So we reach the end of the rope for both Ezio and Altair, the stars of the previous Assassin’s Creed Games, before a whole new world opens up with a new ancestor in the all ready announced Assassin’s Creed III. But is the game still as fresh and engaging as it was in Brotherhood? Has the now silver haired Ezio still got the chops to keep us interested for one more game?

Well yes and no, Revelations is as good as you expect an Assassin’s Creed game to be. But with Assassin’s Creed you’re always expecting it to be better.

Ezio, epic level party crasher

Or to put it another way, Brotherhood was a big and exciting leap forward, a real tour de force for the series that took critics and fans by surprise. It added so much to the Assassin’s Creed Lexicon and fixed most issues people had with Assassin’s Creed II. By comparison Revelations is a cautious shuffle forward adding in a few new features but making some annoying control changes along the way.

Plot wise there’s a lot going on. Desmond has been recaptured by the Templars and his consciousness is trapped in some kind of safe boot up mode of the animus. Despite a lack of over sight from either the Templars or the Assassin’s our uncharismatic hero can still enter the past memories of Ezio as he journeys to Constantinople to recover a treasure hidden there by Altair. In some Inception type shenanigans the treasure keys allows Ezio to access Altair’s memories while they’re being accessed by Desmond. It’s all a series of layers within layers, like a tiramisu.

Gonna climb that castle, castles love being climbed

Straight of the boat Ezio meets with the Constantinople chapter of the Assassin’s, lead by the friendly Yusuf, whose energy and humour make him one of the best new characters in the series. Revelations is one of the first games that gives you an impression of the Assassin’s as a proper international organisation. The Constantinople Assassin’s have their own customs and techniques and treat Ezio like a wise visiting professor. They’re open to his teaching and in turn pass on their techniques, such as the hookblade that can be used for faster climbing, using ziplines, quickly bypassing guards while on the run and pick pocketing enemies while fighting them.

Unlike Brotherhood, Revelations throws you right into the Assassin Den management system. Templar districts have to be captured in an identical manner to Brotherhood, track and kill the leader, then light the bonfires. Once you have districts you can recruit new assassin’s and send them out on missions. There are two new twists to the system, the den master quests where you complete a special mission to setup an assassin as a den leader. These leaders are useful for the other new element, a tower defence game that triggers when you’re local reputation is at its worst. The tower defence game kicks off when Templar’s try and recapture your Den you need to set up teams of assassin’s on rooftops to rain death on the attackers who show up in increasingly challenging waves. Unfortunately this defence game isn’t particularly fun, your static viewpoint makes controls awkward and it gets very repetitive. Thankfully, after the initial tutorial, you never have to do it again as it’s very easy, through the judicious murder of informants and bribing of speakers (thank god, no more wanted posters) to keep your bad rep down. Not only that advancing to the next story quest or other side quests usually scrubs your rep clean as well. Often it takes some work just to trigger the tower defence activity.

For some reason the the design team have moved the controls around. Previously the face buttons were all about limbs, with the four buttons coresponding to the head arms and legs. It was logical and made sense, the changes are irritating and seem completely unnecessary.

Look man, growing the tough guy facial hair to distract from the baldness never works

The Altair missions are another slight low point. The levels are linear and play more like interactive cut scenes with a few fights thrown in for good measure. These side missions really serve to pad out the story and fill in the gaps in the plot rolling together the Ezio and Altair story lines into a reasonable end point. They're fun... ish, but the same information could have been presented in a few short cut scenes instead of shallow side missions.

Bombs are the new big thing in Assassins Creed Revelations. Bomb ingredients are found all over the city and bomb making stations are everywhere. Despite this seeming priority of the whole bomb thing, the actual use of bombs is limited. Much like the tower defence mode, after a tutorial session you can get through the whole game without ever using them again. One of the main reasons is that you can only carry nine bombs, and only three of each type, lethal, distraction and the other one, that slows down chasing enemies or something. The game claims there are 150 different combinations, but you’ll only use two, four at best. It’s not that the bomb mechanic is bad; it’s a good idea, just executed in a very boring and unnecessarily complicated manner. The game would have been much better served if Yusuf just said, here Ezio, these are bombs, this one distracts, this one kills, and you can get more at the hideout; and left out all the dull crafting.

The Desmond sections take the cake for the worst section of gameplay in the entire series. Desmond dives into his memories using a first person exploration mode that Ubisoft describes as ‘Dali-esque’, some might not describe as ‘portal-esque’ and my twelve year old described as ‘really shit’. Unfortunately my wise, foul mouthed child is the most correct, the Desmond game sections are really, really shit. So bad in fact I could only bare to play the first two and then ignored the rest, relying on YouTube to fill me in on missing story elements. Please Ubisoft, find something interesting for Desmond to do.

Multiplayer is a must for stabbing enthusiasts

Mulitplayer is, once again, amazing. The appeal of a multiplayer game that primarily rewards wits and cunning over twitch reflexes and internet speed is easy to see. I’m a chess player (yes I am really that much of a nerd) and to me the multiplayer aspects of Assassins Creed Revelations are all about using a chess player mentality. You need to think to moves ahead, you need to multitask priorities and you need to think around your opponent until they’re in the position where they unwittingly do what you want them to do. When a target walks right up to me, almost offering themselves and I stick a knife in their neck, that is gaming nirvana my friends.

There’s many game modes, several new ones that are fun with friends that include flag captures, attack and defend modes and a money ball type mode; but the core game boils down to the same thing. Someone is trying to kill you and you are trying to kill someone else as sneakily as you possibly can. There are no lucky kills, no sweet locations to camp, no power levelling for an advantage; there is only the clever and the dead.

Sir, do you want to get higher than you ever have before? Become an assassin

The biggest issue Assassins Creed Revelations suffers under is its name, it comes from a long line of increasingly better and better titles and it’s the first one to come off barely equal, if lacking slightly, compared to its predecessor. The other frustrating element is that it wouldn’t have taken much to make this game better, to make it the superior sequel fans expected it to be. There’s far more emphasis in this game on gadgets and features than there are on setting up meaningful set pieces and gameplay that thrills. There’s a few good moments, Ezio pretending to be a minstrel while subtle ordering people assassinated at a garden party is one, and the sections of the game that take place is a subterranean city are a diversion, but too much of the game is cut and dried and the story quests aren’t nearly as deep or engaging as Brotherhood. The Assassin’s Creed series has never shied away from telling complicated and intelligent stories, but this is the first time it stumbles in the telling, juggling too many balls and completely failing to frame the antagonist characters. It’s not a disaster though, if you’re a fan clamouring to see the final adventures of Ezio and Altair you’ll get what you paid for and be happy, and overall Assassin’s Creed Revelations is at least as good as you expect it to be, but then again as I said at the begginning, you also expect it to be better than that.