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Assassin’s Creed Revelations Game Review

Assassin’s Creed Revelations is a 2011 action-adventure video game developed and published by Ubisoft for PC and other platforms. It’s another strong entry in this wonderful franchise.

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“Even in times of peace,

the poor are always under siege“

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When this game was released, it garnered excellent reviews for the most part. Nowadays, the game’s estimation has somewhat shifted more toward a mixed status. While I definitely have many issues with this entry, I still find it to be a worthy addition to the series and a game that I loved playing throughout.

Set in 1511 Constantinople, it follows Ezio as he has to find the five keys to unlock the library built by Altair. This is the final entry in the so-called Ezio trilogy and I have to say that they closed his story beautifully. This trilogy has to rank among the best in gaming history and a series that featured one of the most unforgettable gaming protagonists ever. Yes, Ezio remains a powerful, highly charismatic presence. But here he was also more humanized. We follow his older version and the frail yet still competent older Ezio made for a wonderfully complex personality.

I did wish for more emphasis on Turkish characters. The game is set in Constantinople, but it doesn’t properly develop any of its Turkish characters, though the political drama brewing within the city was expectedly intriguing. Yusuf was a wonderful companion and his death was very much felt. I also loved Sofia’s character. I find her to be a superb love interest for Ezio and their scenes together were brimming with touching romance. Ezio’s story finished off on such a tender and moving note and I loved every second of it.

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But the highlight for me was all the Altair stuff. As a huge fan of this character, I appreciated the decision to bring him back for this game. How they tied his story with Ezio’s was incredible. We get a lot of insight into Altair as a character and his future after the first game. He has a very tragic, but memorable arc and especially what happened to his family was brutal. The Abbas storyline was exceptional. Extra props have to go to the writers for actually incorporating both of these characters into a coherent storyline that felt richly ambitious and satisfactory. The ending was particularly potent and absolutely epic in scope. It was the perfect way to end the entire trilogy.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations is set in Constantinople and the vast majority of the game is confined to that one city alone for better and for worse. We do get to experience Masyaf through those flashback sequences where you play as Altair himself. I just loved those parts and I wished that they were longer as they were so intriguing in plot and well executed in all areas. There is also one sequence set in Cappadocia – this mountain town was visually fascinating and quite unique.

But for the most part you are in Constantinople. I loved the addition of extra information that you can read about the people that you meet and the places that you visit. That was a nice touch. The city itself is populated with interesting mosques, towers and squares, but it never truly came alive for me in the same vein as Venice and Rome did before due to the city being too small and because most of it had indistinguishable streets and roofs. It was also lacking in important towers to climb, which especially frustrated me. The Grand Bazaar was easily the best and most colorful place to visit.

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The game is rather familiar and straightforward in its technical aspects. The graphics are serviceable, but not a big leap from its predecessors whatsoever. It looked good, but far from amazing. The score was fine when it was included, but that happened so rarely that it really bothered me. The scarcity of music in this game made it less epic for me. I wished that the gameplay itself was as cinematic as those incredible cutscenes were. But the voice acting is once again absolutely incredible and so emotionally charged for every important character. And the highlight for me was what they did with the controls. They made them more streamlined and, thus, much more intuitive to use than they were before. This was the only big improvement upon its predecessors.

Revelations is an open world action-adventure stealth game that is played from a third-person perspective. The Desmond scenes felt as disposable as ever, but thankfully both the Ezio and the Altair sections were a delight. The mixture of combat, exploration and stealth is as appealing as ever in this installment. But I have to say that combat fared the worst this time around. It’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but it simply never had the polish of the later entries or the difficulty level of the previous games. The main narrative is way too short, making this entry the shortest AC game to date. And it’s also one of the easiest games, which is in no small part thanks to that combat lacking in challenge. I very rarely died during the main missions and that was a problem for a player who likes to be challenged.

Much has been made of the Hookblade addition within the game itself, but this proved to be much ado about nothing at the end of the day. This special blade helped Ezio compensate for his old age and I liked that the game at least tried to be more realistic in that regard. It lets you not just climb faster, but also attach yourself easier when jumping from building to building. It was serviceable, but at the end of the day not really needed, especially when using it against the enemies for special moves that are cool but inessential. The best use of this new mechanic was easily during the ziplines. I loved this addition and it’s crazy that it took them four games to include such an obvious mechanic, but it still bothered that there were so few of these ziplines scattered throughout the city.

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This is a very easy and short game to beat. I am talking about the main campaign of course. Things are a bit different if you want to 100% complete it, which is what I did. You have to collect all treasure chests, Animus Fragments and book pages scattered throughout the city, but they can be marked with the treasure maps that you buy from vendors, so that made this task infinitely easier.

You also have to craft a bomb of each type and use them all on guards in what was the most frustrating task to complete for me. It was even tedious. I disliked this one, but thankfully all the other tasks I genuinely liked. Bomb crafting is the newly added mechanic in Revelations, but one that felt even more unnecessary than the Hookblade. In fact, if you don’t want to complete every single thing in the game, you could easily finish the main campaign without ever using a single bomb if not needed. Admittedly, how they were executed worked. Their effects were interesting and it can be a lot of fun using them, but you can just as easily beat the guards on your own, which the bombs unimportant.

You can renovate the city of Constantinople in the same way that you did for other cities in the previous games. Killing the Templars and recovering the parts of town and its towers was also revisited here to a great effect. But this time around the Templars can launch another attack on the area that you’d won before, so you will need to do these Den Defense missions. This is where Revelations suddenly turned into a tower defense game and I honestly quite disliked it. It didn’t fit this series at all and it was very jarring. Thankfully, there is only one of these missions that you just have to do, so I ended up entirely ignoring the others and doing just fine.

The Piri Reis bomb missions are quite easy, but the Guild Challenges were the hardest by far and this is where I spent most of my playthrough toward full synchronization. These include challenges for all the different guilds (Romani, Thieves etc.) and they require a very specific set of skills or tasks that you need to successfully pull of multiple times – for example kill guards from a ledge. Although these were too specific and rather difficult at times, they made the game a lot of fun to play and I actually grew rather fond of them later on. I was hooked and I loved playing all of these tasks, not counting the bomb ones of course.

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Another huge new addition and the one that changed the game most for completionists is the addition of Master Assassin missions. You recruit Assassins by saving them from guards in a repeated mechanic from its predecessors, but the added element of training them was included here and it actually really worked. You train these assassins by sending them to overseas missions all the way to Level 10 and then you go with them on the first mission. Then, you train those five assassins to Level 15 and you complete the second mission. This was such a rewarding mechanic that made the game innovative in its use of time management and tactics employed. You really need to start these off as soon as possible as they require a huge amount of time to fully complete.