The End of an Era

 

My Review of Assassin's Creed: Revelations 

  Assassins Creed you are an interesting series, you look simple on the surface but underneath you have so much depth. Your story has become as complex as The Matrix series, one blink and I feel like I might miss something. If your a fan of the series and you need to be to pick up this addition to the series, just to understand whats going on. Revelations does answer a lot of questions but at the same time leaves you asking new ones.

You'll play as three characters this time, Desmond aka the dude in the future visiting his ancestors Ezio and Altair in the past. The game-play is what you come to expect from the franchise, running across roof tops. Stabbing guards in the back, blending into crowds and using fellow assassins to attack. Which is still very bad ass by the way, you raise your arm and your little ninja assassins comes out of the shadows to kill whoever you target. You can still buy property, recruit more assassins, send them on missions, attack Templar dens and go through crypt like areas searching for Altair keys.

The Altair keys are a new addition to the series that allow you to play as Altair in the past and see what happen to him. The only thing that bothered me was that it was always in the same area. Masyaf, the old Assassins Creed headquarters from the first game. Yea I know it's a very important place but did everything have to go down there?

Another new edition to the series is the ability to craft bombs from different ingredients. It's really simple to do and they add an extra layer of strategy to the game. You can make smoke bombs, explosive bombs and even bombs that explode coins and cause crowds to fight over them. I honestly used them sparely, I was always good with my blade or knifes. You now have a hook blade on one hand that allows you to zip line across the city and climb faster, its a welcome addition. 

Constantinople is a huge sprawling city, congested with many buildings to climb and run across. I kinda missed Rome from the last game, not only was it a beautiful city but it had a nice sprawling country side and great variations environment wise. One could blame the team staying true to the original design of Constantinople but I feel like they could of made areas of the city look more unique. Another complaint I had with the game was it's side missions, in Brotherhood you had such a great variety from doing missions for the guilds to Da vinci's missions. Which were some of the best in the whole franchise. In Revelations, you got your main story missions, den attack missions, assassin missions and your crypt missions. Oh you have some Desmond missions where its like some first person puzzle game where he talks about his past. Its good but not great, which is kinda of the theme of this campaign.

I really wanted this game to be the best in the series but it falls short of the brilliance that was Brotherhood, don't get me wrong it's a good game that all AC fans should check out. Just don't expect to be blown away by the campaign, the online on the other hand is amazing. I honestly would recommend buying this game just for the multi-player alone, yes its that good and unique. Ubisoft's little game of cat and mouse is a fun and thrilling experience you will not find any where else. It's well designed and balanced for solo and even team play this time around.

I really hope they expand on this multi-player and don't butcher it like they did to Splinter Cell's versus multi-player. I really wanted to give this game a great score but in the end it's gotta get the score I feel it deserves, hopefully Ubi takes it's time on the next game and blows me away.

8/10