The word, "Revelations" doesn't even begin to apply to this disatrous new direction the AC series is going in.
Story (Be Warned of Spoilers):
According to one of the employees at Ubisoft, story is at the heart of this franchise, and they were aiming to put more emphasis on it this time around. In that light, how did this chapter of the ongoing dual-story manage to turn out like this? By the end of the game, there are only three things you will know that you didn't before. Firstly, the mysterious temples mentioned at the end of both ACII and ACB were in fact built by Those Who Came Before. That's something we already guessed. Second, William M is Desmond's father. Not only is that something we already guessed, but it's completely obnoxious. Third, Desmond apparently used to use his parents' conspiracy theories as a pick-up method at parties.
But that's all. There are no big secrets revealed, no serious questions answered, no mysteries undone, no emotional farewell to Ezio, no heartfelt look into Desmond's tear-jerking past, or anything else like that. The dialogue and the voices that deliver it are almost completely emotionless. Some parts of Altair's story, and a lot of scenes between Ezio and his new girlfriend, are handled well, but the rest isn't. This is especially clear in the almost-completely optional 2012 aspect of the story, which kicks off with the unbelievably stupid and infuriatingly unnecessary "revelation" that Lucy Stillman (you know, the only interesting part of the modern day story) was indeed killed by Juno's attack at the end of the last game…despite Altair and Ezio having survived several stabs to the gut, and Altair didn't even have any armor. Although you might expect a little bit of sadness on the part of her remaining teammates, you're treated to a brief and unconvincing breakdown by Desmond as he finds out that his love interest is dead. Shaun, Rebecca, and William are even worse. If this is the extent of the revealings, it's a horrendous start. The 2012 plot doesn't ever improve, with a lack of emphasis and a terrible rendition of Subject 16, who doesn't look or act anything like what one would imagine after listening to him in the last two games.
And it carries over to Ezio's tale. This is just a rehashing of the Brotherhood plot, just with different villains. It takes a few sequences for the story to pick up…right before it falls flat on its face with a horde of terrible new characters that are rushed in to take the place of the loveable and genuinely-good characters from before. Constantinople may be a far better location then the formerly-speculated Japan or Egypt, but it feels utterly disconnected from all three of its predecessors. This feeling of disjointedness is only made worse by the lack of any familiar people or places. Sofia is the only bright spot. She takes the place of Ezio's former love, Cristina, who was also killed in ACB. Watching their ongoing relationship remains entertaining throughout.
Altair's story suffers from the same problems, but has the fortunate advantage of ending on a good note. By the end of the plot, it's easiest to identify with Altair, especially after his wife is killed (seriously, Ubisoft, knock it off…NOW). But, the expected lack of emotion quickly kills all forward momentum. When he extinguishes like an ancient flame, it is the only moment that provokes even the slightest of emotion in you.
Well, that and the woman with a crying baby in the aesthetically-pleasing scene that shows how the sun flared up and destroyed the world once before. This scene is quite literally the highlight of the ending. The rest of the time, Desmond listens to an old man from the First Civilization ramble on about things we already knew. Quite literally, the character just finds different ways to word things that have already been revealed in previous installments. Amazingly, one of his lines defeats the purpose of the entire game when he tells Desmond what basically amounts to, "Don't ask me, I don't have the answers". And then the miraculously under-whelming moment when Desmond returns to his body…and instead of embracing anyone (like, you know, his father) or crying or anything like that, he ends this dreadfully disappointing story with the single most cliche line of dialogue in history.
And don't get your hopes up for any sign that Lucy might still be alive. Don't worry about the reconstructing island in the background. Don't expect any further conversation between the characters to get you hyped for the result of this terrible new story direction. Because you aren't going to get any. Guess questions like why was Lucy stabbed, what was Subject 16 talking about during the Truth segments of the last two games, and what's Ubisoft's excuse for predictably forcing Desmond's father back into his life will have to wait. If, that is, they're ever answered at all. Never mind that the title of the game is Revelations. It seems that Ubisoft's story writers just bit off more then they could chew here, and rather then try to chew it slowly by at least getting a few things right, they've decided to sweep it under the rug. Unless the next game is a serious improvement, the franchise's plot element may have lost all its heart.
Gameplay:
One would hope that at least playing would be fun, but Reveations comes up short here, as well. The central mechanics of climbing and fighting have had the usual "improvements" (or lack thereof, to be more precise). Ezio still climbs around way too slowly, the combat still tries to be harder then it should… But this time, it also tries to be flashier then it should. The slow-motion spam and the over-done brutalized killing animations are just plain effing ridiculous. The exploration, renovation, and economic gameplay has all been botched, too. Assassin's Creed is about an assassin climbing around, killing people, and trying not to be noticed. It was kind of fun to play landlord and talent scout/slave owner in ACB. In ACR, it's all a big fat chore.
Climbing is drug down by slow movements in an attempt to be realistic. Climbing on buildings isn't realistic, so give it up and allow the characters to really high-tail it around their historical cities. It's also not "creative" to make players shuffle around buildings trying to find their way up instead of just dashing up the side of the building like in ACII. This is such an exaggerated issue this time around because of the hookblade. The hookblade was hailed by Ubisoft to speed up the travel by 30%… Boy, 30% sure sounded a lot more impressive when they said it.
Playing landlord is suddenly a BIG problem for many reasons, but especially because of the notoriety issues. The general idea behind renovating everything is that you eventually generate a lot of income from it and have money to do more renovating and buy stuff. But that was back before renovations didn't increase in cost. It was also before renovating didn't drive your notoriety meter up. This is a stupid thing, and like most of the game, completely unnecessary. But it would at least be tolerable if not for the whole Den thing (more on that later) and the lack of posters to rip down. You must now reduce notoriety by paying precious few coins to Heralds and by killing the too-scarce officials.
You can see how this is becoming a problem with the in-game economy. If you have to save all your money for Heralds and renovations (in a pointless attempt to gain more money), how can you buy weapons and armor? Or books, ammunition, and parachutes? It quickly becomes about balancing the meager scratches you're scraping by with vs. the faint hope that you'll have less trouble if you struggle forward a little longer.
The extraneous assassin recruits are back and more cumbersome and tedious then ever. At least this mechanic was fun in ACB, despite the flaws that were unavoidably present in it's system. And now it's a cluttered mess that involves dens, missions, and miserably long, arduous defense missions. Akin to the Borgia towers from before, a den must be liberated from Templar control first. Once it's in your hands, you should have little to worry about, right? Wrong. ACR tries to make even this more depthy then it can successfully be. The notoriety (which, you must remember, is almost impossible to keep down) is tied to the dens. So, if you happen to be running too low on money to pay off Heralds, or can't find any officials to kill, you will undoubtedly find a den under attack. And what's worse then having a den under attack? Not being able to just go, fight a lot of bad guys, and solve the problem. Instead, you must play an idiotic, awkward, boring, and ultimately pointless new minigame that takes ten minutes and usually fails. When it's over, you can easily regain the den by just assassinating the templar leader who's taken control. And all this frustration and annoyance results from having no posters to tear down...
Once you get past that, you'd expect to be able to send recruits out on missions and use them for easy kills. And yes, you can still do that, but further weighing down the den mechanic is a new ability to assign level 10 recruits as den "masters". You'll soon tire of this as you try to coordinate recruits for missions AND take on the always-tedious master assassin missions.
Speaking of, weren't there not supposed to be side-missions this time? And if there must be, shouldn't they all be accessible? Certain missions, like the Piri Reis missions or some of the final master assassin missions don't even make it clear how to access them. To try to make up for these supposedly non-existent side missions, the game will drop a random task in your lap once in a blue moon. But carrying crates a few feet to a destination point or trying to ward off stalkers (by trying and failing at least five times to prevent them from stabbing you in an uninspired reflex-based button-pressing sequence) isn't a very good substitute.
Neither is bomb crafting, which is an almost entirely pointless venture. There's nothing that can't be done without them. They make certain things easier, such as achieving 100% synchronization in some missions, but are ultimately another unnecessarily extraneous detail that aren't very much fun to use. Of course, so is the 100% synch feature. This nerve-grating, and often arduous, thing shouldn't be here to begin with. But it would be at least bearable if there was a simple revert-to-last checkpoint option. The simplest of tasks are bogged by a badly-designed menu, though. Simply pausing the game or opening the map takes at least five seconds. That wouldn't be a problem if you didn't have to do it so frequently, but playing an AC game means opening a map, finding a place to go, and going there. So it will cause you to grit your teeth when you realize you have to open the map. You may try to find excuses NOT to open the map just because of it. Even skipping a cinematic, which you can do with one or two buttons in practically every other game, is a lengthy process. Pause the game = five seconds. Wait for the menu to become workable = three seconds. Select option = two seconds. Confirm = two more seconds. And then sit through a damn loading screen. Not impressive or smooth-flowing.
When playing as Altair, you will inevitably have more fun. The missions are short and usually combat-based, with simple 100% synchs and a feeling that comes directly from the older games. It literally is as simple as go here, do this, stealth here, do this, repeat. AC games may need to be more varied then the first game in the series, but they don't need all this extra nonsense like bomb crafting and assassin dens. Not that these features couldn't have been well done, they just weren't.
When playing as Desmond (which happens altogether too infrequently), you'll run around the empty and depressingly dead animus island. Sometimes (but again, not nearly often enough) you'll get to listen in on a conversation Shaun, Rebecca, and William are having. But it's usually just another brief discussion about Lucy. One horribly-wasted conversation deals with the subject of the undisclosed feelings between Lucy and Desmond, but not only does it fail to be what it should be, it only serves to remind you of how much has gone to waste because of the inexcusable decision to get rid of the character. Once the modern assassins finally stop talking, you can take on one of five Desmond-centric sequences. Assuming that you've managed to accidentally stumble across enough date fragments in the Ezio portion. Like the rest of the plot, these sequences don't tell you anything new about Desmond, other than his methods for getting laid at parties. We already knew he hated his life with his parents. We already knew he left them when he was 16. We already knew he got a job as a bartender. We already knew he was kidnapped by Abstergo. What they should've looked into with these sequences were his friends, past romantic entanglements, extended family, where he lived, the other jobs he had, the kinds of food and drink that he liked, and other things like that. This series is highly lacking in drama or angst, and here is an unused opportunity to add some. Even if you don't agree with that, you'd be hard pressed to deny that these sequences don't tell us anything new or interesting about Desmond. Essentially, we're left with the same character we had before. Only now, there's no building relationship with Lucy.
The way these sequences play is almost as bad as the den defense minigame. First-person puzzle segments that try to convey the supposedly-sad story of Desmond through echoing voices...and his own, talking himself through all the "pain" he was feeling during it all. What should've been lengthy, required sequences that take a deep and personal look at Desmond through traditional animus memories has instead been watered down to a few gimmicky platforming puzzles extended across five levels of non-engaging rambling.
Across all three Assassin's gameplay, the control layout is terrible. The puppeteer concept that felt so intuitive and natural in previous games is sacrificed for something that's just straight-up damned confusing and dumb. Why would you press the head button to fire pistols and throw knives, but use the armed-hand button to fire crossbow? Why would you press the analog stick down to activate Eagle Visi- oh, I'm sorry. I mean "Eagle Sense". The camera is standard AC, but that means it comes with all the pros and cons together.
The rest of the gameplay flaws amount to things as pointless as the change from the better Eagle Vision to the all-flash-no-substance Eagle Sense. Changes like art shop to book shop. It's just another reminder that this is an Assassin's Creed game starring Ezio that doesn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game starring Ezio.
Audio:
The music is way below par for Assassin's Creed. There's still orchestral themes, and that's all well and good. But none of it is memorable, like the Venice Rooftops theme from ACII or the Brotherhood Escapes theme from ACB. There are no quieter, happier-sounding tunes Florence or Venice from ACII. No mysterious, intriguing tunes like the song from the Truth video in ACII or the Apple Chamber from ACB. There are also no enjoyably explosive battle themes like Villa Under Attack. But that's just because there aren't any explosive battles. That Apple Chamber is copied and pasted in the last Desmond sequence, which is all the better for it. But that sequence feels right because it feels like you're getting back to AC1, when the positive resonance hadn't all but left the game...
The voice acting, on the other hand, is atrocious. Emotionless is one thing that AC always struggles with, but the delivery of this dialogue is often-times really, really bad. The most prevalent cases are Subject Sixteen and Yusuf, but Suleman and the generic villains are pretty bad too. The worst is definitely Altair. At no point should they ever have even thought about making him actually sound Arabic. Oddly, though, Maria is pretty on-key. His son isn't too bad either. But again, there's nothing here that can even stand up to the last three ACs.
Visual:
The characters' looks are noticeably altered to try and look more...Truthfully, to be honest, it isn't clear what they were trying to do here. Ezio looks right, but Altair doesn't age into the man you thought he would. Desmond looks like he just had his 40th birthday, when he's supposed to be 25. Sofia is pretty, but has nothing on a young Maria, Cristina, or Lucy. If characters like Claudia, Leonardo, and La Volpe had been animated using these new graphics, they would've been undoubtedly hideous, as well. The visuals are also the most responsible for the alien feel that accompanies Constantinople. It's impressive at night, but not for the same reasons as the other ACs. You don't feel like you're having fun stealthing around at night. You feel like you're a stranger, walking through a distant land. Mist affects, particles, lighting, etc. are all very nice looking, but...there's just something not right about them, too.
The writing for the menus is worth special mention. As usual, it's way too fine to read without sitting basically on top of the TV showing it. The menus themselves are a chore to navigate, but even more of a chore to read. The layout hasn't changed much for things like the DNA screen, but this black color scheme is more then just unfitting and depressing. It's difficult to decipher through.
Final:
Assassin's Creed: Revelations should've been so much more then this. A lack of revelation that's full of pointless character deaths, a complete mess for gameplay, unimpressive soundtrack, voice acting that ranges from stoic to totally terrible, and a graphical direction that not only makes no sense, but makes most characters look like gorillas is primarily the culprit behind the ruination of this game.The only true positive about Revelations is that at least it didn't take two years to disappoint so heavily. For Assassin's Creed III, the best course of action would be to strip away the animus and all the unnecessary things that go with it and get back to the good old AC fun. Don't kill off anymore characters in the story. Don't try to shoehorn a new girlfriend in for Desmond. Don't end the series with him sacrificing himself. Don't end it with him failing and the world burning, don't compromise like that. Stop, take a good look at the series' past, and answer the questions that you were supposed to answer with this game. Then end it with the happily-ever-after...Desmond stops the templars AND the sun. Do it simple, by having him walk right into that temple at the end of the game...
And if possible, bring Lucy back to life. That's a real betrayal, and you need to fix it.
Score: 4.0