Assassin’s Creed Revelations

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 signs of an uncreative development cycle, being simply devoid of a reason to exist. For this reason, it is surprising that it’s only the fourth game in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, the first one to truly expose these problems.

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 story, which never evolves 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 a couple of interesting dialogues, 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 strengthen the player’s empathy towards the character and his conflicts. Since in Revelations his journey lack any emotional impact, 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 player of its authentic – 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, as his dialogues are filled with unnecessary exposition. The rise and fall of the Assassin are told very quickly and without any real purpose: Altaïr’s character arc was completely finished in the first game, which means that all the events narrated here don’t add anything substantial to his journey.

And Desmond doesn’t 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 blending together 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 skill or intelligence.

Another mechanic even more out of place in the franchise is the inclusion of Tower Defense stages. When the alertness level reaches its peak, Ezio’s territories are attacked by Templars and players will find themselves trapped in a Tower Defense minigame. 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 becomes dire – 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 game 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, it’s no surprise, remains devoid of any difficulty. Players just need to wait for the enemy to strike and press the counter button to eliminate them. If the enemy soldier is immune to counters, pressing the left trigger releases Assassins on them. Training the assassins in the long run also remains devoid of any reward and the practical difference of having a level 8 Assassin from a level 10 remains a mystery. Bombs, on the other hand, are a nice addition, as they can distract or kill guards, increasing the possibilities of facing a mission with a stealthy approach.

Parkour, on the other hand, has received small but harmful adjustments. Early on in the adventure, Ezio receives a hook from a Turkish colleague that expands his options of climbing and moving. The problem is that the hook, combined with the “super jump”, expands so much the movement that makes analyzing the geography of the buildings an unnecessary exercise: just jumping randomly and using the hook works. 

Constantinople must have been an ideal locale for the developers to explore due to its architecture having Greek and Roman influences. The city is beautifully represented and feels alive, especially its most important sights such as the crowded Grand Bazaar. However, its design is so similar to that of Rome, that a region next to a large broken aqueduct seems essentially the same as the one observed in Brotherhood.

The two previous entries in the franchise were also successful in being a kind of tourist guide to the cities they were set in, showing the player their most important sights, such as important monuments and the interior of great churches and palaces. This characteristic reinforced the idea of ​​historicity very important for the central plot to work – basically a conspiracy theory –, especially when they contextualized such structures within the game: when structuring missions inside churches, for example, the developers made them a great labyrinth of platforms, while at the same time impressing the player with the details of their paintings and frescoes. By recontextualizing these famous places around scenes filled with tension, the development teams made them immediately memorable, significantly increasing the player’s immersion. In Assassin’s Creed Revelations this design is nowhere to be found, wasting the potential of some striking buildings: Hagia Sofia, for example, is relegated to a hidden secondary mission and many players will give up on the game before even finding it.

The developers’ lack of creativity is so apparent that the best addition that Brotherhood had made in the gameplay, Full Sync, exposes the blandness of the level design. Normally, players can solve a mission in the way that they want, stealthily or with a more combative approach. However, because of Full Sync, players are stimulated to solve missions in the way that Ezio “really did”, thus achieving total synchrony with the memory. This allows the development team to lead players to exhaust the level design of a certain mission, indicating the most challenging and interesting ways to complete it: in Assassin’s Creed Revelations, however, this only comes down to simple objectives like “Do not get caught” and “Do not take damage”.

The game’s technical presentation is also subpar. Not only is the soundtrack practically non-existent – apart from the good main theme, almost no music is heard in-game – but the number of bugs, at least in the PS3 version, is alarming: Desmond’s stages only loaded when they wanted to, often crashing the console; when Ezio jumped off from roofs to assassinate somebody below, he would occasionally get trapped in the air and miss his mark, or hit a ladder and the target would die – possibly from a heart attack – far away from him; and after an assassination, the alertness meter would jump to the maximum level and stay there endlessly, being necessary to restart the console for the situation to return to normal.

The foundations of the Assassin’s Creed series were never solid. Its titles were getting more and more stuffed with abstract mechanics that little influenced the real gameplay. Yet it was a franchise that tried to tell great stories filled with twists and turns. In Assassin’s Creed Revelations none of this is achieved, resulting in an extremely flawed game without any creative reason to exist.

December 06, 2018.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.