Assassin's Creed: Revelations

[Erkki]

Recruits appear on your mini map, I can't remember if they are all visible or if they just pop up occasionally when you are near by

Maybe you need to further the story more to open this up

Ah, yes, I needed to do exactly one more story mission to open it.

[JonCole]

Yeah, I've even heard of the "strategy" of just letting the Templars take a region rather than do the tower defense, because all you have to do is recapture the tower which ultimately takes far less time than a whole runthrough of that minigame. That being said, I'm in the same camp as Miffy - only ever got enough notoriety when the story forced me to, so I only played the TD once. It wasn't that bad, but I wasn't really hurting for more variety in gameplay types either.

[melmer]

When i played through it I only had to play the TD mini game once. :/ I'm pretty sure I even purposely let it fall so I could play it

[Roderick]

Annoyingly, one of the assassins' bonus objectives is to win the TD game three times. I don't know if my completionist's streak is powerful enough to do that to myself.

I've played enough of the game now that it doesn't feel like a disparate bundle of things anymore, but a solid game in a solid place. I'm digging it, it has the same excellent qualities Brotherhood had, minus the awesome city and the cool side missions in the country side. On the other hand, this game has a few things really going for it:

- Altair flashback goodness

- Old Ezio who is rocking a fine beard

I'm seriously impressed with the detail and the animation of the models. Whenever Ezio and Yusuf speak it's so pleasant to watch. I don't know if AC3 really improves on these aspects, or that this is the best Xbox 360 graphics have to offer, but color me charmed. It feels like an improvement over Brotherhood, but I'd have to compare to be sure.

[melmer]

The character models and in game cut scenes (of which there are billions) in AC3 are really pretty. I was really impressed. Shame that the actual game is a festering turd

[Erkki]

I'm actually liking Revelations as well after palying for a while (actually I played this the whole day today) and I agree that it's almost as good as Brothergood. So far I've kept the templar awareness level low by bribes to keep away that TD minigame. But sometimes I let it get to 100% because it's fun to hunt down the officials.

[miffy495]

Yeah, the main reason I wanted to play Revelations is that I'm really attached to the Altair character. I just love him in concept, and even played the not-so-great PSP game twice because he's the star. Getting to follow up on him, especially the later flashbacks where he's actually a feeble old man, is awesome.

[Roderick]

What's funny is that when we switched to Ezio in the second game, I sort of disliked the new outfit - I thought it was very busy and messy with all the layers of cloth overlapping. Now that I see Altair in Revelations, I'm thinking 'wow, what a simple design'. AC has me, you guys!

I can't wait until the next generation of graphics when teeth will be individually modelled instead of a bar of jagged white.

(Of course, I still remember the revelation of Half-Life (1) when we actually got NPC's that opened their mouth when they spoke instead of merely tilting their heads. So, all in due time.)

[Roderick]

More impressions:

+ The story is so good. For some reason I like it better than most of the (historic) stories so far. Again we see that as soon as AC scales back, it gets better. The story this time around is a lot less convoluted, centering on the ascension to the sultan's throne and a threatening coup by the specter of Byzantium. Fewer characters this time around. It works. What I like most of all is that Ezio is making mistakes. There's a feeling - maybe just a feeling - that now that he's older, Ezio is slightly less than he used to be. I can almost hear him sighing upon arrival: I have to fix the whole city again? This theme subtly runs through the whole game. In the later flashbacks, Altair too is struggling with his past mistakes. A sense of loss and regret that comes with old age. It's quite poignant.

- There are no more horses. Then again, there's no room in Istanbul to ride them, and there are so many other systems it's not a sore miss.

+ I take back my initial reluctance to invest in the bombs. They're so much fun! And what a complement to the arsenal of weapons already in the game. I feel like a mad bomber, like the Renaissance version of Waluigi, throwing around sneaky little bombs, blowing the lids off of water wells, setting proximity bombs, creating diversions, oh, so much fun, throwing a sticky bomb on a guard that then explodes into a fountain of coins and the poor, unsuspecting guard is rushed by a frantic crowd. Bombs.

+ Just like last time, I'm having the most fun with the guild challenges. Wouldn't have minded twice as many crazy suggestions on how to misbehave in public in creative ways. Yeah, they're basically ingame achievements, but this is what they can do for a game like AC, that is basically a giant pool of interlocking mechanics that beg to be abused.

[Regenherz]

Revelations surprised me. Only played it recently, before Assassin's Creed 3 came out, to play catch up and get some closure to Ezio's storyline. Really had no interest in Altair initially but I felt the story provided some great sense of closure for him, too. In general, the ending to this story was really well done and the final moments of this game gave me fantastic goosebumps - something I really did not expect beforehand.

[Erkki]

Finished it some time ago, and have been going back to it to do some of the optional stuff. Maybe I'll even complete the Desmond stories, although those are the boringest thing in any assassin's creed yet. Even the Lost Archive expansion was better somehow, although pretty much similar.

It was pretty good, almost as good as Brotherhood, and has me actually wanting more of Assassin's Creed, so I'm even considering buying Ass3.

PS. So I'm trying to get some of the FULL Synchs, but man why do they have to be so that you have to replay the entire mission to if you fail just once. Could easily allow restarting from a checkpoint at least for those which aren't timer-based. Like the one where you take the first Templar Den. There's a longish part with the bomb tutorial and lots of slow walking before you get to the point where you can easily fail the full synch, but no, you have to redo that every time you fail. Makes it especially hard to explore different options because so far I still have no idea how to do that mission without causing conflict (seems to be the same as being detected, but it's so easy to get detected there).

[Roderick]

I think I'm nearing the end, I just got a radically awesome bit with old Altair just, you know, coughing and wheezing and KICKING ASS.

Some of the synch stuff should've been checkpointed. I'm looking at you, templar hideout where you mustn't be seen yet there are three separate areas you need to do perfectly in a row. On the other hand I just did the wonderful Hagia Sofia interior, I love those climbing bits. I get the feeling they're a lot more prescribed than in Brotherhood though - I'm spending way less time looking and being stumped at where the heck I should go. Still awesome though.

[Roderick]

Oh boy. I think I may start rooting for the templars now.

I got to Cappadocia and the part where Ezio blows up the arsenal in the cave city. Someone tells him beforehand; hey Ezio, won't that create a lot of panic in the streets? And Ezio is like; yeah, he he, that's gonna be a great distraction to get to the bad guys. So then what happens is he starts a fire in the cave city and everyone starts asphyxiating and trampling each other to get out. I think that might've been just about the most callous and awful thing Ezio has ever done. Especially considering the horrendous tragedy in the Brazilian disco last week, where the same thing actually happened. Considering the thickness of the smoke and the crowdedness on the streets as I made my escape, I estimate about half of the population (a few thousand people) will have died there.

You know, besides being pretty awful subjectively, it also doesn't fit with the game's narrative. Whenever I kill one of the people in the street (always the super annoying beggar women trio), I get a message that "Ezio didn't kill innocent people". Well, I guess, you know, apart from half of the population of Cappadocia. They must've been asking for it.

[Roderick]

Finish! [/Mario Kart]

I am quite pleased with this game. Overall it was practically a carbon copy of Brotherhood, but hey, I didn't mind it going in reprise. The (historic) story set in Istanbul I thought was very well done, a tight experience, and the Desmond bits were of course all but baffling. A little strange not much attention was paid to Lucy, with all the stuff that happens to her in Brotherhood. But then again I am impressed with how they're slowly dripping out the story over four games now. It's soapy, yeah, but it works to tie the thing together.

After all these hours, I'm still not very enthusiastic about Istanbul itself, it just doesn't have the scope of Rome. It was a functional setpiece, more than a beautiful place to walk around in. The break to Cappadoccia was very welcome and well done.

According to my schedule, I will now proceed to wait until the next game is out, and then buy a discounted AC3.