Assassin’s Creed Revelations

After the Assassin’s Creed franchise became very successful, its producer Ubisoft adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year: they must make money while the iron is hot. It was inevitable, then, that the games would eventually show clear signs of a rushed development cycle, being devoid of any creative reason to exist. Assassin’s Creed Revelations is the first victim of this business plan.

For marketing reasons, we now play with the two previous protagonists, Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad. Revelations, which reveals absolutely nothing important about anything, follows both Assassins but devotes most of its time to exploring Ezio’s mission in Constantinople – it’s the most popular character of the two, after all. The Italian wants to uncover the secrets that lie hidden in the great library of Masyaf but, in order to enter the place, he needs five keys that were hidden by Niccolò Polo in Constantinople.

The story, which never evolves beyond this fetch quest, divides itself into several fronts. In the first, there is the local political dispute for the new sultan of Constantinople. The leader of the Templars has one of the keys and it is up to Ezio to discover his identity in the court and which side – Byzantines or Ottomans – the man is fighting for. The second front focuses on the search for the four remaining keys – hidden in tombs and caves that need to be located by reading books that also need to be found – and follows the strange relationship between the protagonist and the owner of a local bookstore. The third, led by Altaïr, is episodic – only by “reading” each key is one of his chapters unlocked – and it tells us of the Assassin’s last days. And the last front is about Desmond in the present day as he tries to overcome the consequences of his actions at the end of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.

The political plot matters little to Ezio and, therefore, much less to us.  Ezio’s journey in previous games was always extremely personal, fueled by revenge and a strong sense of justice, but here it’s just a bureaucratic mission, giving us little reason to engage emotionally with what’s happening onscreen. To make matters worse, the antagonist is only discovered by the end of the game and has very little time to discuss his intentions, making any political discussion mute. And to add insult to injury, there’s also a love story that feels tacked on, never convincing us of its authenticity – the age gap between the two is a crucial reason – and is also equally irrelevant to the main events.

Altaïr’s part is even worse, as his dialogues are filled with unnecessary exposition. The fall of the Assassin is told very quickly and without any real purpose: Altaïr’s character arc was completely finished in the first game, which means that all the events narrated here don’t add anything substantial to his journey. He’s here for marketing purposes, to sell Revelations as a reunion of sorts: it’s the one where we can play as both Ezio and Altair, isn’t that exciting?

Desmond doesn’t fare much better either, never doing much more than complain about what’s happening around him and be confused by the questions of his predecessor, a man called “Seventeen”. Trapped in a kind of limbo inside the Animus, Desmond must reminisce about his past and reconstruct the fragments of his memory to prevent the lives of Ezio and Altaïr from blending with his own in his mind. His goal is a very grounded one, never feeling part of a videogame quest in any way: he must collect 100 “pieces of memory” throughout the environments while overcoming first-person platform sequences. The objective is to create blocks in the air to help him reach the other side of the rooms while Desmond remembers his childhood and adolescence. This part is slow, is built with a boring, bland art style – there are only blue and gray blocks on the stages –, and it requires very little of the player’s skill or intelligence: there’s simply no saving grace here.

And the problems don’t stop there. When the “alertness level” in an area becomes full, Ezio’s territories are attacked by Templars, an event that surprisingly takes the form of a Tower Defense minigame. Ezio stands on top of a roof, placing Assassins on top of the other houses to attack the Templars who are invading the street. The issue is that these stages are repetitive and very, very easy: we even possess a cannon shot that kills almost all enemies on the screen, if the situation ever becomes dire, which won’t. And because it needs the alertness level to be at maximum to be unlocked, we will hardly need to play these Tower Defense stages after the tutorial. In other words, here’s a perfect example of the tendency in this franchise to add more and more shallow systems and mechanics that in no way, shape, or form add to the experience: they’re just contrived distractions.

The combat, surprising absolutely no one, remains with the same problems as before: we just need to wait for the enemy to strike and press the counter button to eliminate them. If the enemy soldier is immune to counters, pressing the left trigger releases Assassins on them and immediately solves the issue. Training the Assassins in the long run also remains pointless, as the practical difference between having a level 8 Assassin from a level 10 is still a mystery. Bombs, on the other hand, are a nice addition, as they can distract or kill guards, increasing the possibilities of facing a mission with a stealthy approach.

Parkour, on the other hand, has received small but harmful adjustments. Early in the story, Ezio receives a hook blade from a Turkish colleague that expands his options for climbing and moving. This may seem good, but the problem is that the hook expands so much the movement options that it makes analyzing the geography of the city and its buildings an unnecessary exercise: just jumping randomly and using the hook works just fine now.

Constantinople must have been an ideal locale for the developers to explore due to its architecture having Greek and Roman influences. The city is beautifully represented and feels alive, especially when we are passing through its most important sights, such as the crowded Grand Bazaar. If there’s an element that the series has not yet – at this point in time, at least – failed to do is to provide a city that feels authentic and lived in.

The two previous entries in the series also worked as a kind of tourist guide to these incredible cities, which reinforced an important sense of ​​history that is at the center of the narrative. These games structured missions inside real churches and palaces, turning them into a great labyrinth of platforms surrounded by famous paintings and frescoes. They put tense set pieces on them or elaborate parkour sections, recontextualizing these places in our minds. In Assassin’s Creed Revelations this design is almost nowhere to be found, wasting the potential of some striking buildings: Hagia Sofia, for example, is relegated to a hidden secondary mission, so many players will give up on the game before even unlocking it.

Revelations is so soulless that it also fails to expand one of Brotherhood’s best additions to the formula, called Full Sync. Normally, we can solve a mission stealthily or with a more combative approach, it’s up to us how to tackle a situation. But with Full Sync, we are encouraged to solve missions in the way that Ezio “really did”, which should allow the development team to lead us through the missions, indicating the most challenging and interesting ways to complete them. In Assassin’s Creed Revelations, however, this only comes down to dull objectives like “Do not get caught” and “Do not take damage”.

The game’s technical presentation is also subpar. Not only is the soundtrack practically non-existent – apart from the great main theme, almost no music is heard in-game – but the number of bugs, at least in the PS3 version, is alarming: Desmond’s stages often load only when they want to and sometimes the game even crashes in the attempt. When Ezio jumps off from roofs to assassinate somebody below, he can occasionally get trapped in the air and miss his mark, or hit a ladder and kill the target anyway – possibly from a heart attack from witnessing a man hanging in the air with a blade. And after an assassination, the alertness meter can jump to the maximum level and stay there endlessly, with only rebooting the game as a workable solution.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations is a game made to make Ubisoft money and only that. There’s a creative void here, sucking all energy from the narrative, and leaving nothing remotely interesting intact.

December 11, 2024.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.