Reviews VideoGame / Assassins Creed Revelations

A notable failure of a game.

Revelations' problem is that its story is completely irrelevant and every mechanic it introduces is either terrible or useless.

This game is nine chapters long and in six of them you are stuck in the most boring city of world, Istanbul. There's no countryside, no horse, and precious few other areas to visit. Being able to free-roam as Altair in his time would have fixed this lack of variety.

The story hurts because Ezio has no story to tell. He's on a scavenger hunt but keeps getting involved in Ottoman politics despite having no stake in the affair. Altair, on the other hand, does have a story to tell but it's relegated to a few scenes with much of his character development off-screen. The one bit I liked was Ezio's romance with the woman who helps him on his scavenger hunt. It was the only time he felt invested in the goings-on.

The gameplay hurts because of conflicting game-design. Den Defence is pointless and the game encourages to grind to skip the process. The first-person Desmond levels stink due their boring gameplay, and the bomb-crafting mechanic is a needlessly elaborate system that you can also skip. What's left is a paltry number of sidequests, pointless collectibles, and rehashed mechanics from Brotherhood.

What really shows how confused the game is are the Full-Sync objectives. There are several awesome setpieces like chasing a boat full of guys shooting at you, but if you so much as stub your toe you get an F rating. The whole game is like this. One half wants you to have fun, the other half wants to grind, curse, and be bored.

I only played this game because it was cheap and on sale, but still ripped off. It's the fourth of nine games and it's tired. They managed to keep the series fresh for a while with the naval gameplay, but as a whole it shows the folly of trying to force out sandbox games on an annual basis.