surgeworks

AC1 Retrospective

AC2 Retrospective

AC:B Retrospective

Pros:

Much like the two games before it, Revelations has again stepped up its presentation.
- ACI had a clinical, digital aesthetic with a creepily synthetic feel. ACII went for a pristine, clean and white holo-world feel, and AC:B went for a look that alternated the two. Assassin's Creed: Revelations instead goes for a darker aesthetic. It mixes the first two, rather than alternating, and what we get is something like a dark, "stormy" feeling with a "corrupted data" feel to it. The title screen and world again feels terrifyingly synthetic, all the more because of the feeling of wrongness.
- The first twenty minutes of the game step up the action yet again. Everything is action-packed and cinematic, and admittedly it works well for this series. A blizzard? Exploring ruins of old Assassin strongholds IN a blizzard? Getting dragged along your stomach from a horse-driven carriage through Assassin ruins in a blizzard? The action doesn't stop or slow down. And that's while your framing device has become "make your way through the internal systems and data worlds of the Animus and un-aneurysm yourself".
I have perhaps not been giving the last two games the inventive credit they deserved for the weapon and tool system. ACII gave you smoke bombs, poison, and a pistol, only the last of which you were given much reason to use (smoke bombs broke the game but were far less than necessary to escape a situation, and poison blades just lengthened combat you could significantly shorted with the normal ones). AC: Brotherhood introduced parachutes, which I never used even once, and I never even picked up the smoke bombs at all. On the other hand, poison darts were a better idea, as were crossbows. That said, they're still options and still lend to creative freedom whether you use them or not. One of the better ideas was a weapon/tool ring introduced in II, which I liked as it felt a bit like playing Ratchet and Clank. I bring this up because Revelations expands on it, and you now have two rings to select from and can assign different tools to different D-Pad shortcuts. I cannot overstate how useful that is.
Eagle Vision has been moved to another button, allowing an extra button for weapon and tool functions. I personally put medicine on my Y button a lot of the time. It's also been updated and looks less mystical and more like an x-ray highlight, which makes sense since you're using it via corrupted memory. You can also free-run without having to turn it off. You could technically do this in the last two games, but good look getting anywhere because the way it was rendered removed a lot of important details to the environment.
When you're not playing as Ezio and are within the Animus' innards, you can hear little conversations quite often about what's happening in the real world. It's admittedly not interacting with the real world proper, but it's still close enough.
After waiting two games to see if Assassin's Creed was going to honorably follow-up Altair, it's amazing how much about this game resembles a true fusion of Ezio and Altair. The stylized outfit of ACII has morphed to resemble the more practical, subtle look of the robes from the first game, and Constantinople has a very Jerusalem-like vibe to it. Even the map has an AC1 look to it.
There's a skip cinematic button!
There are no glyphs or glyph puzzles in this game! I was wrong, and I'm so happy to have been wrong!
I have to commend Ezio's voice acting. It's remained consistent with his age, changing just enough over the course of three games.
ALTAIR!!!!
- Yes, being able to play as Altair again, in itself, is a pro. It's wonderful to have him back.
- And speaking of voice actors, he at last has an appropriate accent for a middle eastern man. Sadly, it's no longer as deep and husky as it once was.
While there are no glyphs or codex pages, there are still "seals", and this time they're necessary. This marks the third and final Ezio game and the third consecutive game where collecting these things has been thrust in my direction. Admittedly, they are given the best incentive possible to collect them--they're a bit like Animus records, except not needing to be related, in that they store memories, meaning you get to play as Altair for collecting them.
The Assassin-Templar conflict is the main gig here, and for once the Assassins are the winning force by default. The Templars can actually come up and stealth-kill you if you're not careful, which is a very cool touch.
Assassin's Creed has finally achieved what it's failed at for three games straight, and that's incentivizing a player to collect its collectibles. Aside from aforementioned memory seals that let you access Altair's memories, there's also the data fragments. Naturally, there are 100 of them scattered throughout the city of Constantinople, so I naturally brushed it off and figured I'd never waste time on it. That is, until I went back to Animus Island and saw that I had to collect a maximum of 30 to unlock all the extra memories. That's much more manageable.
Using those data fragments and unlocking those memories unlocks yet more playable segments, in which you get to play Desmond's memories, giving us some desperately-needed info on Desmond himself before...ya know. It's fun, even if the gameplay does suddenly resemble Portal all of a sudden.
At one point, you disguise yourself as a minstrel to protect a cute Ottoman prince from being murdered by Templars, and you can sing tunes with various button presses. Some of them will be snarky rhymes about the enemies Ezio beat in the past, the Pazzi, the Barbarigo and the Borgia.
- Let me repeat that: you can, as Ezio, sing diss tracks about the antagonists you shitkicked before. This is officially my favorite game of the Ezio trilogy.
I never really liked or disliked the free-running dungeons in the past games, but I have to admit to being impressed with the catacombs under Galata. This is some real Nathan Drake shit right here.
I used the Cristina Vespucci missions in the last game as an example of how Brotherhood was an afterthought to ACII. But I won't say the missions themselves aren't good story, and that holds true for the Sofia missions here as well. Aside from being a part of the mission chain to re-living Altair's memories, it's also genuinely sweet to see an older Ezio find love with Sofia, and interact with her like a real friends to lovers romance would.

Cons:

I'm not sure what happened to Desmond's face or the white hoodie he was wearing, but both have changed for the worse. Clay, too, both looks and sounds like someone completely different.
The "cinematic" angle is finally bogging down the game like it does so many others. Whenever you do a counter kill, the game gives you some slow-motion to watch it happen and also prompts you to press the button again to properly finish it. I wasn't impressed; frankly I liked watching them happen in real time.
The game is still giving me little conditions to fulfill that then judge me when I finish the mission. I still don't like it, even if it fits the framing device now.
At this point, it warrants addressing: I'm tired of unlocking the same ability and having it called something different each time as though it's a new addition. ACII taught you early on how to free-run and climb, and then decided to re-teach you both at the midpoint of the game, which was patronizing enough. The latter at least unlocked a "jump" feature on your climbing to help you reach higher areas. You for some reason failed to have this ability in AC:B, at least until you unlocked and bought a special glove which changes that for some reason. Now, in AC:R, you have the "hookblade", another climbing aid that has changed maybe .001% of the game. You can even perform new moves you would presumably be able to do just fine without a gadget's assistance.
- "You see, the hookblade consists of two parts: the hook and the blade. So you can use whichver one you like."
- Wow. Thanks for holding my hand through that, Yusuf.
Up til now, all of these have been minor complaints, but I do have one significant one, that being the part of the game where things grind to a halt and you're suddenly playing a point-and-click tower defense game. I mean, for tower defense, it was pretty okay! It just isn't anything like Assassin's Creed as far as I'm concerned. And I know exactly what "Assassin's Creed" is is supposed to change over the years, but this did not give me the fun of gathering info on a target or hunting him down like past games were busy doing for me.
Another new part of the game that doesn't enamor me is the crafting aspect. Rather than just smoke bombs, there are now over ten different types of bombs you can use for different effects that the game basically demands you use. Not only is this propped up as a big aspect of the game, but you are expected to make your own the vast majority of the time. Yes, it's a full crafting system and I hate it. I'm fully aware that's been all the rage since 2010, and continues to be all the rage all the way into 2018, but this little gaming gimmick has never held any appeal for me, whatsoever. It's time-consuming, requires grinding and resource-hunting to do no matter the scale, and simply cannot compete with the other ways of completing objectives, no matter what game you're playing. I am holding that as a major strike against this game, and I hope that future games don't continue it, though I have the nagging feeling they will.
I'm hesitant to say that any game can have too much content, but it can genuinely be a problem sometimes. But even ignoring all of the ways you can handle situations outside them, there's just never enough different situations to warrant the usage of all these bomb types, since your approach will generally be to kill the guards or your target, give them the slip, or lure them away--and among the three types for those very purposes, there's abundant specific bomb types. I simply will never need all of these, and thus it chafes me all the harder that the every chest or body I loot gives me nothing but materials to make these things instead of things I'd rather receive, like bullets, crossbow bolts, or medicine.
Unfortunately, for all the scale that this game builds up in the beginning, it goes nowhere fast. The goals of crushing Byzantine usurper efforts and unsealing Altair's library rarely intersect, at best being linked by Ahmet, the traitor, using the Byzantines for his own ends for...no real reason I can think of. We're never given a real threat to combat--ACI obviously has the danger of the Apple and what the Templars could do with it as well as their plotting to move the Crusades to their advantage. ACII has Rodrigo becoming Pope and possessing the Staff, and trying to meet God in the Vault. ACB has Cesare's maniacal, tyrranical and hedonistic rule that needs to be ended with all haste. But here, Ahmet doesn't really pose much of a threat and neither do the Byzantine usurpers; the main goal of unsealing Altair's library doesn't aid in anyone's being safe from harm.
The game advertises Altair a hell of a lot more than it has any right to. There are only five Altair missions, and each of them can be completed in under ten minutes--that's less than an hour of Altair gameplay in comparison to about three days of Ezio gameplay. The latter two only take that long because you're restricted to slow movement. Perhaps if less of his story had been skipped (see below) this wouldn't have been an issue.
Ahmet as a final boss is a bit disappointing. You could tell Ubisoft were trying to go for a dramatic ending, but they really just failed to live up to the standard set by the past two games' endings, or the beginning of this one. The whole parasailing angle is thrust on you with no warning whatsoever, but thankfully isn't that hard to adapt to. Chasing down Ahmet takes ten minutes. Beating him takes ten seconds as you plummet down a cliff far farther than should be remotely possible. And then a character you've never seen before pops up and kills him.
Ahmet as a character, really, is a wasted opportunity. Unlike the dramatic and evil Rodrigo Borgia, or the utterly insane tyrant that Cesare Borgia was, Ahmet simply goes for a "we have the same goal" angle with the hero. It's played up as another thing with the Assassin protagonist's noble desires being the same thing desired by the evil antagonist and their methods simply differing, but Ahmet would've been better played as a psychopath who was simply evil. The things he did for power--kidnapping, murder, extortion, manipulation, etc.--are things he all talks about with utter calmness and distanced apathy. It would be chilling if that had been put down as a point to hate him for, or if someone had called him out on it, but that's not what happened.

Really bad cons:

As much as I enjoy playing Altair again, I have a few large problems with his story that warrant cons of their own:
- A period of thirty fucking years is skipped inbetween Masyaf Key 2 and Masyaf Key 3, the largest yet by far of any timeskip and the largest span of time traveled over the course of any game so far. Within this timeskip, Altair got together with Maria (not showing us any of the process or the chemistry), had two sons, somehow lost control of the Brotherhood to Abbas Sofian after his disastrous misuse of the Apple of Eden, and his youngest son was executed. For all the opportunity this game presented to show us more of Altair's life, we end up being told the largest part of it--again, after that mistake was already made in Assassin's Creed II.
  - And it's even worse than before, considering that in Ezio's side of the story, we do get to see how Ezio and Sofia interact and build up a romance, and see their affection blossom.
- Because so much of this is offscreen, Abbas and Maria both come off as flatter characters. Abbas comes off as a diabolus ex machina, having somehow siezed control of the Brotherhood while Altair was away despite everybody and their mother already having seen that he can't be trusted not to fuck people over, and despite every word of his voice dripping with antagonism. Not to mention his machinations resulting in the deaths of three great and skilled Assassins, two of them offscreen and one of them being Malik. Maria comes off as a generic wise peace-loving wife who stupidly gets herself killed because she came inbetween an Apple-wielding Altair and a man with a sword, rather than the badass warrior capable of going toe-to-toe with Altair that we know her to be.
- Yet another thirty years is skipped inbetween Masyaf Key 3 and Masyaf Key 4! Abbas has still maintained control of the Assassins for all this time, without Altair ever doing anything to stop it despite having the damn Apple the entire time. This doesn't just look like Abbas isn't compelling as a villain, it starts to weaken Altair's claim as a skilled and driven Assassin. Especially when the reason given is "self-imposed exile".
- All of these "revelations" sound like they were simply to give Altair a tragic life. A tragic life isn't a subsitute for depth or a compelling story, and Ubisoft seems to have thought that it is. And that's frustrating. Ubisoft wants to tell me that Altair "lost" everything, when the truth is that they took it away from him.
Once again, you don't even kill the final boss yourself. This is the second time this has been ripped away from m, and I'm sick of it.

Miscellaneous:

Rather than a notoriety meter that increases guards' temperamental attitude the fuller it gets, we instead have an assassin attention meter. Instead of it driving guards to stick a sword up your ass if you breathe in their vicinity, a full meter instead causes a templar attack on one of your dens, triggering a tower defense fight.
For the first time, Ezio is no longer magnetized to whatever surface comes within range. This can be a blessing when you consider how Ezio wildly jumping in the wrong direction or climbing something vaguely in the way would constantly fuck you over in past games, but on the other hand it can be a curse in calmer climbing and free-running when I expect to grab a surface and find myself coming up short.

Final thoughts:

Really, this game's biggest sin was utterly failing on all things relating to Altair and souring the enjoyment of his character I walked away with in the first Assassin's Creed game. It's a pretty big failing--and quite the reversal from me disliking Ezio's campaigns, which I liked in this game. It's only other major flaw was trying to push a few gimmicky things as new and impressive when they usually were neither. If it were just the latter, this would be a great game, easily surpassing ACII and Brotherhood. I still think it's my favorite of the Ezio trilogy at the end of the day, I just wish the cost weren't so great.