Game review: Assassin’s Creed Revelations

A good game needs to be played more than once.  I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing to think after playing a game.  But it’s the only thing going through my head right now.

My initial reaction to ACR is that Ubisoft has started down a path that may make the AC series like Star Wars: storyline may be sacrificed for the “WOW” factor.

Don’t get me wrong, ACR is a beautiful game and I want to visit Istanbul because I fell in love with the city.  But I wasn’t as drawn into the story as I was with ACB and ACII.  (ACB was a complete shocker–it was brilliant beyond all expectation).  Maybe that’s the issues I have with ACR: I expected amazingness.  And when expectations are high, there always seems to be a falling short.

What I felt lacked was a cohesion to the story as Desmond tries to delineate his memories from those of Ezio and Altaïr.  Ubisoft tried to tie everything together with narrative form Ezio (and I was glad for many of the narrative aspects in all parts of the game–Desmond’s background coming out finally was helpful, even if I felt it was an Ubisoft apology for not doing it sooner), but I wasn’t as involved as I was when Ezio was in Italy.

I’ve thought of a few reasons for this: I’m not at all familiar with the history of the Ottoman Empire, so I didn’t see connections between happenings and my knowledge; there seemed to be many more Ubisoft studios involved in this game than in previous ones (ostensibly to ease the load and speed the development process) and this may have caused some disconnect in the dev process.

But Ubisoft gets a lot right, too.  The main storyline–Desmond’s–is right on.  I love his journey to coherence.  No spoilers, though.  The new moves are cool.  The bombs are cool, even if I didn’t use them well.

Conclusion: I need to play it again and play it differently than I did.  I think this might improve my impressions and make the story line more coherent.

Overall: 8.5 / 10