14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series may have started with lots of promise and not a lot of technical accomplishment, at least in the first game, but quickly became one of the most popular franchises for the French company, thanks to the stunning Assassin’s Creed 2 and last year’s Brotherhood.
Now, the company has launched the fourth installment in the series, Revelations, which promises to conclude the saga of Ezio Auditore, the protagonist from the last couple of games, while answering a huge variety of questions concerning its convoluted story.
So, is Assassin’s Creed: Revelations the game we’ve been waiting for or should it be stabbed and have its body thrown in a bale of hay? Let’s have a quick look.
It’s hard to talk about the actual beginning of the game without spoiling much of the story, especially the one concerning our modern day assassin, Desmond Miles, so I’ll just skip to when you start controlling Ezio himself.
As you no doubt saw from the trailers released in recent months, Ezio was on his way to Masyaf, the home of the Assassin brotherhood from the first game, but he quickly finds himself captured by Templar knights who are looking, just like Ezio himself, after the secrets of the original game’s protagonist, Altair.
After some dramatic moments, you escape their clutches, but you quickly learn that the key, or shall I say keys, to unlocking Altair’s vault, are spread across the Middle East, so he needs to explore it, while fending off enemy Templars, to uncover his ancestor’s secret.
In terms of gameplay, Ezio controls the same as always, as his age doesn’t really show in the acrobatic moves he pulls off while free-running and climbing through the environment, or in the stylish executions through which he eliminates his enemies.
While you can once again just sit around, waiting for your enemy to attack you and then counter their moves, you can also go on the offensive as Ezio is quite powerful, at least against regular foes.
There’s a much more cinematic feel, at least from the beginning of the game, in order to get players invested in this new chapter that focuses, once again, on Ezio, so it’s going to be interesting to see if the title can keep up the solid pace it has shown in the opening segments.
Check out the first bits of gameplay from Assassin’s Creed: Revelations below, without any major story spoiler about Desmond.
