My take on Assassin's Creed: Revelations SP

This entry will be about the single player portion of AC:R. There is a spoiler alert for the whole series. You have been warned.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations is the fourth entry in the award winning franchise. Assassin's Creed is an action adventure game that tells about the conflict between the two factions, the assassins and the templars. In the middle of all this is the first civilization, an ancient race of people who saw the destruction of the world. Included in all of this mess is also the technology made by first civilization, most notably the apple of eden. The ultimate goal is to stop the end of the world, which is supposed to happen in 2012 where a second solar flare will raze the world of everything living. A machine called The Animus works as the games main story platform. It let's the games protagonist Desmond Miles (voiced by Nolan North) - who is an ascendant of the assassins - to live the memories of his ancestors through his DNA. So to put it short, Assassin's Creed seeks to rewrite the history in a grand way. Assassin's Creed is also known for it's cliffhangers. Every game so far has ended in a cliffhanger that makes you want to call Ubisoft and ask them "if I kill my neighbour, will you tell me how the story continues?".

First of all I wanna point out that from a design viewpoint the animus is one of the most brilliant storytelling platforms a series could have. It let's the writers and designers create infinite amounts of stories, set anywhere in the past. They can dive in to all the great conflicts, myth or real and place the assassins and templars within that conflict. They can pull out any historic character (Assassin's creed 2 and Brotherhood introduce Leonardo Da Vinci helping the assassins) and make them a friend or foe (the final objective of Assassin's Creed 2 is to kill the pope of catholic church). Even Marco Polo's father is mentioned in Revelations. This is awesome, because it adds to the immersion, making the story events and characters all seem believable. You could say the series is knocking on the fourth wall.

There's been a conflict in the interwebz about the AC:R reviews, reviewers giving the game "only" 7.5+ has pissed off a lot of people but playing the game it instantly becomes obvious that Revelations is the second worst game in the series, right after the first part. Revelations however is... not-so-good (I don't want to say bad, the game is still fucking amazing) for completely different reasons than the first game. After an hour of Revelations it becomes obvious that the concept is finally getting tiring. Revelations adds den defense, bomb crafting and hookblade to Brotherhood's equation and that's pretty much it. The story of the overall saga is awesome enough however to keep anyone in it's grasp long enough for them to complete the game. The game also wraps up nicely the stories of two introduced assassins so far, Ezio and Altaïr. It's time for Assassin's Creed 3 which should introduce something new to the series. This probably requires a two year development cycle but we'll surely hear about AC in E3 2012.

Revelations keeps many of the elements familiar from Brotherhood and mainly just introduces the new play area, Constantinople. The city is vast and has tons of stuff to do in it, but the main problem is that this is the third entry in the series to have the same stuff to do on the side of the story so it (finally) starts to get tiring.

The main story consists of two different portions. As Ezio you are to build up the Assassin faction in Constantinople and look for the five masyaf keys that Altaïr hid away with Niccolo Polos help. The location of the keys is hidden within five books and to find these books Ezio needs the help of a young librarian called Sofia. During the search for the keys Ezio is more and more attracted to Sofia and we all know what that leads to.

Acquiring the book for the keys location is always simply a matter of running to the quest start point or doing something minor like getting flowers for Sofia. The main "challenge" lies in the dungeons the keys are at. These levels always consist of simply climbing, jumping and running forward to reach the end. They are a really nice change of pace from the city environment and I personally like them so much that I would have wanted to see more of them. Especially one of the missions where you chase a templar boat through the cavern was grand.

Each time Ezio obtains a masyaf key, he unlocks a memory that's hidden in the key by Altaïr. By following these memories we see the events after Assassin's Creed 1. On top of being great fan service the sequences are interesting and gives credit to Altaïr's character. In the end the memories lead Ezio to Altaïrs library, the games ultimate goal.

The other branch of the main story is the byzantine conflict taking place in Constantinople. While building up the assassin's brotherhood, Ezio gets caught up in the ottoman conflict, where the two brothers are quarreling over the inheritance of the sultan's position. These missions mainly involve helping out the young prince Suleiman resolve the conflict. Eventually it's revealed that Ahmet is the mastermind behind the templar scheme so it goes along to just kill him.

This storyline has all the usual missions that you already know from the latter games, but there's plenty of variety too. The storyline is good and keeps the player in it's grasp, but it's not even nearly as exciting as finding the masyaf keys.

A new Assassin's Creed means new collectables and this time they are data fragments. Once again there's a 100 of them and this time there isn't even a map you can buy in game for them. From the start every 5 fragments unlock Desmond's memory where he goes from his childhood to the trip to New York. All the memories are unlocked at 30 fragments, so they're fairly easy to unlock and the rest of the fragment's don't have any use, unless you like achievement hunting like I do.

The unlocked memories are crap. They are played in first person view, going through the insides of the animus trying to avoid black data streams and using white data blocks to move around. The levels are hard to navigate and you often get stuck, not knowing where to go, which then breaks up the storytelling. The only good thing about them is the the text that's written very well and it's easy to follow along. These sequences would have been so much better if they had been just 5-10 minute cutscenes. I would have loved to watch those, the first person sequences just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Another new addition is the den defense minigame, which I hear not many have liked. I personally enjoyed it, it was also a nice change of pace from exploring the city. Den defense occurs when templars try to take back an assassin's den that you have conquered before so you have to defend it or the templars will take over it again. Only few of these popped for me during the main story which was just enough. If they would pop up constantly it'd be a real bother. The familiar sub game where you send your assassins do missions in distant lands is back and the assassins once again gain levels from completing these missions. When an assassin reaches level 10, he can start the master assassin training which involves killing some target. The first half always fails and the second part of the training unlocks when the assassin reaches level 15. Upon completing the training, assassins can be assigned to dens and so the player doesn't need to bother with the den defense of that particular den anymore. It's good that the master assassins help with the defense but it just feels like the developers didn't want the player to like the minigame to begin with and hence they help he player to seal away this "annoyance" for good. It's not such a big part of the game though, so I don't mind.

Overall I think Assassin's Creed: Revelations is an excellent game but it fails to deliver the freshness that II and Brotherhood had. It however concludes the stories of Altaïr and Ezio, and leaves the player begging for more. The repetition of old schemes is getting tiring but the game is still excellent. At this point however I'm starting to hope for Assassin's Creed 3 with some new gameplay elements and characters. Still, even if the disc only included the cutscenes, as a fan I'd still pay for it.

Kim