So I am playing this in anticipation of ac3. I have to say coming back to it not on the heels of brotherhood has made this very enjoyable. I think I may have just been creeded out before.
I’d be mad at this game, but they let me dye Ezio’s robes violet. So, there’s that.
I loved re-opening businesses and upgrading the city in Brotherhood, but now that those things make your notariety meter tick upwards, I feel like my main in-game activity is bribing heralds. I do NOT want to trigger one of those tower defense sequences.
I’m also confused by the inconsistent awareness levels of guards in templar dens, compared to the Borgia towers of AC:B. They seem to see me coming from miles away. I guess they tweaked that to make me use bombs? Oh yeah and so many chests, only filled with bomb parts. It’s like little bummer after little bummer up in this joint.
I just want to quote this post again, since I just started playing Revelations, but don’t plan on getting the Lost Archives DLC. Thanks for taking the bullet for us Jonathan Crane! :)
So far I’m really liking Revelations. Istanbul/Constantinople is really pretty. And I’m digging the hookblade. And I loved how the game started in that area from AC1. It took me a while to recognize it, since it’s been so many years since I played AC1.
I’m glad my suffering was able to help others. :)
Truly a pity that they had some interesting plot left over, and just hid it in the DLC.
And another one down. 40% synchronized, if you will.
I remember being a little disappointed by Revelations when I played it on release. I can see why, but - while I still think it’s the ‘worst’ of the Ezio trilogy - it’s still a good game. But there were a few things that made it disappointing, IMO:
- The game starts off (or at least shortly after starting) with an on-rails section. Also ends with one too. I don’t know who looked at that one section in AC2 where Ezio and da Vinci were headed to Venice for the first time and thought ‘we need more of this, but harder’, but wrong decision. There was also a section like this in one of the tombs where you’re sliding down a slope and had to avoid crap (ala Tomb Raider), but that was was pretty easy to get through unscathed. I’d say that it was impossible to do so with either of the other sections. When riding the parachute at the end, there were simply sections where the best path seemed to mean you’d only hit one wall instead of two. Granted, not hard (overall) to just get through it, but it was nothing resembling fun. And I don’t recall any more ‘on rail’ sections in the remaining games, but we’ll see as I play them.
- Obviously, the ‘Den Defense’ minigame. Again, I don’t know who was playing ‘Plants vs Zombies’ and decided ‘we need this kind of gameplay in AC!’, but that couldn’t have been a worse decision. Granted, if you want to grind and game the, uh, game, you only had to play the one tutorial mission for this. But it shouldn’t have been there at all. Hell, a fight to save your den ala gangs attacking your territory in GTA:San Andreas would have been a better call. Not only is it something the opposite of fun, but doesn’t even really match the universe - that of ‘open war’ between the Templars and Assassins. No ‘working in the dark to serve the light’ in those missions.
- A minor thing, but I didn’t like that they moved the ‘Eagle Vision’ to the LS click (and, at least on the PC version, could not be changed). I understand that they wanted to use the ‘Y’ (or matching key on the PS3 controller) for bombs, but if your going to use one of the sticks, make it the RS. See, LS controls movement, and Eagle Vision would only turn on if you were standing still (although you could turn it off while moving). The RS only controls the free camera, which is straight up (and therefore easier to press) a lot more often. Just a bad decision (as was not being able to reconfigure).
- The PC pathing seemed to take a step back in this game, and it wasn’t great to begin with. Can’t count how many times I was trying to run up a dome and ended up jumping backwards to a severe injury or death. Same with trying to jump up a tower (although when it did work, holding down the B button to do a vault afterwards was cool).
- Having buying shops/monuments add to the notoriety meter - and on top of that also getting rid of wanted posters as a means of reducing that - was just awful. It made the grinding part of the game (mid Sequence 3 for me) that much more tedious. At least the first time. I just downloaded a trainer and reduced that notoriety as needed instead of finding/paying a herald to do that for me - something I never did in previous games w/ notoriety (and was the only thing I used it for this time).
Aside from that - and the possible fatigue from playing the same style of gameplay for 4 games now - I now think it’s a much better game that I thought originally, even though AC2 and AC:B are, to me, still better.
- I thought the storyline was pretty good for these games. I mean, no, I didn’t care that much about the war over Istanbul (not Constantinople - I’m just assuming this is ‘They Might Be Giants’ favorite AC game), but anything with Sofia was, for me, enjoyable. I do wish we’d learned more about what happened to Claudia, tho. And if you haven’t seen ‘Assassin’s Creed: Embers’, go search You Tube and watch it. It was a great postscript to Ezio’s story in the same way that Sequence 9 in this one was the postscript to Altiar’s story.
- I also liked the hookblade, both for running through crowds and opening up the ability to use zip lines. Bombs - eh, they were OK, but I rarely needed to use them, so I didn’t.
- The gameplay was still solid. I get that fatigue can set in after 4 games, so I see why they changed things up a bit starting with AC3. But I am going to miss those execution streaks. Speaking of which
- They did tighten up the gameplay a bit - countering w/ the double blades was still pretty easy, but I think the window was a little tighter this time. And the fact that they had enemies that didn’t succumb to that move (unless you did it three times, anyway) made it a little more challenging. Also, this was the first game that I saw an enemy use the kick move on me. I didn’t like that (I mean, I did - nice to see them fighting back and all - but you know…)
- The setting enough was different enough - yet still somewhat similar - to Italy. The different levels did drive me crazy - seemed to be a lot more levels in Istanbul (not Constantinople) than Rome had, and made traversing the city a challenge at times. Still, it was pretty.
- The added weight to having your own guild and training up Assassins. First, giving half of them both a recruitment mission and a master assassin mission once they hit level 15 was a nice touch. And of course, the fact that a den had a level 15 assassin stopped all future Templar attacks (and, therefore, stopped Den Defense missions) was needed. The only real issue is - there wasn’t much of a reason to continue doing those missions after you had level 15’s in all the dens. I know you could assign assassin’s to the various countries and whatnot, but there didn’t seem to be a need for that aside from more money, which like the other games, became less important as the game went on.
As for the present day story - for the most part, just filler to get from AC:B to AC3. I thought the platforming segments reliving some of Desmond memories were easy enough (the third one was the hardest of the bunch), but just seemed pointless. They didn’t really advance the story in any significant way. And although I’ve played it before, I had no interest in replaying ‘The Lost Archive’ going over Subject 16s time at Abstergo, and ‘verifying’ that Lucy was, in fact, a triple-agent. I still say that’s something they come up with between AC2 and AC:B when they realized they weren’t going to have/pay for/whatever Kristin Bell for more than 3 games. And this was just shoehorning in some ‘plausibility’ to everything. Still, unless you really liked that platforming stuff (and I’m sure you’re out there, tho I’ve never read anything from anyone who really liked that part of the game), it’s easier just to go find everything online. Or just check out the brief description earlier in this thread.
Also, I was a little confused by the ending. It seemed like, at no point during any of the games prior to the end of AC:R, did the assassin’s have any idea where this ‘grand temple’ was. It seemed like that’s the information Tinia was imparting to Desmond at the end of the game. Yet, when Desmond finally comes to, they’re already there, as William and company already figured that part out. Maybe I missed something, but that seemed to be a reach. They could have ended it the same way, and just pointed out/showed somehow that they needed to go to upstate New York, but whatever.
Anyway, as always I’m sure I’ll think of more to say later. Like I said, although it had issues, I think this was a pretty decent game. And the two worst things about it - the den defense missions and the platforming Desmond segments - could at least be ignored for most (for the defense missions) or all (Desmonds’ platforming) of the game.
Alright, all this positive Assassin’s Creed talk in the Syndicate thread and Origins thread has me hankering for Assassin’s Creed again. I guess it’s been long enough.
Time to dive back into Revelations. Anyone with me?
I enjoyed Revelations, I am sad I didn’t post here when I played it years ago. I recall the PC release coming out months after console and me waiting forever to get it.
Ezio is still my favorite character in the series, and I feel they gave him a great send off in this game.
FYI he is 52 years old in this game, which I think is so cool, he has a maturity to him that is really well portrayed in the game.
Tower Defense parts were the worst part of this game, never to be revisited in any of the others. :p
Not me man. Still my least favorite AC.
I started it up again tonight.
I love exploring the city, and I love it when you get the option to press Back and find out more about the place that I’m currently exploring.
I’ve forgotten the controls though. I thought you could go behind someone from cover and assassinate them from behind if they’re not aware of my presence. But after trying that, it appears that’s not the case in this one? And wasn’t there a way to counter people? There doesn’t seem to be an option to counter. Sometimes the Y button prompt turns into a “counter steal”, where I press it and it steals from the guard that’s attacking me. That’s kind of funny.
Other times I seem to have picked up one of the guard’s swords somehow? I had fun at that point.
Anyway, the game has an extensive tutorial in the menu that I can start playing any time I want, so I just need to dive back into that so that I figure out the controls again.
You have to hold one of the triggers to be in defensive stance then counter button appears as an option.
Hope you stick with this, its a great AC game. (ignore all the future parts if you can, they suck).
There haven’t been any in this one. At the end of Brotherhood, your character did what he did, which was a real WTF moment. But in this one, you start off in some kind of Animus island or something. I wouldn’t really call that a future part. The funny thing is, you can leave Istanbul at any time and jump back to the Animus island if you want, but there seems to be no reason to do so. I mean, it’s an island in the character’s own mind. There’s no point to it, it seems.
But my god, this game is hard compared to the previous entries.
I’ll try that defense stance thing. Maybe that will make combat easier.
Is assassination from behind also behind an equivalent trigger? Maybe you can only assassinate from behind in defensive stance?
Gah I don’t remember , I am pretty sure you could do it if you were in one of groups you could hide in and walk with.
I don’t remember this game being notably harder than any previous entries. But then I don’t remember too much about it in general.
The game still had very strict fail states, gladly they are almost totally gone in the newer games.
You mean like the sneaking sections that would fail the mission if you were spotted? Sure those sucked, I just don’t remember them being significantly more difficult in Revelations.
I did one yesterday where I had to hide among gypsy women and assassinate guards using poison, but I couldn’t be spotted, and I had to do it while staying hidden. So initially the game told me about the poison blade, and it’s literally impossible to finish the mission that way, because you have to leave the gypsies in order to use the poison blade, and you get spotted the instant you do. And then I noticed the game telling me I also had poison darts I could use. And that was the key to the whole thing.
The really hard part is the frequent Templar dens throughout the city. When I first started playing, I thought like in Brotherhood, I’ll just go clear these out and “take over” these areas from the templars. Easy peasy, right? I can’t even do one of those. There’s like a hundred guards, and the main commander you have to kill runs away almost instantly unless you can kill him on first strike.
Ah ok, that does ring a bell. Definitely could be frustrating if you put in place a great plan to clear out a stronghold and then the commander manages to sneak away.
Right, I remember the strongholds being tough when I picked up Revelations. As you said, that could be because we’ve internalised later control schemes. All came good in the end though. I think I ignored all that fiddly crap about bombs, and I don’t think I ever got the hang of tower defence. Another beautiful setting though.
I’m playing through this one right now. Got all the strongholds conquered, just plowing my way through the story. Right now I’m in one of the unlocked places that open up when you find some books for whats her name (Sofía?). One thing I wish is that when you want to start from the last checkpoint the stupid thing would have that in the menu as an option. I think later games had that.
Hmm - I bought the remastered Ezio games for the PS4 , and tried Revelations briefly, but man it looks dated. How are the cities? Are they interesting to explore even if the graphics are a bit dated?