Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

Before I start with this review, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am a pretty big Assassin's Creed fan. I own every game in the series, and I think that the overall gameplay formula is spectacular in its simultaneous depth and simplicity.

That being said, I wasn't too wild about Brotherhood, and I didn't get my hopes up too high for Revelations. ACII remains one of my top sequels of all time. It got the whole sequel thing right. It added new characters, new locations, new items, and an all new storyline to play with, while keeping the basic story threads of the series intact and kept them rolling. It was artfully done. Brotherhood was good, and added some new economic pieces to the gameplay pie (open shops, get discounts, ????, Profit!), but added so little that it felt more like an extension of the story than anything else.

This was NOT necessarily a bad thing.

Assassin's Creed, as a series, has one of the most ludicrously (and pointlessly) convoluted story arcs in the history of gaming. Did the game need to have dual timelines, genetic memories, and all that? No. But it's intriguing, and keeping it going is interesting, to say the least. That brings us to Revelations. This game feels so alive and so deep, yet at the same time feels rushed and bloated by features and mechanics we never wanted, at the expense of the story that we are dying to see draw to a close.

Right at the get-go, you'll be thrown into the game once again as Ezio Auditore da Firenze at Masayaf castle (one of the primary locales from the first game) and execute a daring escape. Essentially, Altair Ibn la'Ahad (the main character from the first game), has some kind of library and the Templars want to get into it, and there are five keys to open it. Ezio happens randomly on some information that points to Constantinople as the resting place for the keys. Hooray! Off we go to the city where East meets West.

Constantinople is a very lively location for the game. Moreso than any other game in the series. There is more going on, the NPC's are more interesting, and the city itself looks and feels absolutely amazing. There's no knocking Ubisoft for the work they do when crafting a world.

How you relate to that world is pretty much exactly the same as we have been doing for years at this point. Climb on buildings, run on rooftops, gank unsuspecting guards, and perform death-defying leaps of faith from synchronization points across the city. So far so good. Unfortunately, one of the new elements in the game is Ezio's hook-blade. It replaces the hidden blade on his right wrist and has a nasty hook on the end. He can use it to go down ziplines and (somehow) vault off enemies for quick escapes. It's really not that much of a game-changer. Ziplines are certainly faster, but they always seem to be going away from where you're trying to get to. It's fun to do assassinations off of them, but you won't get the chance all that often.

Add to the mix the fact that there are Templar dens (which replace Borgia towers from Brotherhood) which need to be captured and turned into Assassin dens. It's pretty easy. Locate the captain of the den, kill him, and then light a fire in the tower and it's yours. Unfortunately, this brings me to a very unnecessary addition to the game: Tower Defense.

I love tower defense games. But this one isn't very fun. Basically, performing assassiny actions around the city causes your awareness level to go up. This has been a staple of the series for years. Unfortunately, when your meter is full, you need to get it down quick or one of your dens will be attacked. In order to fend off the attackers, you have to approach that den, while anonymous, and start a tower defense minigame that involves building barriers, putting assassins on rooftops, and killing Templars. Aside from the fact that each game takes about ten minutes, it's played from a frustratingly bad angle, which makes troop placement difficult. In all, this new system is stupid and shouldn't be in the game, at least not in the state it's in.

You still go around the city and open shops and the like, but now there are random people with little busy jobs for you that pay a laughably low sum for the five or so minutes you could have spent having fun. There is an assassin management system in this game that lets you recruit, train, and send assassins on missions (much like in Brotherhood) that's pretty deep and gratifying. When you get an assassin to level 10, he can become the master of one of your dens. Get him to level 15, and that den can never be taken over by Templars. Remember that. Level 15 den leader= NO TOWER DEFENSE. You can bet I have sunk some time into this mechanic.

The story is shockingly hard to follow. Prince Suleiman is trying to get into power, family struggles ensue... I'm not even sure who I am rooting for, or what is even going on at this point. The story has a ham-fisted approach to exposition. There's some woman helping Ezio find books hidden by some guy named Paolo, and finding those books is somehow the key to Altair's keys, but I don't remember ever hearing how Ezio came to that conclusion or why.

In the end, this iteration of the series is a bit of a flop. It's still amazing fun to play, and the game as a whole is great, but the series has led me to expect more and I feel like this game, while fantastic in its own right, was made to bridge the gap in the story between Brotherhood and some new AC game coming out in the future, and I suppose it succeeds in this respect. The story revolving around Desmond is one of the more interesting parts of the whole experience, and if you're an Assassin's Creed fan, there's a lot of interesting stuff, and the story as a whole still has that Assassin's Creed magic.

But as an addition to this storied franchise, I'm afraid that for the first time, this one came up a bit short.