Review: Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is a stealth sandbox game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC. It was developed by Ubisoft.

Ezio Auditore climbing a large tower.

Desmond Miles is stuck inside a machine that allows him to relive the lives of his assassin ancestors, and has to put himself together by following the later years of one of his ancestors, Ezio Auditore. Ezio has travelled to Constantinople to locate the keys to the hidden library of his ancestor, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad, and gets involved in helping the local Assassin’s guild stationed in Constantinople.

In Revelations, you mostly play Ezio in Constantinople. Ezio is an assassin who easily scale buildings and run across rooftops, and has access to many weapons, both subtle and obvious, like poison darts, hidden blades, swords, and guns.

Ezio will get a mission to go somewhere in Constantinople and kill someone or several people, and escape. Ezio cannot walk up to his target and stab them though; he has to find a way to approach his target without being seen. Ezio’s sneaking tricks including hiding in piles of hay, sitting on benches, and hiding among moving crowds, though you will most often ignore these and just hide on a roof or behind a wall, whatever blocks their line of sight. When Ezio reaches his target a cutscene will play, and Ezio will either have to fight them out in the open or kill them stealthily.

Killing a target, and killing guards on the way to the target, arouses suspicion among other guards, and if Ezio is identified he has to kill all the guards or hide until the heat wears off.

Ezio fighting two guards.

With so many weapons to use, places to hide, and a giant city to move around in, carrying out missions should be really fun, but it is not. The game is way too restrictive when it comes to how you complete a mission. You often do not get to decide how you get to kill your target; you are usually forced to fight them out in the open or have to kill them in a certain way. You are not allowed any creativity. You do not even get to approach the target the way you want, a lot of the time the game forces you to take a certain path or follow a trail to your target. It is like Ubisoft gives you all these toys, but then says “You can only play with this one toy, and you have to play with it like this.”

The irritation of not letting you play the game how you want to play it is compounded by the extra “100% synchronization” objective in each mission, which all have you do something extra difficult to count the mission as fully completed, like only killing the target with poison, or finishing under six minutes, or not taking any damage. If you screw up you have to do the entire missions again, including all the tedious walking and talking at the beginning. These are optional objectives, but they do not add anything to the game except frustration, and it is hard to ignore them when the screen has a bright red mark on the menu because you did not complete them.

Ezio running across the rooftops of Constantinople.

There are a lot of side activities in Constantinople. You can recruit new assassins who will kill people for you, renovate shops and use the profits to buy useless weapons and books, liberate sections of Constantinople from guards by killing a captain and climbing a tower, hunt for memory fragments hidden around Constantinople, complete minor challenges for different factions like killing five guards with throwing knives, and hunt down Altair’s keys.

Some of the side quests are fun because they have actual missions, but most of them are busywork, designed to extend the gameplay for the obsessed completionist, and are not actually fun.

Revelations comes with a multiplayer mode, based around assassinating other players online. In the regular deathmatch games, you pick a character and walk around a level, looking for an assigned target among the similarly looking NPCs. When you find your target, you assassinate them before they notice you and try to escape or fight back. Meanwhile other players are stalking you, forming a giant circle of assassinations.

You can do things that will keep your opponent’s game from identifying you, such hiding in a crowd. How incognito you are is represented by a bar that fills up when you hide. Points are awarded based on how stealthy you are when you kill your target, and whoever has the most points after ten minutes wins. Other games, like team deathmatch and king of the hill are variations on this.

The highlighted portrait indicates you have located your target.

The problem with the multiplayer is defending against assassins. Whether or not you see your attacker feels random; sometimes you can block their attacks, or at least get some points before dying, by pressing the right button at the right time, other times you cannot. You can actually see your opponent run straight at you from the other side of the level and still be unable to block them. You can run away, but that alerts your target and does not get rid of your attacker permanently like blocking them does. That your defense relies so much on chance makes the whole multiplayer experience more frustrating than fun.

I found it hard to remain invested in Ezio’s story in Constantinople. For most of the main story Ezio does not have a personal stake in what is going on, and is helping out the local guild just because, so who cares about whatever political fighting is going on among the Constantinople royalty. Desmond loses focus a third of the way in, so he is unimportant. It was nice to see Altair though. The story is not going to make any sense for people who are not already big fans of the Assassin’s Creed series.

I would not recommend buying this Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Running around Constantinople is fun, but there are much better Assassin’s Creed games you can buy that are not so restricting. The only people who should play this are Assassin’s Creed fans who have to know every part of the story and do not want to look up everything on Wikipedia and YouTube.