Doing a whole lot of nothing
The first Assassin’s Creed was notorious for its repetitive side missions, a flaw deftly remedied in Assassin’s Creed II with the ability to renovate shops around the city and earn income to purchase better equipment or even decorate your villa. Brotherhood added the option to recruit assassins and train them using a Facebook-esque mini-game where you send them away for a set amount of time on missions to gain XP (known in Revelations as the slightly expanded “Mediterranean Defense”). All games have kept variations of the random collectibles spread throughout the world, be it flags, feathers, or what have you.
Once again, Revelations does very little to improve that system. And while I enjoyed or at least endured the mindless busywork before in order to improve the assassin’s guild, the fourth time around is one too many. Especially since it all feels very hollow. Why is Ezio renovating shops in Constantinople? To what end? What’s the point of buying a landmark? It doesn’t change, it doesn’t become a haven for assassins or anything like that; it’s utterly pointless.
Less than a third of the way through the game, the entirety of these extracurricular activities become available to the player. Since I have an obsessive compulsive need to do everything I possibly can before progressing the story, I spent roughly 10 hours buying up shops, earning money, and recruiting assassins. In Brotherhood, there was a slight disconnect between the story and the nameless recruited assassins, as they felt somewhat tacked on. Revelations puts in a bit of extra effort by giving each assassin two full-fledged unique missions that Ezio must partake in with them. It’s a nice touch, and one I very much appreciate, but I still would have liked to have somehow seen a deeper bond established between all these characters.
But training the recruits to master assassin status is a must, unless you want to suffer endlessly through Revelations’ new tower defense mini-game. Throughout the city are Templar dens which must be taken over by killing the Templar captain and then lighting the signal tower to essentially tell the bad guys to pack their shit and move out. It’s a bit of a stretch, but remember what I said about The Matrix, and this being more of an arcade game. (This is the franchise where jumping into a rose bush from the top of a 30-story tower is an acceptable means of transportation, after all, and where assassins hide in plain sight by dressing more exquisitely than anyone else on the streets.) Once you have claimed a den for the assassins, you can assign a level 10 recruit to watch it. And once that assassin has been leveled to 15 and both master assassin missions have been completed, the den he or she has been assigned to will no longer be vulnerable to Templar attack.
Since seemingly any action you take will increase your chances of a den invasion, having all seven locked down was mandatory for me. The last thing I wanted was to renovate a shop I was passing by, therefore increasing my “Templar Awareness” and causing one of my dens to come under attack all the way on the other end of the city. That, and the tower defense mini-game isn’t terrible, but three times was more than enough for me. If it had been integrated into the story it would likely be more enjoyable, but as it stands now it’s obnoxiously reminiscent of getting phone calls to go bowling in Grand Theft Auto IV while trying to build your criminal empire.
On the plus side, the game’s collectibles now have maps allowing you to hunt them down more easily, and the miscellaneous Achievements are much better than they’ve been in previous games, though I’m fairly certain a couple of them might be glitched.