brace yourself HM
#10 - Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (360/PS3/PC)
http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/628358-assassins-creed-revelations
This writeup is probably going to sound overly negative, despite the game still being in my top 10 for the year. That’s mainly due to the fact that I had high hopes for Revelations and ended up being rather disappointed by what the game ended up offering me. Assassin’s Creed II is one of my favorite games of all time, and Brotherhood was an excellent extension of the gameplay, albeit slightly less focused than its predecessor. Revelations, on the other hand, doesn’t do quite enough to make it feel like a fresh experience, and what it does try feels cheap and tacked on.
Ubisoft pulled a fast one on Assassin’s Creed fans last year when they released Brotherhood. It wasn’t quite a proper sequel to the second game, and a lot of people were worried it was just going to be Assassin’s Creed II+. However, the game managed to add enough significant gameplay features (the largest being the ability to recruit assassins and utilize them during missions) to make it worthwhile. It flirted with the line of “too much stuff” very carefully, and mostly managed to avoid crossing it.
Revelations does neither of these things. All of the core mechanics from Brotherhood are virtually identical - you’re still in a single big city - something I don’t actually care for much, you’re still recruiting assassins, you’re still liberating Borgia Towers - sorry, Templar Dens, etc etc. The developers then saw fit to tack on a ton of other useless things in an attempt to justify this game’s existence. Bomb making is wholly useless, the ridiculous tower defense game is unnecessary (and if you’re careful throughout the game you won’t even see it outside of the initial tutorial), the hookblade is “sort of cool”, but never really seems worthwhile, and it seems like they added even more collectible trinkets that have no purpose. Why do I care about finding books and pages of some dude’s memoir?
The game also makes a couple baffling design decisions that hinder the experience. Why does every every action Ezio take increase notoriety? It almost makes you want to not expand Constantinople when every time you purchase a shop you have to go hunting down a herald, not to mention the fact that the gauge fills completely after taking a Templar Den. This is compounded by the fact that there are now less way to reduce your notoriety than there were in Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood. I understand that this probably “makes sense” within the context of the world, but it’s not fun and kills the momentum of the game at times.
Story-wise, Revelations is mostly pointless too. I will admit that Ezio’s and Altair’s story do come to a fairly satisfying conclusion when all is said and done, but I don’t feel like an entire new game was needed to accomplish this, especially when everything leading up to the conclusion feels so pointless. On the Desmond side of things, we get almost nothing. There’s a few Desmond backstory segments, but they require you to play through awful first-person “puzzle” segments that often demand precision and dexterity where the controls offer none. It all ends with another cliffhanger, leaving you to realize that you’ve actually learned nothing since the end of Brotherhood.
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FF fans don't hang around the internet on a monday morning they are out doing shopping or asleep hungover from parties. They got lives. -The_Djoker