A revelation of a creed

Happy new year! I'm a little behind on reviewing games I've played in 2011, but I'll get there slowly!

Review

Played on: Xbox 360
Released: 2011

It really isn’t possible, to not mention, the Assassin's Creed series when talking about this generation of gaming. From the beginning, it has shown us what the current generation of consoles and hardware could do. The sheer technical prowess of the Assassins Creed games, with their huge cities, incredible detail, even down to the small details and the vast size of its environments, amaze the gamer in all of us.

Even now, with the release of Assassin's Creed Revelations, it will still make mouths open in awe. The rich, colourful and buzzing city of Constantinople, or the more modern and familiar name Istanbul, will have you exploring with eagerness, once again, like you always have done through the series.

It’s a game of familiarity, perhaps too familiar for some. In a sense, it’s a game for the fans, yet what else can you expect from a release that’s really the third part of AC2, following the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

Revelations hardly takes any consideration if you're new to the series and explains the story following up to Revelations very briefly. As such, it's a game best avoided for beginners to the series. A far cleverer place to begin, is with the fantastic, and still unrivalled, in the series: Assassin's Creed 2.



The previous AC, Brotherhood, may have come across as being more like an add-on to AC2, but after a while it really grew into a fantastic and very innovative title of its own. It took the series in new directions and added many varied new gameplay elements into the fantastic standard set by AC2.

Revelations follows closely to Brotherhood, keeping the new and welcome ideas, but perhaps adds too few new and unique elements on its own. It does, however, add a deeper element to taking over the city, allowing you to choose special leaders out of your assassin trainees. It even adds a rather entertaining tower defence sort of element into keeping control over sectors of the city.

The clever feature from AC2 and Brotherhood, of entering famous buildings, has been shifted over to some rather exciting and dangerous exploration of more natural environments, like crypts and caves beneath Constantinople. It actually reminds me a lot about a Tomb Raider game in these sections, which is a very welcome turn indeed.

They've also added a grappling hook, making climbing easier, some fun gliding on ziplines, to get across the city quickly, and a rather advanced bomb making facility, for taking out and surprising guards. I found the hook very useful combined with the ziplines, but it makes the climbing a tad too easy. The bomb making, though, I only used a few times and I felt it rather was a little overly complex, considering I hardly needed to use them.



The familiarity and small changes is a two edged sword, you can interpret it as a negative and accuse it of being an unoriginal game. You can also, however, look at the positive side of not changing game elements that are fantastic and work fine, simply giving you more of the fun. Fans, such as myself, will most likely interpret it as the latter and really enjoy the game.

One aspect though, really can’t be told without giving the game enormous credit it deserves: the story, and the way it’s presented, is excellent. In fact, it really is one of the best stories of the series so far. It gives a huge depth to the character Ezio, it makes us feel as if we've literally known him for a lifetime. He is old and has changed drastically from his loud-mouthed and cocky personality, in his youth, and grown into a wise and thoughtful person, with much consideration for the people close to him.



The story also gives depth to how small each of the individual assassins are in the big picture, leading up to the future. The incredible, and rather sad, realisation that each person working for the assassin's, only do their small part and cannot fully understand the whole picture and will die without knowing the end result. Supporting only what they've learnt for generations about something much further into history.

The way the series cleverly weaves this conspiracy story in-between real history, and real famous people, the in-game database is a little history book of its own, is something I really enjoy and respect the developers for.

The plot is summed up perfectly by Ezio changing his intrigued mind into expressing that he doesn't actually need to know the full truth, because he has learnt so much in his lifetime and is getting exhausted and old now. This, put together with a similar flashback to AC1s main character, Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad, dyeing of old age, gives the story a great sense of scale and time. It feels like the whole universe of the games is well thought out and we're ready for moving on in history with an Assassin's Creed 3.

A game for the fans then and a fantastic journey once again into Ezio’s rich life.


PS: The game also features a multiplayer mode. I've only tried this a couple of times and feel I can't give a very good opinion of it. It features a detailed tutorial and seems like a solid experience for those wanting the feeling of trying to hide from and assassinate real players and not just A.I. characters.