Assassin's Creed: Revelations

This is the last of Ezio’s games in the series and it sees him travel to Constantinople for some more rooftop adventures... meanwhile future Desmond is trapped in a coma with both Ezio’s and Altair’s memories to get by. There is a lot more to the plot but I won’t ruin it by trying to unravel to twisted mess that involves reliving ancestor’s memories. I also don’t understand why, in order to wake Desmond up, the only way to do so is by living through the said memories.

They have also introduced some weird platforming sections where you have to generate blocks to traverse through first person eighties style blocky environments. I didn’t understand the appeal of this but others must have as there is a DLC focussed solely on this gameplay element, but more on that later.

Visuals and sound are the same as the other Assassin’s Creeds but I did think that Constantinople was a lot more colourful than Rome or the various cities from Assassin’s Creed II. The environments are fun to explore and it was nice to go through a completely new and unique environment.

The gameplay is quite funny in places. The game is set a long time after the events of Brotherhood, and Ezio has noticeably aged. You would think this would be a problem that would affect his ability to climb walls with triple the efficiency of Sean Devlin, however it has not. When Ezio arrives and meets the local assassin (who is also dressed in a really colourful fashion) he is given an extension claw which allows him to jump to the same height as when he was younger!

Age also hasn’t affected his way with the ladies. He meets a woman and begins some kind of weird courtship thing that only Italians can do. The woman is question looks young enough to be at least his daughter. What a legend.

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, they have introduced a new gameplay element – tower defence. And they know it’s shit as they only make you do it once through the storyline of the game. They have also introduced bomb making as a new and completely redundant way of dealing with enemies. I mean, the sheer variety of Ezio’s weapons without adding bombs into the mix was enough – this added extra only makes things more complicated than they have to be. And, as it’s a new feature it is of course built into the storyline to make the fucking things.

Achievements – 69 Achievements – 1,490 Points

With all standard Assassin’s Creed games, you have to use all of the game’s various different bits to get the clean sweep. For Revelations this means that you have to craft the bombs described above and you have to kill a certain amount of enemies with said bombs. In addition, you also have to complete tower defence multiple times to clear the map and there is also one for doing it without using a cannon, which is essentially ‘complete tower defence on hard.’

In addition to the unavoidable storyline achievements, there are also achievements for climbing various monuments quickly. If you don’t know the right path, this could take multiple attempts to do but it’s not too arduous.

There are the standard collection achievements too but these are scaled back in terms of volume. There are 100 animus fragments as part of this and they don’t show up on the map until you have collect 50 of them, so it makes it a semi challenge to find them all, unless you use a guide or map (which I did.)

Multiplayer

Similar to Brotherhood, I had completed all of the offline achievements in 2012 before stepping up to the multiplayer arena this year. In comparison to Brotherhood though, these achievements were a lot less time consuming. You only have to get to level 20 and this was boosted relatively easily. The others all came along with it and it’s the first multiplayer set that hasn’t had me screaming at the TV. I’m amazed that I put it off for so long.

Downloadable Content

There are three different DLC packs for Revelations. Two of them are multiplayer ones. One is an extra characters pack which means that you have to do certain things with each of the characters. This isn’t too troubling and the additional achievements were fairly easy to get in a group.

Another is a set of maps and this was problematic as finding a group with the DLC, or people who were willing to pay for the DLC, was quite tricky. I got there in the end and some of them could be earned solo in the training ground mode. This is also applicable for the above character based achievements.

The last DLC pack is a solo pack called The Lost Archive and as I mentioned earlier, this is just a another version of the first person block placing levels from the main game. It is relatively tricky and there are two of the toughest achievements in the game in this pack. You have to traverse certain areas of the map without dying and I feel like I got quite lucky as I managed to bag these on my second or third attempts.

The Lost Archive was one of the least enjoyable DLC packs I’ve ever played and that is probably because the normal Assassin’s Creed gameplay is enjoyable and I was hoping for a further expansion on that rather than the sections of the game that I put up with.

The multiplayer achievements are the only reason I’ve completed this one so long after the initial release date and I’m glad to see the back of the Assassin’s Creed games and keep up the 100% completion record on these things... Oh wait, now there’s Black Flag to do...