Assassin’s Creed 3 releases tomorrow, so it’s about time we reached the end of our Assassin’s Creed retrospective (part 1, part 2, part 3) with a spoiler-filled look at Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
The final chapter
Revelations begins with Desmond in a coma, his mind broken by all the trips in the Animus.
He’s trapped inside the Animus on Animus Island (complete with beach) with an AI version of Subject 16. Subject 16 tells Desmond to find a “synch nexus,” a memory that links Ezio and Altaïr with Desmond and will repair his mind.
Desmond dives straight back into Ezio’s memories, joining him in the early 16th century with Ezio now in his early fifties. Ezio heads to Masyaf in search of any secrets Altaïr managed to uncover.
Whilst there, he learns about the five Masyaf keys required to open Altaïr’s library, but gets captured by Templars and loses all his equipment. After escaping the Templars, Ezio sails to Constantinople, the city where most of Revelations takes place.
During the rest of the game, Ezio works on locating the books that hold the locations of the Masyaf keys, against a backdrop of unrest and political and literal backstabbing.
Deja vu
The gameplay itself is almost identical to Brotherhood’s, with the same investments system (plus bookshops), Templar dens directly replacing Borgia Towers and the same guild questing system (with added rewards).
You can build up your own Brotherhood of assassins again, but this time around you can assign them permanently to various Mediterranean cities to halt the Templar resurgence. You also gain money and items for holding each of the cities.
These small changes were disappointing and made controlling the Brotherhood feel like a tedious mini-game of menu navigation rather than anything requiring skill. Further, the assassins you recruit all seem the same – the system would really have benefited from allowing additional customisation and specialisation, instead of going down the Skyrim route of battling against the UI.
Templars must die!
A similarly poorly executed addition is a tower defense style minigame, where you have to place assassins along rooftops, place barricades, and fire cannons at the oncoming Templar soldiers. Luckily you’re only forced to do the mini-game once.
There’s very little strategy involved; the tower defense game is far too simple for it to be compelling and feel important. Again, this feels like a feature that was rushed to make the release date and did not feel fully developed.
Perhaps the largest new feature added to Revelations are bombs. Ezio is taught how to make his own, from cherry bombs that distract guards, to highly destructive splinter bombs, to bombs filled with skunk oil to repulse your enemies. There’s even an entire series of bomb quests designed to teach you how to use the things. Unfortunately, bombs aren’t all that helpful except for on a handful of occasions.
In my entire Revelations playthrough, I think I only used bombs three or four times; it was simply easier to use conventional weapons or, if I needed to enter an area unnoticed, to blend in with the crowd.
Oh and Ezio’s become so popular that he has to deal with stalkers. The kind with knives.
Desmond’s Journey
In Revelations there are fewer collectables than in previous Assassin’s Creed games. There are 10 memoir pages to collect that unlock a jumping puzzle inside the Hagia Sophia and reward you with the best armor set in the game, and there are a hundred Animus data fragments to collect.
As you collect these, you unlock parts of Desmond’s Journey, a series of Desmond’s memories from before he started out with Abstergo.
These memories take the form of a first-person platformer mini-game, where you place different shaped blocks to traverse the levels. The puzzles were mostly straightforward and occasionally frustrating, and the mechanics have some potential.
Their implementation did not fit with the rest of the game, however. I don’t enjoy first-person platforming and I vaguely resented having to spend a good half hour doing it in order to discover Desmond’s backstory. Still, it gave some depth to Desmond’s character and helped me to forgive his perpetual grumpiness.
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