speaking of, I honestly didn't have that much of a problem with the full synch requirements for missions in Brotherhood. Sure, they were often quite a lot of trouble and could limit how to play a mission or made a mission seemingly impossible (I'm looking at you, "don't get hit" tank mission), but most of the time they simply seemed to fit with being a better assassin. Like don't lose too much health, kill only your target, don't be detected, etc. In Revelations things feel wholly different. Technically many of the requirements remain the same, but somehow this time they feel more arbitrary and harder to accomplish. The "don't use blades" E3 level and "kill 6 guards from a haystack" when only 1 guard patrols around a haystack level are the most egregious examples, but some levels "don't be detected" or "don't lose any health" are practically game-killers in how often you have to replay it to get it right (if you're a perfectionist like me and want that 100% sync). And of course, all you have to look forward to with that 100% is a goddamned trophy, and of course getting rid of the feeling like you failed that mission because you didn't play it the way they told you to.

Also revamped and nearly game-breaking is the notoriety system, Borgia towers (now Assassin's Dens) and economy. And yes, they do all tie together. Each Den plays out just like a Borgia tower. You kill a captain, climb to the top of the tower, light the beacon, and it's yours. It also allows you to renovate nearby shops. However, this time, if your notoriety gets too high the Templars can launch an assault on your den, which propels you into the Den Defense minigame, which is the worst idea they've ever come up with. Essentially it's a tower defense game where you set up different types of units on the rooftops and barricades in the street while waves of Templars come by and tear it all down in an attempt to wreck your den. This...minigame...is so bad...there are no words. Most of it appears to be luck. And the worst part is, if you lose, the tower just goes back to Templar control, and it's actually usually faster to just forfeit the minigame and then reclaim the tower than it is to play the minigame. As for notoriety, the best I can say is that they listened to fans and got rid of the stupid posters. On the other side, they made it so that renovating a shop or buying a landmark bumps up your notoriety by 25%. Killing a guard doesn't even do that. It's fractional compared to that. And sure, there are no more posters, but now bribing heralds only takes away 25% (and they're less abundant), and killing officials takes away 50% but they hardly ever pop up. Oh, and capturing a den automatically makes you notorious. But it's the punishing you for renovating that makes me cringe. Essentially for every shop you renovate you have to find a herald, unless you like playing the godawful den defense game, which brings the whole system to a crawl. Not only that, but gold is less abundant overall. All those treasure chests now only contain bomb ingredients for the most part.

This also ties in to the slightly reworked assassin recruits and Mediterranean Defense, where you send your recruits to other cities to spread Assassin influence. This time each mission reduces Templar influence at that city, and you also have the option to try and reclaim the city. If you do, the city brings in bomb ingredients and gold for you. However, your own influence also decreases over time, and if it reaches 0 you have to reclaim it again. Missions earn your assassins xp, and once they reach level 10 they can be promoted to the head of one of your dens. If they reach level 15 they become master assassins and the den they protect can no longer be targeted for den defense. However, it takes quite a lot of time, and it's pretty boring, so I only had 2 master assassins by the time the main story ended.

What this all goes to show is that Revelations suffers from the same problem that plagued Brotherhood. There's simply too much to do. Between worrying about den defense, gaining your assassins xp, renovating, finding heralds, trying to complete faction challenges, searching for fragments and pages, yadayadayada you're left with hours worth of tedious things to do far after the story is over. In Brotherhood I put it up to a simple misjudgement in wanting to include everything to make the game seem longer. In Revelations there is no excuse. This time they knew it was padding around a main story that, while it lives up to its name in theory (sure it reveals things, but they're not very interesting revelations) is pretty bare otherwise. The civil war storyline is pure filler with nothing interesting to it. Ezio's search for the truth Altair left behind has its strong points, but falters in others. And worst of all, Ezio's relationship with his future wife, which could have provided the emotional center this game needed to make any sort of impact, is almost completely skipped over or is simply told to us in Ezio's narration.

Here's the thing. Revelations is not a bad game per se. It's still an Assassin's Creed game, and that core gameplay and interesting story that keep this series so fascinating is still there. But as I did with Uncharted 3, I have to look at this game in the light of its predecessors. Because we have to face facts here. Anything good in Revelations came from the last games. Almost everything new that it adds either nearly breaks the experience or makes little difference overall. If I hadn't played the other, better games, I probably would've given this an 8 or 8.5. But as it goes...

Assassin's Creed Revelations gets a 7/10.