In light of the recent release of Assassin's Creed IV (which is actually the sixth installment in the series) I thought I would set aside some time and talk about Revelations. Why, you ask? Because Assassin's Creed: Revelations was easily the worst installment in the series so far. As with every Assassin's Creed game, that opinion is far from being across the board; there are some aggregates who called Revelations the best AC game thus far, but I think most people would agree, this was a low point for the series.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love Assassin's Creed. Nobody was more ready for Revelations than I was. I preordered it, I had the poster, I was obsessed with the trailer and watched it probably a dozen times along with the various other gameplay showcases and such, I read all of the news covering it and I even went back and renewed some of the experiences from the older games just so everything was all fresh in my mind. I really wanted to love this game when I put the disc into my console on November 15th, 2011.
What I got was a bit disappointing.
First and foremost were the graphics. Now, I'm not one to get all uppity over such a thing, most of my favorite games are featured on older consoles. I know that fancy graphics do not a great game make but did anyone else watch the release trailer? Was there any doubt that this game would look stunning beyond what any other game had previously accomplished? Ezio does not look like the badass assassin master that we saw with a noose around his neck in the trailer, he looks... homely. I can't quite place it but they messed up his face somehow.
Next we have the setting. Before I played the game, I thought that Constantinople would be a really great city for Ubisoft to work their creative magic. It seemed ripe for the assassinating. When I got there, however, I realized it wasn't quite as fitting as I'd originally thought it would be. It was crowded, shrouded and all very much the same looking. It made me miss the clear openness of the previous installments or the many completely unique structures and city squares that those worlds were littered with. I found myself becoming very board very quickly with this dull landscape that you'd expect would be just the opposite. And sure, it's vibrant at first but after playing for a few hours, you'll know what I mean.
The next major issue is the equipment used within the game. The hookblade was a big selling point for this installment and it was supposed to be this awesome new tool that would reshape the way you play the game. However, if you've played AC III, you know that the hookblade isn't in that game at all so obviously, this did not happen. The hookblade could be utilized in many ways to assist in combat, escape, climbing or just getting around. Despite all of that, I found that I barely used the damn thing. Every chance I had the opportunity to use the mechanic, I either didn't think of it, found it was too difficult to go out of my way to pull off or I simply didn't require it. For instance, you can do this neat escape maneuver that does a flip over a stationary guard while you maintain your speed in a sprint but instead of doing that, I found it much easier to just run around the guard, that way there's no chance of me fucking up the timed button pressing. The only thing I regularly used it for was for zip-lining which was, admittedly, really cool.
Another equipment inclusion would be that of the reimagined bomb system. Whereas in the old games, you had a bunch of smoke bombs that could be used tactically to either make an opening or stall for an escape, in Revelations you'd be able to construct your own bombs and tailor them for use in various situations. This is done by combining a plethora ingredients that you can acquire throughout the world be it from a locked treasure chest or off of a dead guard's body. This is a neat idea and I can see where they were going with it as it encourages the player to explore and think tactically. Depending on what ingredients you use you can control the size of the explosion, method of detonation and the effect of the bomb. For instance, one bomb could just kill while one is a smoke bomb while still another is a blood bomb that creates panic. At first I got all enraptured in this idea and thought it was great until I realized something: they're all pretty much the same. Yep. The only real difference between bombs is that you have ones that kill and ones that stall. Size? Always go maximum, no reason not to. As for the detonation, don't bother with anything that's not explosion on impact after being thrown. I found that even after all of my meticulous planning I still had a very difficult time getting guards to walk across my tripwire bombs and even then it wasn't worth much when I could easily just kill him myself and be done with it.
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| Pictured: Being done with it. |
When I play through Assassin's Creed games, I don't take any part of it for granted. I do everything from even the pettiest of side quests to collecting all of those elusive feathers and achievements. You know what's fun? Putting effort into obtaining money and then purchasing land in order to build a strong tax base in order to buy more equipment as well as more land and then being satisfied as you reap your rewards. You know what isn't fun? Finishing that only to have someone erase your hard work before telling you to do it all again. This is what I faced with Revelations which tasked me with buying all kinds of land and properties in the exact same manner that Brotherhood had me do. At least they upgraded and modified the process from AC II to Brotherhood but here it's just copied and pasted. I didn't even give it the time on my playthrough and to this day, it remains unfinished. Who wants to do all that shit twice?
Another thing that remains begrudgingly the same would be the Borgia tower missions. AC Brotherhood introduced this feature wherein if you systematically take out the Templar-backed Borgia fortresses, you could gain land and footholds towards taking Rome for the Assassins. Revelations lazily recycles this idea and by now, it's just tedious.
What's even worse is the addition of the tower defense mini-game which received ubiquitous disapproval. In this mini-game which occurs randomly during gameplay, Ezio must command his assassins to defend one of the multiple towers that you've won from the assailing Templars. You do this by positioning various squads at different vantage points. This is fun all of one time, after which it's a drag and you'll wish the Templars could just take the stupid tower and coexist. Furthermore, this completely dissolves the whole idea of the enduring secret war between the Assassins and Templars that is a (if not the) defining point in the story that sets up the universe. All of this sniping and bombing and exploding and marching and armies just kills it completely.
But what's probably the biggest complaint I have for this game is your invincibility. I could probably count on two hands the number of times I died during my playthrough of Revelations (not including the times I deliberately committed suicide). With the first AC game, you were fairly weak and charging head on into a big group of guards was a pretty dumb move, at least in the beginning of the game. The second game was much the same way and Brotherhood added in the assassin follower mechanic wherein, you can summon your underlings to take out menial targets for you. This was an interesting and useful addition to the game that spared you the trouble of going way out of your way to kill everyone and probably saved you more than once.
But in Revelations it's flat out abused. In Brotherhood, it takes awhile before you accumulate enough assassins to pull these stunts off but in Revelations you have it really early on. On the other hand, you don't really need the assassins because you're already so armed to the teeth with bombs, swords, guns, crossbows and a whole shit load of other things to keep any foe at bay. Once you figure out the fighting mechanics, nothing can touch you and the entire stealth feature goes out the window. Why even bother sneaking or trying to run away when you could easily just kill your way through anything? I found that I never had to even think about something before I just dove right in. I could use eagle vision and plan out a complicated attack but there's simply no reason to do so.
Well, the game does add in the full-synchronization feature from the other games, which is basically a bonus objective to complete in each mission (e.g. don't be detected, don't take damage) but I hate it just as much now as I did then. I almost always make an attempt for these bonus points just out of a sense of obligation but they take a lot of the fun of the game away from the player. If it's telling you exactly how it thinks you should approach the situation then whatever happened to the whole 'choose your own methods' thing? Furthermore, just trying for these frustratingly difficult goals often had me throwing my controller in anger. Long story short, the normal game is too easy but the full-synchronization is just too fucking hard.
But even after all of that, Assassin's Creed: Revelations is not that bad a game. I loved that they brought Altaïr back and after all those years, it was nice to get some closure to his story. However it was admittedly pretty absurd that you were sitting in your living room controlling Desmond who's in the Animus controlling Ezio who is controlling Altaïr... still however a great addition and big selling point for this game.
After all, the game is called Revelations and Ubisoft definitely made good on that. They cleared up a lot of the questions that had been floating around since the end of the first game. As far the story aspect goes, this game satisfies and excels. Interestingly, I didn't find the plot-twist at the end to be that, well... twisty. The reason being is not by any fault of the game by any means but rather because of an intricate side-quest in AC II that tasked the player with tracking down numerous runes and symbols hidden in out-of-the-way, otherwise unremarkable places. These runes are invisible unless you view them through eagle-vision, making them all the more obscure. After finding one, you unlock a challenging puzzle mini-game and upon completing that, you'll be granted a few fractions of a second of a clip. When you complete the entire clip, the game rewards you with something that makes a huge allusion to what is eventually explained at the end of Revelations. After I took many hours to laboriously track these down and having months to think about and hypothesize about the clip, I was able to arrive at a simplified version of the conclusion we're treated with in Revelations.
One of the reasons I love this series is because you can go and do things like that and to me, that just adds so much intricacy to the game. That they had this whole elaborate puzzle that they must have known only a handful of people would figure out.
On the other hand, the online multiplayer is also a very rewarding distraction. For Revelations, they took the existing formula they created for Brotherhood and innovated upon it, expanding it to accommodate more game-types and to appeal to more styles. I wish that the techniques utilized online were as prevalent in the story mode. Online, if you go high profile by sprinting everywhere and jumping around, you're doomed. The game rewards creative and stealthy approaches to your kills whereas in the single player, I found that there were multiple times where I simply had no choice but to engage in a head-on assault which would've practically been blasphemy if it were in the first or second game.
I don't hate Assassin's Creed: Revelations, not by a long shot. It's still a good game however, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you're involved with playing through the series, in which case, you can't afford to miss it as it's integral to the lore of the game. It's still full of great mechanics and it's built atop an already awesome series but it's terribly flawed. The problem with taking a leap and going out on a limb as the Assassin's Creed games often do is that some times, the innovations just don't work out. However, Revelations was a combination of this and the exact opposite problem. Not changing enough. AC II was a massive step above the original and Brotherhood took that formula and perfected it. After two games of that, by the time I got to Revelations, I was ready for change that didn't come. They innovated in places that didn't call for it and left things that should have been amended. Overall, not a bad game but definitely below the standard that I hold for this exemplary series.
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| Ezio signals commands to his Assassins during a high profile tower invasion. |
But what's probably the biggest complaint I have for this game is your invincibility. I could probably count on two hands the number of times I died during my playthrough of Revelations (not including the times I deliberately committed suicide). With the first AC game, you were fairly weak and charging head on into a big group of guards was a pretty dumb move, at least in the beginning of the game. The second game was much the same way and Brotherhood added in the assassin follower mechanic wherein, you can summon your underlings to take out menial targets for you. This was an interesting and useful addition to the game that spared you the trouble of going way out of your way to kill everyone and probably saved you more than once.
But in Revelations it's flat out abused. In Brotherhood, it takes awhile before you accumulate enough assassins to pull these stunts off but in Revelations you have it really early on. On the other hand, you don't really need the assassins because you're already so armed to the teeth with bombs, swords, guns, crossbows and a whole shit load of other things to keep any foe at bay. Once you figure out the fighting mechanics, nothing can touch you and the entire stealth feature goes out the window. Why even bother sneaking or trying to run away when you could easily just kill your way through anything? I found that I never had to even think about something before I just dove right in. I could use eagle vision and plan out a complicated attack but there's simply no reason to do so.
Well, the game does add in the full-synchronization feature from the other games, which is basically a bonus objective to complete in each mission (e.g. don't be detected, don't take damage) but I hate it just as much now as I did then. I almost always make an attempt for these bonus points just out of a sense of obligation but they take a lot of the fun of the game away from the player. If it's telling you exactly how it thinks you should approach the situation then whatever happened to the whole 'choose your own methods' thing? Furthermore, just trying for these frustratingly difficult goals often had me throwing my controller in anger. Long story short, the normal game is too easy but the full-synchronization is just too fucking hard.
But even after all of that, Assassin's Creed: Revelations is not that bad a game. I loved that they brought Altaïr back and after all those years, it was nice to get some closure to his story. However it was admittedly pretty absurd that you were sitting in your living room controlling Desmond who's in the Animus controlling Ezio who is controlling Altaïr... still however a great addition and big selling point for this game.
After all, the game is called Revelations and Ubisoft definitely made good on that. They cleared up a lot of the questions that had been floating around since the end of the first game. As far the story aspect goes, this game satisfies and excels. Interestingly, I didn't find the plot-twist at the end to be that, well... twisty. The reason being is not by any fault of the game by any means but rather because of an intricate side-quest in AC II that tasked the player with tracking down numerous runes and symbols hidden in out-of-the-way, otherwise unremarkable places. These runes are invisible unless you view them through eagle-vision, making them all the more obscure. After finding one, you unlock a challenging puzzle mini-game and upon completing that, you'll be granted a few fractions of a second of a clip. When you complete the entire clip, the game rewards you with something that makes a huge allusion to what is eventually explained at the end of Revelations. After I took many hours to laboriously track these down and having months to think about and hypothesize about the clip, I was able to arrive at a simplified version of the conclusion we're treated with in Revelations.
One of the reasons I love this series is because you can go and do things like that and to me, that just adds so much intricacy to the game. That they had this whole elaborate puzzle that they must have known only a handful of people would figure out.
On the other hand, the online multiplayer is also a very rewarding distraction. For Revelations, they took the existing formula they created for Brotherhood and innovated upon it, expanding it to accommodate more game-types and to appeal to more styles. I wish that the techniques utilized online were as prevalent in the story mode. Online, if you go high profile by sprinting everywhere and jumping around, you're doomed. The game rewards creative and stealthy approaches to your kills whereas in the single player, I found that there were multiple times where I simply had no choice but to engage in a head-on assault which would've practically been blasphemy if it were in the first or second game.
I don't hate Assassin's Creed: Revelations, not by a long shot. It's still a good game however, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you're involved with playing through the series, in which case, you can't afford to miss it as it's integral to the lore of the game. It's still full of great mechanics and it's built atop an already awesome series but it's terribly flawed. The problem with taking a leap and going out on a limb as the Assassin's Creed games often do is that some times, the innovations just don't work out. However, Revelations was a combination of this and the exact opposite problem. Not changing enough. AC II was a massive step above the original and Brotherhood took that formula and perfected it. After two games of that, by the time I got to Revelations, I was ready for change that didn't come. They innovated in places that didn't call for it and left things that should have been amended. Overall, not a bad game but definitely below the standard that I hold for this exemplary series.
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