MikeMcD

<span class="articleText">The first time I saw Assassin's Creed, it was about stabbing a man from behind. Then, Ubisoft showed off how they layered parkour and stealth mechanics onto that core premise. Then the game comes out, and on top of an innovative take on assassination, navigation, and stealth, the game revealed its labyrinthine story: About a man named Desmond in 2012 caught in a struggle between the descendents of the original Templar and Assassin orders, and how he uses a machine to access his genetic memories of his 12th-century ancestor, Altair ibn-La'Ahad. Things get even crazier when Assassin's Creed II switches perspectives from Desmond reliving Altair's memories to instead reliving the memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze -- a minor Italian noble who undergoes his own personal version of the Batman origin story and matures into an Assassin whose ultimate target becomes the Pope himself.
While AC2 came out two years after the original, and addressed practically every one of its predecessor's flaw to become an significant and innovative leap forward (and an example of a great sequel), Ubisoft has since adopted the annualized sequel method popularized by sports games and Call of Duty. So just one year later, rather than Assassin's Creed III, we saw Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. That title layered on mechanics such as the management of the guild, tweaks to combat and navigation, and on top of those: the bold addition of multiplayer. For what was assumed to be a quick cash-in, Brotherhood ended up being a pretty hefty game. And now we have Assassin's Creed: Revelations.


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