For the past few hours I've been trying to draft up a review for Assassin's Creed: Revelations (which I just finished last night) and I'm having a hard time writing it. I think I need to get some thoughts out and my biggest thought is: it could have been better. I wanted to like the game a lot more but I can't. I can't help but feeling that the game did not put out it's full potential. I was thinking that the story of Altair, Ezio and Desmond would be wrapped nicely with only so much of the story left for Desmond to make AC III. Was I wrong. All that was wrapped up was Ezio's and Altair's.

There are still so many questions left about Desmond's story. That's not what I was expecting. I clearly set my expectations in the wrong place but now I'm feeling disappointed with a game that had great gameplay but the story, which is a big part of AC, left me empty.

I wish the game was as good as AC II and Brotherhood but it isn't, in my opinion. There are some good things done in the game and some nice improvements gameplay-wise like combat but the story just didn't do it for me in this game.

So frustrating...

I don't think the expectation was ever that we'd get much significant movement at all in the Desmond storyline. It was always meant to wrap up Ezio and Altair. So, sorry you misinterpreted?

@bwheeeler said:

I don't think the expectation was ever that we'd get much significant movement at all in the Desmond storyline. It was always meant to wrap up Ezio and Altair. So, sorry you misinterpreted?

This. Ubisoft themselves said that ACR would end Ezio's story, not Desmond's. His will be focused on in later games, potentially in AC3. Can't blame the game if you were expecting it to be something that is was never meant to be.

I love the AC story, but some of them are just so short :/. I platinumed one in a week, which is an achievement in itself. However revelations let it go a little longer. It is trying to set up for the rest of the series. I think one of the producers said something about wanting to have like 9 character lines by the end or something silly like that.

@JoeyRavn: Yeah you're right. Definitely can't blame the game. I guess I feel a little better about the game now that I understand what the expectation originally was.

It is the worse game in the series imo. I have experienced more jankiness in the first half of this game than the last three combined. I feel I am spending way too much time in menus assigning assassins that I have zero connection to to random missions. The tower defense bits are completely pointless since I don't really understand how it is possible to lose. But the worse part of the game by far are the Desmond sequences. The first person just straight up controls poorly and the platform laydown puzzles are just bad. It is just a frustrating dumb part of the game which could have been better replaced with a cutscene with Desmond explaining his past. I also find that traversing the city just isn't as fluent and fun as in the others. It seems the way the rooftops are spaced out just isn't as convenient for getting around and I find myself on the ground more than on the roofs. Assassins Creed was one of my favorite franchises from this gen but not anymore. I hope AC3 is as good as it should be.

@sirkibble23

I've actually started coming around to it more. I'm still not done I think I'm on Seq. 8 right now. Out of 9 that is a horrible place for the game to "pick up" but better late than never.

I originally thought getting the keys was annoying because the first dungeon you go into is boring and you have to stay stealthy. The latter key dungeons are great though - the second key especially under Galata Tower was awesome especially if you go for the 100% synch which added tension (although the game bugged out and didn't give it to me for some reason lol)

Main problem for me was the poor quality of storyline missions up to the point I'm at. Some of the assignments you go on seem so pointless or that they could have been handled way better in the context of the game. Especially most sneaking missions are poor since the series has a very strange stealth system. There are no shadows, you're either in a crowed or in hay. If you're in enemy territory with no civilian crowds it's just memorizing the one route to take to avoid the guards. Around Seq.6-7 the storyline is starting to be more dynamic which is good.

All the Altair stuff was a good try at potentially emotional moments - but I thought mostly fell short in one way or another.

I'm almost at the end and I'm sure the shit will really hit the fan storywise pretty soon and I can't wait for it.

Also I couldn't disagree more with the one person that said the Desmond levels were terrible. Maybe it's just because I like platformers and FPS games but I actually found them to be a lot of fun. Especially the later ones that get tricky - I wouldn't have minded if they made 10 of those instead and introduced different shapes and properties. Only real letdown is that wasn't much of a "Demond Journey" I thought we would learn a lot of cool back drop and you basically are told what you already know, only from Desmonds perspective.

@Humanity: I actually agree with @laserbolts as far as the Desmond sequences. They are terribly done. The sequences make little sense and they slow down the progression of Desmond's storytelling. It takes a little bit to solve a puzzle and when I finally do, I've forgotten what Desmond was talking about as he continues his monologue. I find myself trying to finish the puzzles in one quick try so I can continue on with Desmond's monologues. But I can see where you're coming from enjoying the puzzles. I would too if it wasn't contingent upon getting the rest of Desmond's story.

I agree with the Altair sequences. They are not as juicy as I thought they would and the consistency is lost, in my opinion, with the huge change in voice from the first AC. The missions also seem repetitive and uninspired. I know as Assassin's there are a lot of escapes but man. And the story is very slow, to me also. You're not even done with it yet so you'll get what I mean when I say it's like a fuse that is lit and then the bomb explodes and then it's over.

@sirkibble23 said:

@Humanity: I actually agree with @laserbolts as far as the Desmond sequences. They are terribly done.

They're painful. I completed them for the Achievements, otherwise I wouldn't have given a fuck about them. It's not that they reveal something completely unexpected from Desmond's past either. I don't get why they just didn't make them like the Desmond parts in AC:B. They were at least consistent with what an Assassin does: jump around and do cool stuff.

@JoeyRavn said:

@sirkibble23 said:

@Humanity: I actually agree with @laserbolts as far as the Desmond sequences. They are terribly done.

They're painful. I completed them for the Achievements, otherwise I wouldn't have given a fuck about them. It's not that they reveal something completely unexpected from Desmond's past either. I don't get why they just didn't make them like the Desmond parts in AC:B. They were at least consistent with what an Assassin does: jump around and do cool stuff.

I must have just grown apart from the whole AC experience as I found them a welcome escape from what I considered a rather "painful" single player campaign. Maybe it's a new level design, maybe too much clutter - traversing the city was just getting grating. In a game where you have to assign waypoints to get to anywhere, for the map to come up so slowly is just criminal. Janissaries cannot be grabbed, kicked nor flipped over while blocking every strike and counter parrying continuously. Get surrounded by 3 or more and when some of them start pulling out their pistols while others attack you from the back and the fun factor finds itself on a slippery slope. When the rooftops workout and you're not actually getting constantly shot by guards who are on top of buildings of no significant value and all the ziplines align it is wonderful. Sadly this happens so infrequently that I find myself just running on the ground most of the time because it's just quicker and less of an overall hassle.

I'm not going to even get into the awful missions that hover in the tutorial zone for what seems like 3/4 of the game. All this makes the quiet and almost serene Desmond Journey missions so relaxing and fun to do. That said I can understand how it's not for some and I'm going to assume I'm in the minority here.

I never played Brotherhood so I don't know what that looked like - all I know is that in AC2 you had to spin a picture around or highlight the apple in the painting and that stuff was simply terrible.

I actually ended up liking Revelations more than I thought I would. It definitely is the weakest in terms of the story or pacing compared to Brotherhood or ACII, but I still had a lot of fun leveling up my assassins (something that I was obsessed with in Brotherhood), and I felt the main missions weren't bad either, though not as interesting as in Brotherhood. I agree that traversing the city itself has become more of a hassle due to constantly having to deal with guards on the roof and that fighting the jannissaries is no fun at all but of the twenty or so hours I spent playing the game (part of it was because I was going for 100% sync in very mission), I still will say that I enjoyed most of it. As for the tower defense, I didn't care for it, but I also found them to be pretty easy to accomplish (once you figured out the patterns that is) so I wasn't very irritated about them. The multiplayer is pretty good as well, though after the couple of sessions I spent playing that I can't say it's a game I would want to go back to.

The ACR is a weak gun but its very accurate and....oh wait this isn't call of duty.

Janissaries became easy to fight although hard to kill. Once they pulled out their guns, I just threw a kick at them and that put the gun away for the time being. I actually thought the combat was so much more improved because it was too easy in the past games. The Janissaries actually made me feel like I wasn't invincible.

I haven't yet finished the game, but so far it's lived up to my fears, unfortunately. Having played all the games in the series has been a steady climb up in terms of quality, with the jump from 1 to 2 being the mind blowing one, I already started feeling towards the end of AC:B that just adding gear to Ezio isn't doing it anymore. I mean the dude is hauling enough gear for a small army, and while that's not that outrageous, I just feel a bit tired of Ezio storylne at this point. The set pieces aren't that memorable anymore and I'm not really surprised by anything.

It's more me thinking how much more cooler it would be to have a Assassin's Creed game set in the feudal Japan, early industrial England or imperial era Africa. I mean they could do much more with the universe, instead we get AC:R which is more of the same, in a not as iconic location with 2 pretty bad minigames thrown in. But yeah, still haven't finished the whole game, but I'm expecting of considering it to be "only OK", whereas previous 2 have been excellent.

ps. fun fact: I dislike the tower defense minigame so much that I usually just enter the attacked fort, go make myself a sandwich and then kill the captain again and recapture the fort.

@Humanity said:

I never played Brotherhood so I don't know what that looked like - all I know is that in AC2 you had to spin a picture around or highlight the apple in the painting and that stuff was simply terrible.

Oh, I'm not talking about the Subject 16 puzzles. I absolutely loved them in AC2, enjoyed them in AC:B. But what I'm talking about is the parts in AC:B where you controlled Desmond directly. No just around the villa in Italy, but inside a VR program and, later in the game, in certain parts of Rome. But, dude, you never played Brotherhood? It's the best AC of the lot. And the story directly follows into Revelations...

@Catfish666: I'm with you on that one.

@Humanity: You've got to play Brotherhood. It may be one of the only games that have ever been released in less than a year and ends up being the best game in the series.

@JoeyRavn said:

@Humanity said:

I never played Brotherhood so I don't know what that looked like - all I know is that in AC2 you had to spin a picture around or highlight the apple in the painting and that stuff was simply terrible.

Oh, I'm not talking about the Subject 16 puzzles. I absolutely loved them in AC2, enjoyed them in AC:B. But what I'm talking about is the parts in AC:B where you controlled Desmond directly. No just around the villa in Italy, but inside a VR program and, later in the game, in certain parts of Rome. But, dude, you never played Brotherhood? It's the best AC of the lot. And the story directly follows into Revelations...

See thats so weird! I hated those Subject 16 puzzles - I thought they were so out of place and boring to me. This is an old painting of Hercules on 3 discs, spin them to align the picture, congrats. Find the 3 apples in this old painting, good job! Abraham lincoln was a Templar did you know that?! I was just snoozing past them.

@sirkibble23

I didn't play Brotherhood for exactly the same reason why I'm snoozing through most of Revelations - I thought it looked too much like AC2. I can only imagine how bored I'd be by ACR if I actually HAD played Brotherhood and having my own assassins to train and use was not a new thing.

@Catfish666

My thoughts exactly on adding new equipment and Ezio. I'm surprised DaVinci didn't send him a minigun to strap under his other hidden blade from Italy - you know it would have a crank on the side like all miniguns featured in historical games do. I'm surprised they did a third game with Ezio because his character is not really evolving. Altair was a character with depth - his cockiness shamed him and the brotherhood so he was humbled and made to earn back his honor through retribution against the templars. I was really curious what he was going to do with the apple after AC1 and I had to wait 3 whole games to find out and no spoilers but it's a complete disappointment. I believe ACR should have had a new character, a new setting - and Ezio should have gotten the Altair treatment of small levels in between that wrapped up his storyline.

ACR was the worst one out of all the Assassin's Creed games. The story was uninteresting, the desmond sequences were terrible and that tower defense game was incredibly dull.