Assassins Creed: Revelations

Assassins Creed is one of those franchises that I really like, and don't mind having lots of titles to play. I liked Altair, the loose-cannon assassin who gets his crap together and gets himself on track, and I liked Ezio the roguish assassin who goes from revenge to duty as his motivator to be a renaissance action hero.

I've even enjoyed all of the games they've put out, even if Brotherhood should have been more of an expansion/DLC pack and was probably the weakest overall entry. The single player city renovation, assassin recruiting, and guild management side-games were fun, if a bit light on content to really get into. The multiplayer had a lot of promise, and was lots of fun for at least a little while.

How is this relevant to Revelations? Well, Revelations is basically Brotherhood, in Constantinople. You still do the renovation thing, purchasing healers, smiths, bookstores, and tailors who are only there to sell you things, and tell you how little they think of you. No, really... every merchant is shocked that you can afford to buy their wares, even though you were the man who put their shop there in the first place! 

You also do the whole recruiting, training, mission-assigning thing from Brotherhood, where you collect a bunch of downtrodden peasants, random criminals with hearts-of-gold, and so on, sending them off to far off places to do things for money and experience, and the chance to level up and be slightly less expendable. Not that they are that expendable this time around... where the Templar forces could kill a handful of your assassins in Brotherhood, they are almost unstoppable to the point that I've yet to have one die ever, even if wildly outnumbered and surrounded.

You also have bomb building, side-missions, item collecting, and Den Defense, which is basically tower defense, but with assassins fighting Byzantine holdovers marching under the Templar banner. I know, it's kind of absurd, but this is Assassins Creed: Revelations, where you play a man reliving the memories of his ancestor... reliving the memories of his ancestor. I'm not even kidding, that happens several times. It's great, and I loved, but it's absurd when you think about it too hard.

Anyway, if I'm going to gripe about anything in this game, it's that the extra content like the Brotherhood challenge maps, and race courses are missing, which I quite liked. Also, it's missing some of the challenge, and massive battles. In all the previous AC games you could count on being surrounded by upwards of fifty armed, jeering, angry soldiers who would try to hack you to little-bitty-assassin bits. Apparently they just don't have that kind of manpower anymore. Maybe Ezio's just killed too many people across the last three games.

However, all the new gadgets, moves, and bombs do make terrorizing what guards there are infinitely entertaining.

Story-wise it's good, and it wraps up Ezio's story arch, reveals some more stuff about the ongoing plot, develops Desmond a bit more, and sets up the next game to be about him. Probably. Who knows anymore. Maybe Desmond's story is just being relived by one of his descendants. Yeah, I wouldn't put it past Ubisoft to do something like that.

As for the multiplayer: it seems like Ubisoft has figured out how to make it work, and it's pretty entertaining.

Bottom line: Worth the full price.