OK, hold on, this is gonna be a long one. Sorry about that. It has pictures tho.

(Please remember, english is not my main language, so please excuse the typos and gramatic errors).

Ezio

I honestly don't know why I like Ezio so much. He's charismatic, yes, but he's also kind of an asshole. I've followed him for three games now and I realize that he's interesting because of his relationship with others: his sister Claudia, his mother, his uncle Mario, his friend Leonardo DaVinci or his lovers Cristina and Caterina... but not by himself.

And that's maybe why I didn't enjoy Assassin's Creed Revelations so much. He no longer has his aquantaices at his side. The new characters are too simple, their relationships too forced or uninteresting. Even his new romantic interest, Sofia, is just a damsel in distress, even a little worst because of the difference in age between the two.

It's a shame because this is the game that closes Ezio's story and doesn't have anything insteresting to do with him. He doesn't have an arc. He's the same person when we reach the end of the game (just with a new girlfriend). The revelations about Altaïr's life have, ironically, few revelations in them. The information dump about the first civilization at the end has no relation at all with the adventure we just had.

Constantinopla

My first impresion after arriving to Konstantiniye was awe. I was amazed of the view of this gilded city, with the sun reflected beautifully on the waters of the golden horn. Edifications like the 'Hagia Sofia' impacted me with their design and I couldn't wait to explore it all. And then the love at first sight died, because this city is no different from Roma in AC:B. Despite the ports, it's incredibly similar in their design and the visuals are not enough to make a different impression. I grew bored of the city fast. How could one of the most important places of the Ottoman empire, the jewel of the islamic culture of the XVI century could be so uninteresting?

A few excursions to a cave city in Capadioccia and Masyaf did little to add some variety. Anyway, I did love one thing about this representation of the middle east: the costuming. The clothes and outfits on the people that roamed the streets, were peasants, soldiers or royalty, was amazing, as usual in this franchise.

Game systems

I liked Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. A lot. But I remember describing it like an overly long DLC of Assassin's Creed 2. It has new cool systems, specially the recruiting of assassins and the way we could summon them to help us or sent them on missions. AC:R plays exactly like its predecessor with a few minor additions, like the hookblade, that allow us to make a few extra moves in battles (nothing important) and traversal, like sliding across cables. This seems like it would make movement more dynamic and fun, but there are really few places where is useful. The same can be said of the new parachute.

A new mechanic that was heavily marketed for the game were the bombs. Now you can craft and use a lot of types of bombs with different effects to kill, disable or distract enemies... but I found that they weren't that useful after all. There are a few specific situations where a well placed bomb could avoid a fight or make it easier, but most of the time it was just easier just fight, summon the assassin's or use a guild. The city is full of materials to make this bombs, but I stopped used them so this discouraged most of the exploration.

Chasing trends

There is a 'tower defense' minigame in Assassin's Creed Revelations. It's awful. the pacing is so fast that you can strategize how to place your resources and the view of the battlesite is extremely limited. You can even use an overpowered cannon to not loose. The designers had to knew this was bad, because you can only access it if you play careless. That's right, this minigame is a punishment for the player.

Why it exists? Ubisoft is the kind of company to "throw everything to the wall to see what sticks". AC:R was developed during the tower defense fever (specially Plants vs Zombies). They probably spend so much time developing it that they didn't want it to remove it from the game even when they realized it was not good.

This also explains the weird Desmond puzles. Optional sequences in first person that mostly remind me of Portal. They're not specially challenging and the systems of creating blocks to advance don't really fit, not even with the sci-fi plots of the AC world. They're ugly and just reveal some parts of the past of Desmond, nothing interesting. What hurts it's that they replace the optional "tombs" of past games, which were my favorite parts. The main game still has some "tombs" with nifty platform challenges, but being obligatory lack the sense of discovering and adventure.

In conclusion...

I did not hated Assassin's Creed Revelations. It was fun enough. But I can't stop feeling like a rushed sequel. Constantinopla looks great, the animations of the characters are amazing and it has a few cool missions (I LOVED the minstrel quest were you had to disguise as a singer to stop an assasination attempt). But that's not enought. The new systems are bad or lacking, the story is not that good and it plays just too similar to the previous one.

I would like to see a better goodbye to Ezio.

A final installment in the Assassin's Creed Ezio trilogy is my personal favourite. While it's not revolutionary by far it improves on it's predecessors and delivers an interesting story in a rich and superbly designed environment.

The story this times takes place in Constantinople and ties all loose ends. Apart from writing the final chapter for Ezio it also revisits Altair who is also a playable character in certain chapters. And it was great to learn what happened to Altair and how both he and Ezio are tied together. The cut scenes are really nicely put together and the whole story is quite interesting.

Visually it's also an improvement although not breath taking. The characters are better animated, the environment is well designed and does remind of life teaming city packed with a lot of people. The map overall might be a bit smaller but it's so well designed that it's an actual improvement over the somewhat empty spaces we could encounter in the previous installments. I must admit the city - the way it looks, the way it's structured and how you move around it is what probably makes it my favourite Assassin's Creed game.

The mechanics for the most part are the same. With just the addition of bombs which are quite annoying to craft and not that useful and the hook which lets you climb higher places and also zip line which is super fun - the rest almost unchanged. The whole structure of the game remains the same. And it's absolutely fine as you get to do them in a great environment.

Overall as mentioned - definitely my favourite Assassin's Creed game. Though somewhat requires you to play the previous ones to fully appreciate the story it ties up. Can't recommend enough.

If you liked the Assassins's Creed II and AC:Brotherhood you will probably like this one. It's basically just more of the same except Ezio got more wrinkles and a larger beard.

Yeah, ok, they have thrown in some new mechanics, but it feels like they just tossed in some more mechanics because they HAD to throw in some more mechanics to justify making a whole new game.

Managing the brotherhood, sending your Assassins on missions in other cities have become a bit more complex since brotherhood. You can craft and use a variety of bombs to hurt and confuse your enemies, while in brotherhood you could only use smokebombs. Ezio gets a hook he can use to glide along ziplines around the city, which is new since Brotherhood. Templars can attack your Assassin hideouts and try to take them back, where as in brotherhood, once you had gotten a hideout, the templars just gave up forever on that part of town. You get to play a tower-defence-style minigame to drive the templars away from your hideouts, but if you fail you can just imediatly murder the templar commander and retake your hidout. And finally Desmond can go through some wierd puzzle-quest for no reason, but it will give you some backstory about desmonds life before AC1.

Apart from that, things are pretty much the same. Go to locations, get missions, murder people with your hidden blade/gun/bombs/big ass axes or send someone else to kill them for you. Climb houses and sneak around guards.

Fun times!

After really enjoying Brotherhood, I was kinda disappointed by Revelations and while its gameplay is better, story-wise I might even prefer the first one over this.

The story is cool and the City was really well made and it felt big enough. Ezio once more was a really cool character and while at first I wasn't sure how I felt about his relationship with a new character, but at the end everything concluded really well and the end of his arc was really good.

Now everything that didn't have to do with Ezio, I found silly. Everything with Desmond was really uninteresting and the last cut scene, after a point, got so over the top and stupid. Also while there were different missions, somewhere in the middle the game got kinda predictable. You search for somewhere, you find it, take it somewhere, that leads you somewhere else where you parkour your way through somewhere and then you play as Altair for a bit. And that got kinda boring after a few sequences.

But probably my favorite part of Revelations was everything with Altair. While it could have been really silly, they handled it so well that it came out really naturally and they actually added something to his character and that was great. They actually helped his character and arc and took him to different places that the first game hadn't even touched.

Overall it is fun, even if kinda repetitive for a while, still with some great missions (the whole first sequence is damn thrilling and entertaining) and while the story is lesser than I would want it to be, I had a fun time playing it.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has become so successful that its producer (Ubisoft) has adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year. It was inevitable, therefore, that this business plan would begin to generate games that would clearly show a rushed development simply devoid of creativity. For this reason, it is surprising that only the franchise’s fourth game, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, is the first to expose such signs.

In order to finish the stories of the previous protagonists, Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad, Assassin’s Creed Revelations follows the last days of the two Assassins, although it devotes most of its time to explore Ezio’s mission. The Italian intends to discover the secrets that lie lost in the great library of Masyaf and, in order to enter the place, he needs five keys that were hidden by Niccolò Polo in Constantinople.

The plot, which never goes beyond this search, divides itself into several fronts. In the first, there is the local political dispute, which will result in the appointment of the new sultan of Constantinople. The leader of the Templars has one of the keys and it is up to Ezio to discover his identity in the court and for which side – Byzantines or Ottomans – he is fighting. The second front focuses on the search for the four remaining keys – scattered by tombs and caves that need to be located by reading books that also need to be found – and accompanies the strange relationship between the protagonist and the owner of a local bookstore. The third, led by Altaïr, is episodic – only by “reading” each key is one of his chapters opened – and tells of the Assassin’s last days. And the last front is focused on Desmond as he tries to overcome the consequences of his actions at the end of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.

The political plot matters little to Ezio and therefore much less to the player. Although it contains interesting dialogues that reflect the ideology of that society, the feeling that all events are irrelevant is extremely strong. Ezio’s journey in previous titles was always extremely personal, driven by revenge, which helped reinforce empathy for the character and his conflicts. Thus, since in Revelations the script does not have any emotional foundation, it becomes devoid of any element that could arouse the player’s interest. To make matters worse, the villain is only known at the end and has very little time to discuss his intentions. And adding insult to injury, the plotline about a love relationship is equally ineffective, never convincing – the age difference between the two is a crucial reason – as well as being equally irrelevant to the main plot.

Altaïr’s part is even worse, since his the dialogues are filled with unnecessary exposition. The rise and fall of the Assassin are told very quickly and are all without any purpose: Altaïr’s narrative arc was completely finished in the first game, which means that all the events narrated here do not add anything to the character.

And Desmond does not do much more than complain and be confused by the inquiries of his predecessor “Seventeen.” Trapped in a kind of limbo inside the Animus, he must reminisce about his past and reconstruct the fragments of his memory to prevent the life of Ezio and Altaïr from being confused with his. For this, in addition to collecting 100 pieces of memory throughout the environments, players need to overcome first-person platform sequences. The objective is to create blocks in the air and overcome some obstacles to reach the other side of the rooms, while Desmond remembers, in an annoying way, its childhood and adolescence. This part is absurdly slow and built with a boring, inorganic art style – there are only concrete and blue and gray blocks on the stages – and it requires very little of the player’s intelligence.

Another mechanic even more out of place in the franchise is the inclusion of Tower Defense stages. When the alertness level reaches its maximum, Ezio’s territories are attacked by Templars and players will find themselves trapped in a minigame of this genre. Ezio stands on top of a roof, placing Assassins on top of the other houses to attack the Templars who are invading down the street. In addition to being repetitive and very easy – players even possess a cannon shot that kills almost all enemies, if the situation is urgent – because it needs the alertness level to be at maximum to be activated, a minimally attentive player will only need to play it in the tutorial. That is, the execution of this mode demonstrates the tendency of the franchise not to innovate, but to add more and more absurd and empty mechanics that in no way add to the main gameplay.

The combat, for this reason, remains devoid of difficulty. Players just need to wait for the enemy to strike and press the counter button to eliminate him. If he is immune to counters, pressing the left trigger releases Assassins on him.

---> Read the full review at: http://litonthespot.com/assassins-creed-revelations-game-review/games/review