Monday, January 2, 2012

You Broke My Heart Ubisoft.....


: Review : Dave F. :


For those who know me, you know that if I like a game, I will defend to the death(even if everyone else detests it).  I tend to appreciate the beauty in simplicity and like it when a developer follows The Golden Rule: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!  The thing that I like about the Assassins Creed series is how it really hasn't changed very much from game to game, just little tweaks made here and there, like new weapons or some flashy fighting moves.  With that said, I recently finished AC:Revelations, and here is my take on it.




The series as a whole, puts more work into accuracy into the environment than any other game out there.  The research put into recreating the architecture with such in depth historical accuracy is simply amazing and you can tell how proud they are of this by the way they tie the landmarks into the gameplay.


The main portion of the game still remains simple to control.  Climbing, free-running and fighting have undergone slight changes to incorporate the newly added Hook Blade, which I am a huge fan of.  the best part of this is how smoothly they integrated it into the standard controls.  A simple double tap allows you to jump on a zip line across the rooftops, flip over a Templar standing in your way, or hurl him into the air without having to break your stride.  Eagle Vision is still very useful and has a newly added feature.  Ezio is not only able to identify his target, but can also see which path the target has taken.  This allows for easier tracking and greater stealth when you need to get in and out of locations without being discovered.




The biggest addition to this episode of the AC series, is finally connecting the memories of Altair ibn-LaAhad and Ezio Auditore with Desmond Miles and his part of the story.  You begin to travel through Desmond's own memories(in Portal style side quests)while he is trapped within the Animus, and find out what actually happened to Altair and the mysterious Subject 16, who fell victim to the effects of the Animus prior to Desmond being captured by Abstergo Industries.


Assassins Creed:Revelations doesn't spice up the graphics from previous entries at all, but I didn't really expect it to since AC2 and Brotherhood had similar quality with no real improvement.  The textures were mostly reused from previous games, which was fairly obvious, especially now since the series has gone annual.




The few portions of the game that asked you to control a horse and carriage were horrendous.  It made me cringe in anticipation of it being over.  As the carriage veers from left to right and back again, you struggle to keep control while attacking the enemy carriage, and manage not to run over the 80% of the path that doesn't destroy your carriage.


They have also added a tower defense style side mission to the game where you fend off waves of Templar Soldiers trying to overtake your hideouts.  For those who enjoy other TD games like Plants VS Zombies will love this, I on the other hand, was just annoyed.  It seemed too far from the style of the AC series to be a welcomed addition.  My biggest complaint, is the lack of horse riding and the restriction of only one city to run around, this is a huge departure from previous AC and definitely took away from the experience.


All in all, I still very much liked AC:Revelations, but comparing it to previous installments, it left me with wanting more.  Sure, they made some changes, but they took out a great deal more than they added.  It made me feel as though they more concerned with wrapping it up, rather than creating a great quality game.
My recommendation:  If you are a true AC fan, it's worth the $60 investment, but don't expect it to compare with the AC games of the past, if anything it will at least answer the questions created by the past installments.



Final Score  8.5 out of 10
Do you have any AC:R stories or comments you want to share?  Just click on leave a comment and share

*Editors note*
Dave Flinton has the distinct honor of being the first guest reviewer for Zero Pwnage.  He was unavailable for comment. 

5 comments:

  1. Get your tower defense out of my assassins creed!

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  2. i think he made a fair review. Though I've noticed a number of minor graphical enhancements. There might have been some small assets in the game that have been reused, some of the knives and things are reused, i wouldn't say that most assets were reused.... and I wouldn't say there is no graphical improvements. Also some of the graphical improvements manifests itself in the fact that there aren't those weird freezing hiccups that acb had every now and then when free running.

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  3. Good points about the gameplay. The carriage bits were instensely annoying. I can see how the tower defense was annoying, but I only had to do it twice (3 times counting the tutorial) before I locked all the dens. I lost one of those times, which meant I had to kill the captain, which I enjoyed. So punishing me with more fun? Can't complain. Besides, the tower defense was kind of fun for me. Also, why no more horses? I enjoyed that.

    Personally though I'd much rather have one huge city instead of several smaller ones. Waiting for load times is annoying, and one big city eliminates that.

    I thought the graphics were very nice though, I definitely see improvements.

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  4. Ok, I'll take these one by one.

    First, the graphics. Yes, there may have been some minor enhancements, but not enough to really make a big difference, and none that I noticed outside of the cut scenes, which doesn't really matter to me. I want crazy graphics during the game play, and I didn't get that other than during the chase scene where Ezio is sailing behind the carriage picking Templar’s off their horses. Keep in mind that they haven’t yet updated the Anvil engine that has been used for the graphics on Revelations, Brotherhood, and AC2. So, although they may have tried to add certain things, the quality of what they were able to do was restricted. As for the glitching, I never experienced any in the previous games, nor in this one, so I wouldn’t be able to give a fair comparison on it.

    Next, the “Capture the Den” sequences. True, you were only forced to do it 2-3 times during the main storyline. True, you gained the opportunity to perform another stealthy mission to “relieve a Captain of his duty”. My complaint is based on 2 points that I can’t get past.

    Number one, I despise having to play the same mission over and over again. If I wanted to assassinate another Templar then I could easily take on one of the assassination missions to get my fix, while allowing enough of a cariation to make it interesting.

    Number two, I’m a completion junkie. I need to make sure that I have fully finished every aspect of a game before I am done with it. Every time I would see an area of Constantinople light up red, it was like the game was poking me with a stick. And no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I just had to go in and defend my den to get it to stop.
    I’m not saying that the sequences were poor in and of themselves, but I felt like it took away from the flow of the game as a whole. I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I could've run in and manually fought of the Templars with my fancy, acrobatic fighting skills and shiny, new hook blade. In my opinion, they could have easily incorporated these and TD style mini games, sort of like how MW as Spec Ops mode to go along with the Multiplayer and Campaign modes.

    As for the lack of horses and multiple cities, I really enjoyed riding horses around the countryside, slashing at random villagers (yeah, I’m that guy). I also loved travelling to different cities because it mixed things up a little bit. I could run through the streets of Rome, jump from rooftop to rooftop over the canals of Venice, or gallop through the Tuscan fields. It’s just more to keep me from getting too bored with the game too quickly.

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  5. My god in all honesty I was thinking this would get a 7/10 because I just couldn't understand why Ezio has to drag out of bed and think well lets see if this 50-60 year old body can drag on my story any longer. Don't get me wrong I love this game and I would play it over and over like Brutal Legend. They share the same thing a damn tower defence idea. I hate it but I somewhat have to accept that they need to do new stuff but tower defence. I can just never wrap my head around a serious Assassins Creed tower defence I feel like that just being said should be found on a game site like Armor Games or Newgrounds.

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