Back when this came out I felt I had played enough Assassin's Creed, especially because of all of the similarities between this and Brotherhood; and with all the other games coming out around that time, I decided to skip it. A few days ago I felt an itch for an open-world action game that Assassin's Creed would scratch nicely. I'll try to make this short as I am still only scratching the surface.

The game did not open well for me. After the initial cutscene, there's some tutorial stuff followed by a terrible section where you must hold on to a rope conveiently hanging from the back of a horse wagon (there's probably a better word for that). Then you get on the wagon and have to ram into another one Burnout style until reaching a fortress of sorts. Once you kill the main bloke, Ezio travels to Constantinople to find some keys Altair left there for some contrived reason to give this thing a plot.

I'm maybe 5 hours in, but the game still feels like it's walking me through the tutorial phase, introducing me to new mechanics almost every mission. My main complaint is that instead of taking the franchise in new directions and doing cool stuff to mix up the formula, they just add new game mechanics on the framework of AC2, and while there are certainly worse ways to treat a sequel, It's getting sort of ridiculous at this point. There's just too much, Ezio feels more like a mobile armory than an assassin, and enemies are more of an annoyance than a challenge.

When looking back on AC(one), one of the things I liked about it was having to figure out a strategy of killing my target. Altair was a lot more vulnerable and had only a hidden blade, throwing knife and a sword at his disposal, which meant I actually had to think before I acted. Running in gun..ehm..swords blazing didn't amount to much beyond getting killed or having to run to the nearest heystack, but in Revelations I can pretty much just shoot every guard with a crossbow (or whatever) from afar and not have to worry about it, which diminishes some of the joy.I still think the game is well made, and there's certainly a lot more room for exploration, but I hope AC3 will tone things down a bit and make the game more focused on the "being an assassin" part.

So much for brevity, I guess, but there is a lot to be said about this game, and once I've beaten it I'll probably write another one of these, but until then: Requiescat in pace...