Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2016, Playstation 4) Review

DULL BLADES SHOULD BE PUT TO REST

Also for: Nintendo Switch, OnLive, Playstation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One

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I knew this day would come, but I hoped it wouldn’t arrive quite this soon. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is the fourth entry in a franchise that is still ongoing, and as I try to catch up, I can already feel the fatigue setting in. The game functions well on a mechanical level, but I struggle to detect any real creative intent behind the third and final chapter of Ezio Auditore da Firenze’s story. What I do sense is Ubisoft squeezing the last drops from a wildly popular character.

The entire Ezio trilogy feels like one game stretched to an excessive length. If Ezio truly has one coherent story, it is told in Assassin’s Creed II. Everything that follows feels like padding—material that could just as easily have been framed as an epilogue or handed to a different protagonist altogether. The fact that I didn’t play the trilogy back-to-back is likely the only reason I don’t actively dislike Revelations.

The game’s “new” features barely register. You can craft bombs of various types. You can trigger a dull tower defense minigame if your notoriety gets too high. And you get a hookblade that lets Ezio climb faster and zipline between rooftops. That’s essentially it. If I’m forgetting something, that only reinforces the point.

Despite incremental combat refinements—arguably the series’ strongest mechanical aspect—the Constantinople setting doesn’t justify another full open-world adventure. The game feels like business as usual, content created not because it needed to exist, but because it could.

Narratively, the setup is thin. In the modern timeline, Desmond Miles is left comatose after Brotherhood, trapped inside the Animus. There he encounters Subject 16, a deceased test subject who now exists as a digital ghost. The explanation is convenient: Desmond must relive the remaining memories of Altair and Ezio to stabilize his fractured mind.

This framing gives Ubisoft carte blanche to tell whatever story it wants, largely untethered from previous logic. Ezio’s continued presence makes commercial sense—he was immensely popular—but Altair remains a far less compelling figure, despite being treated with more nuance here than in the original game. His conclusion is at least mildly affecting.

The main plot, however, is astonishingly vague. Ezio needs to access Altair’s sealed library in Masyaf, which requires five keys hidden across Constantinople. To find them, he must involve himself in the city’s political intrigues. That’s the entire premise. “Open a door—but first, liberate Constantinople.” The constant detours quickly obscure the actual goal, and before long I found myself following objectives out of habit rather than interest.

Constantinople itself is historically intriguing but visually drab, often drowned in brown and beige tones. Side activities pile up relentlessly, pulling attention further from an already threadbare main narrative. It’s telling that I finished the game a month ago and can barely recall its ending.

Mechanically, little has changed. Exploration, combat and stealth rely on the same patterns established in earlier entries. Enemy factions are split between Ottoman and Byzantine forces, but functionally they blur together. The AI remains laughably exploitable—I once drowned an entire squad of guards one by one while they helplessly queued at a dock.

That said, the game plays well. The PS4 version in The Ezio Collection benefits from smoother performance, and Ezio remains responsive. Combat chains are fluid, the hookblade genuinely improves traversal, and assassin recruitment is mildly expanded with short character arcs for your recruits. These systems work—but they are refinements, not revelations.

My patience finally ran out with the tower defense mechanic, which I tried once and then deliberately avoided. It exists only to punish notoriety and feels entirely out of place. Thankfully, it’s easy to bypass, but its inclusion epitomizes the game’s design philosophy: unnecessary systems layered on top of an already bloated framework.

Even Desmond’s side content—abstract first-person platforming sequences exploring his past—left little impression. They feel half-formed and emotionally distant, much like the game as a whole.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is competently made, but utterly forgettable. It exists because the franchise demanded it, not because the story needed telling. Whatever heart or identity the series once had was established by its predecessors. What remains here is a hollow echo—polished, professional, and devoid of soul.