The gameplay additions to Revelations feel a bit desperate. This is not to knock the hardworking and frankly talented coders, artists and designers who managed to come up with subtle variations for a formula that had by this point been stretched to breaking point. But – this is a formula that is struggling to find a reason to support another game, released just a year after Brotherhood, and two years after II. There are a set of new gameplay bits I wanted to talk about today – the hookblade, the bombs, and the Den Defense… I think I’ll save the strangest new invention, one I hardly see anyone else talk about, for the third post.
Let’s start with some praise – the Hookblade is probably the best new addition to the series’ gameplay given by Revelations, and I’m frankly bemused it didn’t become a staple of the franchise from this point on. It is introduced in a way I think the Assassin’s Creed community seems to have taken and run with, as Yusuf says “The hookblade has two parts – the hook, and the blade”. Ah, really, Yusuf? I never would have guessed.
This silly introduction aside, the Hookblade is a seamless addition to the series’ parkour elements, as Ezio can now reach higher jumps by extending himself, launch himself from lamps by swinging very far in a straight line, and there are even animations that trigger when you time your hookblade jumps right, as Ezio will now automatically scale linear vertical sections of the wall for you. You have to do less work for more reward, which, in a game with some shockingly high places (that you will inevitably need to scale more than once), is refreshing and adds a much-needed sense of flow beyond its current pace, which had indeed begun to thin out a little by this point in the series. There are also ziplines dotted around Istanbul, which can be rode with the Hookblade, making roof traversal in Revelations genuinely joyful as you zip from roof to roof.
The Hookblade also adds a few options to combat, though these are much less impressive – but still nice to have. The “Hook and Run” or “Hook and throw your opponent screaming off of a rooftop” are two nice options to have, with one rolling Ezio over the top of his opponent so he can keep running, and the other, well, I’m sure you can guess what happens. The ragdoll animation they adopt as they flop to the floor afterwards is oddly hilarious. The other addition is a “Counter Steal” option, instead of “Counter Kill”. Why you would Counter Steal, I am not really sure. There are a couple of classes of enemies it doesn’t even work on, and it doesn’t even kill the enemy. You’re better off just to kill the enemy and loot them afterwards, if you’re that desperate.
The Hookblade does have a bit of a design flaw – the hook obscures the blade part (at least that’s how it appears in gameplay), so Ezio seems to stab people with a blunt hook. Why it doesn’t have the hook set just a little bit further down on the blade (like it appears to in concept art) is beyond me. But the Hookblade is a fantastic addition to a game that needed something to liven up its parkour – this does the job, making Ezio’s movement much quicker and making scaling buildings much easier.
So then we segue from the hookblade to the bombs, and this is where we get onto distinctly wobbly territory. Assassin’s Creed II introduced a single kind of bomb – the smoke bomb – and this was about all the franchise needed, if you ask me. A bomb that obscures your environment is about all an Assassin should really need. It’s a tactical tool that allows for the player to recover from mistakes – an Assassin reset button, basically, in the context of the game’s forgetful AI. Revelations adds a button to throw the bomb – which is what II definitely needed – but the game’s other additions are strange.
There are three different bomb categories, and four types within each category. We have “Lethal”, “Tactical”, and “Diversion” bomb categories. There are four shell types – “Impact”, which is instantaneous, “Fuse” which bounces and explodes after a few seconds, “Tripwire” which is frankly almost useless, and “Sticky” which is also almost useless. In almost every instance Impact is the only shell type you will need, as the game’s tactical options here simply don’t need to exist. But we’ll get onto that in a second.
There are three types of Gunpowder – big explosion, medium explosion, little explosion. But in no instance would you not want the big explosion, as civilian casualties while using bombs are basically impossible to achieve in almost every scenario where you would be using bombs.
There are also several redundant types within each of the three bomb categories. Lethal has a few variations that cause explosions that kill or knock out, but why use loud explosions when you can use a poison cloud that is silent and kills immediately? Also, why have the option for knock outs when there are no in-game penalties towards killing everyone in sight?
Tactical bombs are similarly constrained by having only one real useful option: the phosphorus (smoke) grenade. It is even thicker and longer-lasting than in previous games, enabling you to one-hit assassinate everyone with impunity.
Then there are diversion bombs, only one of which (the cherry bomb) is of practical use. The loud sound draws guards towards hiding spots where you can assassinate them, which is at least a little useful. The other bombs feel like real stretches of the imagination: a Smoke Signal bomb is silent, drawing only guards who can see the smoke signal to it. Just a worse version of the cherry bomb, and almost never useful. The skunk oil stink bomb is at least a little amusing, but its main tactic (to separate those hit with the bomb from a crowd) is pretty useless – just throw a poison bomb or shoot a poison dart! The final diversion bomb, which is a fake gold bomb, draws citizens to aggressively get in the way of guards. Also useless beyond hyper-specific scenarios which a player will only encounter once in the game, if that.
The poison bombs are frankly broken – they kill any enemy regardless of health or status instantaneously. Janissaries, the game’s elite guard, are listed by some as some of the most overpowered enemies in video games. But, throw a poison bomb and you can kill an entire room full of them without breaking a sweat. Don’t forget you can hold four poison bombs at a time, so if one doesn’t do the trick, just throw another one to catch any stragglers. There are bomb crafting stations every twenty meters in Constantinople, so you’re never short. Guards often carry Datura Powder (the required item needed to craft poison bombs) and chests are often full of them. There is no shortage, and this poison bomb blows the doors off of any challenge the game might have to offer.
The other consideration is that the bombs just aren’t necessary. Ezio is already a whirlwind of death. Consider that his counter kill move already instantly kills every enemy besides Janissaries, and that the counter kill move starts a kill streak which allows him to instantly kill other enemies with just the touch of a button using any weapon, and that his list of weapons includes already:
Hidden blades
Sword / Hammer / Giant Ax / Giant Sword
Knife
Crossbow
Poison darts
Hidden gun
Poison blade
Throwing knives
Ezio was not short of any death dealing method before. The games were easy enough without bombs. If Janissaries were meant to be a threat, they are completely dismantled out of the starting gate as soon as you get the ability to craft bombs. And you get the ability to craft bombs before you meet your first Janissary! Janissaries are supposed to be able to survive several counter kill moves, be good at dodging melee attacks, and have a gun they can pull out and shoot at Ezio to knock him off balance. But no, just apply some poison, and you don’t have a problem any longer.
I can’t help but think that the time and effort that went into adding all these new bomb types would have been better served elsewhere – almost anywhere else. It is no wonder that the bomb crafting system did not return, as it rendered the game much too easy in a variety of ways. It really was a design dead end, and I am glad they made the Assassins less gratuitously overpowered in subsequent games – though sometimes not by much.
The final entry is somewhat infamous – Den Defense is a third-person shoulder-mounted tower defense minigame. The sense of creeping dread might begin to set in as you realize just how far deep the team at UbiSoft were in their rut when they accepted adding in a tower defense mode to their game.
But in principle it actually could have been quite cool. The fact that the Templars struggle over the city with you is neat, giving the player a reason to invest in their hired Assassins by sending them out on contract missions (a neat little timewaster of a feature) and assigning them to dens to help defend them. It gives the story’s overarching conflict a little bit more weight in gameplay, as you see that the Templars are trying to maintain a hold over the city.
However it would have been better done if you had to defeat covert attacks across the district rather than what we actually got. Because I thought the Templar / Assassin war was supposed to be secret. Instead, Templars dressed inexplicably in the garb of the Byzantines (several hundred must show up for each assault), attack towers marked with Assassin insignia in the middle of Constantinople. The Assassins have siege cannons they fire, rifles, crossbows and countless die in the street. The Templars throw hundreds of troops, as well as enormous siege engines, at the Assassins. This is no covert war, and they’re not fighting by proxy either. This is just nonsensical all-out war in the streets of one of the world’s largest population centers. In terms of ludonarrative dissonance, if there was a detector for it, it would be going nuts.
The Assassins at least have Ezio sneak in to take over a den for themselves. They might hang up Assassin flags for some stupid reason, but at least there’s a bit of deniability. But who would miss a war going on in the streets?
The Den Defense plays okay I guess – there are a variety of units you can put down, you have to put down troops on rooftops with a small “Leader” unit investment placed on them, and you can put down barricades in the streets. It controls fine, the music is nice, and while the camera is a little annoying, it’s nothing you can’t get used to. It’s just a bit on the easy side as well, with the enemy able to be dealt with pretty quickly. Siege weapons (some of which have low-poly Assassin’s Creed II guards inside of them..?) are wet paper in the face of the cannon volleys you can unleash.
I think that Den Defense is really one of the most telling problems with the franchise at this point. They were getting a bit desperate for some fresh approach, while still struggling along with Ezio as a protagonist, who was a dead weight for the story they were trying to tell. It comes across as just one more thing on our gameplay checklist that we as players have to deal with. It doesn’t mesh at all with the Assassin theme of the franchise, it actively disrupts any attempts to say that either faction is operating “from the shadows”, and it’s just a bit boring. It can be avoided in the end by not raising your Notoriety too high, which is nice and easy considering you just need to bribe (and subsequently pickpocket your money back) some heralds, who are just as common as the bomb crafting stations. It can be stopped forever once you’ve upgraded your trainees to the highest level and assigned them to Dens.
If one of the main gameplay additions to your game is a) story breaking and b) completely optional – and in fact could even be considered a punishment for playing too clumsily (i.e. not like an Assassin) – then something has gone wrong. Revelations, I hope, is starting to come together for the reader, is beginning to coalesce into one big unnecessary blob. But we’re not quite done yet.
Next time: To the future! I mean the present! Wait. Now it’s the past… boy, this is getting confusing.
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