‘Assassin’s Creed Revelations’ Flick Through Review - The One With The Hookblade

Assassin’s Creed is a strange beast. The first game I ever wrote about on my little website here, and a quest I set myself - to play every game in the series to the end credits - that seems like a bigger task with every release.

The first game was released in 2007, the impressive second game came out in 2009, and then only a year later saw Brotherhood, the confusingly titled instalment that did an impressive job with such a quick turnaround on a sequel. What I can find on ancient headlines and fandom pages seems to credit a lot of this expertise and unified vision between separate studios developing something bigger than themselves to Jade Raymond - a producer who worked on the first two games and became the face of the franchise for a little while. After she left, some fans were prepared to be dissatisfied…

But Assassin’s Creed Revelations appeared in 2011, and reviews from the time seemed to find fault in its similarity to the previous titles and the absence of any massive changes. I’ve come to expect a reskin of the previous game, and so while the reviews from nearly fifteen years ago question whether it was better than Brotherhood, I can root around in the minor tweaks to see what makes this game unique and find if it is worth playing in the year that our salamander overlords have decided is 2025.

Where were we?

At the end of the last game, Desmond Miles entered a coma after being forced to stab his love interest, Lucy. Now he wakes in some gap in the code that makes up the Animus system. It is keeping him stable and protecting his mind, but the previous Templar genetic memory subject who Desmond knows had lost his mind and killed himself in reality, has backed himself up in this place too. Subject 16 tells Desmond that reliving the gaps in the memories of both Ezio and Altair is the only way to separate his own consciousness from that of his ancestors. I like this set-up. Desmond is fighting to retain his sense of self while jumping into the fairly well-characterised shoes of two much better-written assassins. It feels almost meta - the player wants to play as Ezio with all his new tools and fancy footwork, and Desmond wants to dissect those memories from his own to escape the system and his coma to leave the whole system behind. But as the themes slip away from the gameplay like this, it can quickly make the whole thing seem like a chore.

Gameplay

So what about minute-to-minute gameplay? It should be the glue that sticks the whole thing together. Desmond relives the memories of Ezio in his final great adventure and learns that Ezio himself lived through many of Altair’s final moments, seeing what became of his ancestor in a similar way to Desmond. What does this mean for us?

Well, it means a whole new city to get to grips with, ziplining, parachuting from the very beginning, bombs and crafting mechanics. Honestly, laying out all of the new systems, it seems insane that it was disappointing for people who loved the previous games. There’s a weird tower defence mode, special missions that you can embark on alongside your new recruits to raise them to the rank of Grand Master Assassin, the hookblade and plenty of new characters and drama to get stuck into. So, where do we start?

Combat is pretty much the same - flashy and a little bit too easy, Ezio counters and stabs and blocks and rinses and repeats. Armour poses a threat, as do new fortified windows that are impossible to get into, but will shoot at Ezio if guards are chasing him. It does make stealth feel more reasonable, which had been a slowly disintegrating aspect in the previous titles. The hookblade makes for some especially visceral kill animations, or the ability to vault over people when they are in the way. It also makes freerunning come alive. Grabbing at higher ledges requires a little more thought and skill and everything happens a little faster and it finally feels like Ezio goes where I want him to. So far, I haven’t had as much fun in any of these games as I did running away from hordes of guards across rooftops in Revelations. Other new systems seem to matter less and less as you progress - buying property like in Brotherhood takes a backseat as you will have more money than you know what to do with so early in the story.

Crafting bombs seems interesting, until you realise that the half-baked crafting mechanic lets you make one of about a dozen bomb variations and only two of those are ever good. I did find the ‘FULL SYNCHRONIZATION’ requirements in this game to be especially tricky but fair, and I found myself going for more of them because they were almost always very clear and immediately seemed quite difficult. One mission wanted me to find my way into a heavily fortified palace without being spotted, and the extra requirement told me to kill nobody. Plenty of trial and error meant that I engineered the perfect path to reach the end without failing and felt like I was really getting the hang of the whole thing.

Then we got the tower defence rubbish. I’m a fan of a tower defence game. In fact, an upcoming Chogg.Blog will talk about what I think is one of the best-crafted tower defence games I’ve played. Here, the towers are not powerful enough, moves that are on cooldown do damage and prioritise targets in a very unresponsive and illogical way, walls can be built and assassins can be moved around, and I found the whole thing tedious and frustrating. The final boss of each tower defence section, a large tank thing that shot fire, seemed to beat me every single time, and I quickly worked out that just letting the Templars take over meant that I could fly in and do some assassinations and reclaim control in a quarter of the time.

Story and Asymmetry

Boiling down the gameplay aspects, I love the hookblade and hate everything else they’ve added. What about the actual content?

Well, missions to train assassins that are specific and plot-heavy and tied to a specific region of the map are awesome. I liked learning about these recruits, seeing Ezio as a teacher and getting to grips with the idea of Ezio as an old mentor rather than a killing machine. I also liked seeing him age. For one part of the game, Ezio travels by boat to a small town in a cave where the people are basically fully occupied. Ezio goes as a stranger and wipes out the army that is mining there, frees prisoners and steals all of their stuff. That felt very unique in a way that these games rarely do: just chucking me onto a new map and saying, “the people here need your help”. He feels pity and anger for what has been done and is determined to set it right, and that carries over into some amazing momentum since all the thoughtless side content is gone here.

This goes hand in hand with the little Altair segments. Ezio has heard the legends of how Altair betrayed the Assassin’s Brotherhood and retreats into genetic memory to see what really happened. Revisiting Altair now, he is given so much more thought and character, and it made me retroactively like him more as a character. He wields the Apple of Eden and decides that nobody should have that power. When the idea of a power that strong corrupts other assassins, he does what he must and is banished. Most of the later scenes with Altair really made it clear that this is a story about ageing and finding peace. Altair comes home, and the Brotherhood have realised that he was a good man. Ezio finds a cute little bookworm lady and talks about settling down with her. And all of that rises to a head at the end when the biggest inconsistency between the series and the story perks up to sour the climax.

Ezio finds the relic he has been looking for in Altair’s library. He finds the corpse of the man we controlled in the first game and then receives a message meant for Desmond once again. But he is old, and he knows that the wars he has lived through for most of his lifetime were all in service of another man’s heroism. The First Civilisation are using Ezio as a conduit and he wonders if what he does matters at all. And then he turns away from it all. He wishes Desmond luck, tells him to make sure all of the suffering was worthwhile, and leaves the library to go and live the rest of his life with Sofia. Our hero, who we have seen from birth, realises the futility of it all and decides he wants peace and will leave the story for the man his life has been in service of. It’s pretty profound, right? And then Desmond is told to go to the Grand Temple, to save the world from a solar flare and he wakes up from his coma to meet his dad and lead into the next game.

The story - which is to say, the narrative about Ezio and his grappling with understanding his ancestor and the path he is on, is finished with a triumphant but bittersweet finality. But Desmond’s adventure and that of the franchise as a whole is only just starting out. But that tension between what the player wants and what the characters want is felt here - we have played as Ezio for most of the game. He is the one that we want the satisfying ending for, the one that I felt attached to at the end of it all. It took 3 whole games for me to realise that he had a personality but now that he is gone I’m not sure it will be the same without him.

Extras

There are a few other little goodies here. In the weird world that Desmond is locked inside in the Animus, he can access his own memories and we can finally get some backstory for him through odd little first-person puzzle platforming sections. I completed the first one and had to hold back a sigh. I wanted the lowdown on Desmond as a character, given how little we actually knew about him, but the gameplay of this section had been so tired and dull that I was not looking forward to going through a set of these challenges. Now I’ve beaten them all, I can say that I’m pleasantly surprised. The puzzles got slightly more complex with each one, whether through tricky platforming or brain-teasing mazes of aerial paths. Desmond is a typical tough guy with a sad backstory, but I’m excited to see how they actually play with his relationship with his father in the next one… That might be me foreshadowing it being awful, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

I played this game through the Ezio collection for the PlayStation 4 and a tiny little piece of bonus content caught my eye when I had finished up. Assassin’s Creed: Embers. This is a sweet little animated short film that does a lot of heavy lifting for Ezio’s emotional journey. It follows the hero twelve years after the events of Revelations, with the assassin retired and living with his wife and children. I’m sure you know the rest; he refuses to help a struggling assassin but steps in to show her what he learned from his long life and saves the day. Then he goes home to Florence with his wife and child, sees a young man that is just like him when he was younger and chats with him before he dies of a heart attack. It’s incredibly well done, and a decent send off for the protagonist of three games. This is the stuff that excites me about the genetic memory idea. We can watch Ezio start out as an arrogant arse and follow him into his revenge quest, then his redemption and finally his wise old age where he realises everything about his life was fleeting and he sees things as they really are.

My Assassin’s Creed Journey

This is my longest Chogg.Blog to date. It probably will be for a little while, too. More regular posts are coming, but this one felt a little special. Not only because it is the end of a four-game-long narrative that began with my first review on here, but also because it reflects the end of an era at the studio as a creative director left Ubisoft Montreal and the production as a whole was concerned with tying up loose threads for their baby before the series spiralled into infinite sequels. Don’t worry, I will be covering all of the Assassin’s Creed games as I complete them and I’m pretty excited to get through them all and see what becomes of Desmond and the Brotherhood. But I think I could solidly recommend Revelations for anyone who wants to see a game that manages to ooze crunch-deadline working and measured care at the same time.

Remember to share this wherever you find your articles and review, and shoot me a message on Instagram, Twitter or Bluesky to let me know what you thought of AC Revelations, or what I should cover next! <3