Assassin’s Creed Revelations was the third and final adventure in the Ezio trilogy, and one that tied everything together before the series moved into a new phase with Assassin’s Creed III. While it centered on Ezio Auditore da Firenze – now the graying Mentor of the Italian Assassins – and his journey to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Revelations came with the challenge of resolving multiple layers of storytelling in a satisfying way.
First, there was Ezio himself, who had traveled to the Assassin fortress of Masyaf in search of Assassin secrets – only to find that the keys to unlock them were hidden across Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Said keys also let Ezio experience the recorded memories of Altaïr, letting players once again play as the first game’s hero while learning where the rest of his life took him. And then there was Desmond Miles, Ezio and Altaïr’s modern-day descendant, who witnessed his ancestors’ stories while in a coma, trying to repair his own fractured psyche.
All of this came with new gameplay innovations that helped give Revelations a unique new flavor. Ezio’s arsenal now included the Hookblade, a versatile Ottoman variation on the classic Hidden Blade that let him climb higher, use a network of ziplines, and grab enemies during combat. He could craft bombs with a variety of payloads and fuses, enabling players to set traps or timed explosions in addition to using them as both lethal and nonlethal grenades.
Assassin’s Creed games up to this point had walled off portions of their worlds until story conditions had been met, but in a series first, all of Constantinople was open for exploration from the start. As he explored, Ezio could take over Templar Dens, which – like the Borgia Towers of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – let Ezio buy and open nearby businesses once they’d been conquered. The difference this time was that they needed to be periodically defended with a tower-defense minigame, in which Ezio would command Ottoman Assassins in battle against the armies of the Byzantine Templars. And while the single-player story continued to innovate, the still-new multiplayer mode did as well, expanding the hunt-or-be-hunted experience from Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood with new modes and a self-contained storyline that introduced a formidable new Templar, Juhani Otso Berg.
All of this culminated in a story climax that spanned centuries and gave players a touching sendoff for Altaïr, as well as a new path forward for Ezio (whose own final days would be explored in the 2011 short Assassin’s Creed: Embers). It was closure for the first era of Assassin’s Creed, and opened the door for a new one, as Desmond woke from his coma and set the stage for Assassin’s Creed III.
