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Assassin's Creed: Revelations (PlayStation 3)

Assassin's Creed: Revelations review

Game: Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Action
Developer: Ubisoft

Staff review by Jason Venter

October 01, 2012

Before I write anything else, let me just note that you probably shouldn’t play Assassin’s Creed: Revelations unless you have first played through at least Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. If you have also played the first Assassin’s Creed (which is also included on the disc if you pick up the PlayStation 3 edition), that’s even better.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations tells the story of an aging assassin named Ezio Auditore who travels to Constantinople in search of five keys that will allow him to explore a vault which was sealed away by his ancestor, an assassin named Altair Ibn-La’Ahad who died hundreds of years ago. A handful of secondary characters makes that central story more interesting. The supporting cast includes a bookish lady named Sophia who helps Ezio to decipher the ancient texts he finds along his journey, as well as various other people with royal and not-so-royal standing within the Byzantine Empire.

You can perhaps enjoy the story of Ezio’s treasure hunt even if you’ve never played an Assassin’s Creed game in your life, because underground passages are fundamentally awesome, but there are certain plot elements that make relatively little sense even when you’re up to speed. Ezio refers to events newcomers won’t have reason to understand, and in the middle of it all, there’s some sweater-loving modern guy named Desmond Miles who walks around on an island and feels sorry for himself (when he’s not passing through magical portals or navigating strange labyrinths by conjuring huge platforms out of the air). Finally, there are strange voiceovers talking about a funeral and blurred memories and such. It’s a bit much to take in if you’ve not been eased into it.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations asset

If you try hard enough, you can get past all of that and have a reasonably good time even without prior knowledge, but of course that’s not the point. If you play Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, the point is that you’ve come all this way with Ezio (and Altair), and now you want to find out their stories end. This is the game that will show you that stuff, and you’ll likely enjoy yourself quite a bit more if you actually care about the characters and the ongoing mythology. So like I said, you should play the earlier games first.

Playing those early games introduces you not only to the characters and plot, but also to a number of gameplay mechanics that drive this more recent experience. Revelations plays a lot like Brotherhood, on a surface level. That means you can invest in buildings (to generate revenue every twenty minutes, and to secure a discount when purchasing various equipment), plus you can recruit fellow assassins to your cause and call on them when you’re in a jam.

The Borgia towers that were built throughout Rome aren’t reproduced here, but there still are towers to climb. This time, your goal is to light signal fires. You can only do so after you first kill a general somewhere near the tower, though. Some of the generals are cowards, and all of them are well-guarded, so assassinating them is a pain in the butt. Then you light the fire and that tower is yours for the rest of the--no, scratch that. The tower is yours only until you let an enemy retake it after defeating you in the all-new tower defense mini-game.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations asset

I’m generally up for tower defense games. I’ve played through a number of the leading titles within the genre, and I find them addictive and enjoyable almost without exception. I was prepared to love the new mode in this case, but unfortunately the segments are quite awkward and the difficulty scales poorly. The first few times you’re pulled into one--which happens if you run around the streets of Constantinople as a notorious outlaw for too long--it’s not difficult to demolish any attacking forces. You place generals on rooftops and then you can bring in additional troops. Your enemies, meanwhile, will rush you in waves and then at the end will bring out a powerful vehicle that slowly rolls through your defensive barriers and shrugs off any attacks you mount as if they don’t even exist. That final phase is a real hassle, and after putting up with it a few times, I finally just decided not to let Templars notice me enough that they would bother attacking any of the towers. It’s a genius plan, I think.

While Brotherhood and even Assassin’s Creed II provided special crypts that you could optionally explore while completing story missions, Revelations writes such adventures into the main script. You won’t have to play for long before you realize that most episodes (or “memories”) in the game amount to the same process: you do some intel work while learning more about the political intrigue playing out in and around the city, you find a book, it lets you track down a dungeon, you clear the dungeon, you get a magical disc, and you examine that disc to relive the memories of Altair. So to recap: you are Desmond Miles, but you’re living inside a machine and trying to recover your memories while you live out the memories of Ezio as he tracks down and relives the memories of Altair.

The story segments that are revealed over the course of all those disparate adventures are actually quite cool, and it’s a genuine pleasure to learn more about the characters and their sometimes tragic lives as assassins. The dungeons where the magical discs (called “keys” in the game) are located definitely raise the bar compared to the crypts in Brotherhood, as well. There are some truly stunning vistas, and the mission variety feels less forced because it ties into the plot better. One dungeon involves an epic chase, while another one is more puzzle-oriented. I’m also happy to report that there are barely any puzzles where time factors into the equation at all. I’m fine with that. Truly, I am.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations asset

Collectible items that you gather are more closely related to something substantial, too. In this case, that something substantial comes in the form of special side quests that you can activate back on the island where Desmond is trapped. As you find enough lost data fragments, you’ll open new gates that lead to additional memories from the contemporary assassin’s often sheltered childhood. Each portal leads to a special labyrinth that is viewed from a first-person perspective. Desmond narrates as he works through challenges, and some of what he says is actually quite interesting, even if it does feel like a lazy narrative conceit. My only real problem with those segments is that they’re quite frustrating. Some of the puzzles you have to solve can get quite complex and the first-person perspective isn’t always up to the challenge. In the second segment, for example, you must drop through a long vertical shaft and move quickly to the sides, swiftly producing blocks so that you can land on them and then move quickly again so that you don’t accidentally bump into one barrier or another that returns you to a higher point in the shaft. The challenge is more punishing than it is rewarding. Thankfully, Ubisoft made all of those sequences optional (though you’ll miss out on trophies if you ignore them).

Even with the optional content considered, Revelations doesn’t feel as expansive as Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed II, though some of that is likely my imagination. On the plus side, the online mode is quite robust and servers are still active enough that I had no trouble signing on and dropping into multiplayer matches both in the middle of the day and well after midnight. A system of perks and skill upgrades is in place, like you might find in a Call of Duty game, and there are various modes that let you play deathmatch or team-based games.

You might suppose that multiplayer would just amount to running around and clashing in epic duels, but actually that’s not the case. Smartly, the emphasis is on stealthy kills. In the standard deathmatch mode, which is where I spent most of my time, you have a single target available to you nearly constantly. You have to look closely because there’s no on-screen indicator to inform you of his whereabouts unless he starts running or climbing along buildings… or unless you see him kill or stun another player. In the meantime, someone else is usually hunting you. Basically, you can move as you like--while taking precautions so that you don’t call unwanted attention to yourself--and you can kill or use a special skill or stun whoever is chasing you so that he or she must be assigned a new target. I’m probably not making any of that sound all that exciting, but it’s quite addictive once you get past the first few rounds and know how everything works. Just the other night, I signed on for a bit and I wound up playing several hours with a group of mostly the same people. It was a total blast.

Assassin’s Creed III will be launching soon, and when that happens you can probably expect much of the current online population to shift to that new game. Until then, however, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is one of the most unique online deathmatch experiences around, and it’s already available at a bargain price. I recommend looking into it immediately if you’ve already played the previous titles in the series. Otherwise, you might be better off waiting for the recently-announced trilogy that will collect all of Ezio’s adventures in one place. Revelations is far from perfect, but it’s still an adventure that’s well worth experiencing.

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