Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is a disappointment by the increasingly assured standards of the series. But the reasons are pretty interesting. There are definitely mechanical issues here: returning to the storyline of 15th century Italian assassin Ezio Auditore for a third (presumably final) time, Revelations outfits an aging Ezio with several new tools, the most prominent being a large variety of grenades and ability to order subordinate assassins around in a tower defence-style minigame.
In the context of a protagonist that’s pushing 50, these are narratively fascinating — were Auditore no longer the lithe traceur of the previous two games, an increasing reliance on others and abandonment of stealth for the brute force of explosives would be a potentially satisfying organic evolution of the series’ gameplay. But aside from a new character model, Ubisoft opts to keep Auditore in acrobatically youthful shape while funnelling players into using both the new mechanics with tiresome frequency, a best of both worlds approach that often stops the flow of gameplay dead.
The new setting of medieval Istanbul/Constantinople is stunning, but its vibrant colour and busy composition feel slightly off. At its core, the series has always toyed with impermanence. The central conceit, after all, is that players are reliving the genetic memories of someone who’s long dead. When younger Auditore’s physical vitality was set against a backdrop of the ruins of Imperial Italy, it lent a subtle emotional undercurrent: running the amiable protagonist across the dead fields of Rome played effectively against the knowledge it was all in the past.
An elder Auditore effortlessly traipsing the picturesque rooftops of Istanbul could potentially be read as a rage against the dying of the light, but its presentation here feels more like narrative laziness.
