Last night I finished the AC Ezio Trilogy and while I was planning on getting right back into HiFi Rush once that was off my plate, I had that weird post-game depression feeling, and I decided to go to bed instead.
Because, wow, that was a pretty great series of games, it ended off the historical story on a great bittersweet note, and I know that this is the last time the very manual parkour control scheme is used…
So here’s a brief (edit: it was NOT lol) review of my likes and dislikes of each title.
Assassin’s Creed 2. —
Great continuation of Demond’s story – mostly – though a lot of the modern day action takes place in a warehouse and you’re basically confined to another room to just interact with the friend group when for whatever reason you’re sooo bored (unlikely) of playing as Ezio.
The story overall is a great revenge tale, Ezio forming an alliance and becoming a great Assassin, after essentially having that role forced onto him after his father’s death and the hunt for his family by a rival group.
The timeline is a little hard to keep track of with time passing, since you’ll be doing a lot of exploring and mission-doing in between the quick year title cards of each chapter, so unfortunately time passing just… passed me by.
The diversity in the 3 locales is pretty cool. Florence has a much more diverse playground to parkour in, lots of stair-climbing involved to get to higher places and is way more engaging than AC1’s mostly flat roof maps. Some streets are pretty wide though and need you to traverse via tightrope to get across. Forli is interesting in that there’s massive multi-story guard towers to scale, though mostly only serve their purpose in a few missions and needing to reveal the map. And finally Venice feels similar to Florence in its roofing levels, but there are often massive gaps you have to cross due to the canals. But thankfully water can provide safe landings from high places, so they’re useful to get to the ground easily and escape chases.
There is a great number of Assassin Tombs and a few Templar Tombs that serve as fairly linear but fun parkour challenges, engaging you to find the right path forward to get the treasure or tool at the end. Very fun stuff.
Assassins Creed Brotherhood. ----
For the story in this one I thought the Modern Day portion was better than last time, since it involves a couple of Desmond parkour sequences at the start and at the end, and lets you have fun in an empty, modernized version of the Monterrigioni map from the last game whenever you want. The gang also holes up in Ezio’s old villa, which is cooler and has more significance than a random warehouse.
Ezio’s story I found more lacking in this one than the last.
It’s yet again a revenge story as someone he loves is killed, this time by a younger and more ruthless adversary. Also the villain from the last game is still alive because Ezio’s “I will make you live with your mistakes and hubris” cool fade-to-black moment at the end needed to be followed up with a sequel, ah well.
The story felt kinda forgettable in this one. Since Ezio needed to flee to Rome, his buddies all scattered and unsure what to do, he decides to try and Liberate Roma! so he can turn the people against the Templars who control the area. …And I kinda forget how he goes about all that.
Unfortunately even though the title is Brotherhood, and it’s kinda supposed to be about Ezio making an Assassin Brotherhood, that key mechanic doesn’t come into play until like Chapter 5 I think? That’s halfway through the game. It was very strange.
Also, since this is a sequel we need to reset players and not make them too strong from the get-go. So Ezio can’t climb-leap because of a bullet wound, and he lost all his equipment so he needs them back – which takes a while too. This is made worse since they tease you with a fully-upgraded Ezio in Chapter 1 just like how AC1 has you fully powered, then losing your stuff, and needing to get them back by the end… ugh, not enjoyable. The gameplay was pretty fun still!
The map itself – Rome – ehhh, not my favourite. Like, half to 2/3rds of the map is just flat terrain with some unscalable rock cliffs, and you’re forced to use your horse to get around quickly, use the same bottlenecks, or just fast travel. So… yeah, not an improvement.
Also UGH, this game introduces side objectives to get a 100% rating on the missions. And they’re usually terribly tough!! It’s usually something obtuse or really difficult like “not getting spotted or having enemy bodies spotted in a packed area” or “tail this NPC only from the rooftops and don’t get spotted” just, complex and harsh especially with the only way to reset it if it fails is redoing the entire mission!
What is a massive improvement is the side-missions. Lots of good assassinations, many of them tied into the main plot with cutscenes and furthering Ezio’s goal of helping citizens again the totalitarian threat of the Templars, the return of Tombs (though slightly less of them) that feature both parkour and comabt challenges with enemies sometimes – and the coolest – DaVinci War Machine missions! These last ones take you to a new mini-map just for the mission, so that’s fun to jump around. And they all end with a pretty good vehicle sequence which shakes things up! They’re all different and enjoyable in their own way with my favourite being the Glider from AC2, now upgraded with a cannon to shoot from above! (I did not like the Carriage Turret or the Boat Turret)
The collectibles though?! UGH. 100 Flags. Yikes. No Way. Not even with maps, I couldn’t be bothered, especially with that Rome map.
Assassin’s Creed Revelations —
This one is actually a smaller title, since it’s something Ubisoft rushed out to fill the void between Bro and AC3 so they could have something to fatten their pockets – or so I’ve heard. But I actually really enjoyed this one, overall way more than ACBro!
It serves as a final entry to tie up the stories of Ezio and surprisingly Altair too! You get a number of flashbacks about how Altair took control and rebuilt the Assassin Order after the events of the first game. It’s pretty well done. Also kudos to Ubisoft for having their actor actually try to pull off an accent rather than going full flat american english while everyone else sounds much different.
The “modern day” plot if you can even call it that is Desmond in a coma because he was unconscious at the end of the last one, and we can’t have him do anything important in this sequel that was never intended.
So he’s in a coma, you get 5 optional chapters of what I can only assume is Ubisoft’s attempt at cashing in on Portal, with jarring first-person perspective platforming levels where you spawn platforms and avoid lazers around you.
Nolan North does a great job with the scripts, reminiscing on Desmond’s past - and its great to finally know more about him - but the gameplay and level design (being all brutalistic concrete as rendered by the Animus) leaves a loooot to be desired. As in: not this.
The story in this is a non-revenge thing! It’s about Ezio in his older (mid-50’s?) chasing down keys to Altair’s secret library that probably house tons of Assassins secrets – and of course Templars are after it too, since they’ve well established themselves in the occupying Byzantine forces in the city of Constantinople/Istanbul/lots of names.
Ezio develops a fun secret friendship with the future Suleiman the Great and begins a new charming romance with a librarian.
First off for the gameplay: Ezio gets the new sequel mechanic (the Hookblade, one part hook one part blade) in Chapter 2. Like, right after the quick prologue/Chp1 section. And you’re let loose with the new tool and all of Ezio’s previous skills open for you. Yay!
The map this time is way better than Brotherhood. I think it’s the most dense urban environment in the series so far. Lots of wooden houses and buildings that are 3-4 stories tall at least, the city is built on an incline so there’s always fun either skipping your way down or hopping your way up the rooftops, and there’s ziplines to cross large gaps or speed your path up, AND Ezio has a nifty hookblade to jump higher, reach farther, climb faster, and is really fun to use – when it works – sometimes the fast-climb animation doesn’t trigger and it’s never clear why. The distance to the top maybe? IDK!
I also found the side objectives for the main missions to be quite easy this time around. Some simple “kill this target with your hidden blade” lol sure why would I not want to kill him with the series’ iconic versatile weapon. Or some straightforward “don’t get spotted” or “don’t kill anyone”.
The side missions themselves are a big disappointment unfortunately.
You only get two parkour tombs. Well, technically one, since the other is bonus DLC thankfully included in the Ezio Collection.
There are about 4-5 tombs you visit in the main missions, but they are all extremely simple, extremely linear “chase scene” setpieces. ACBro toyed with this in a few of the side tombs, but these ones are laughably scripted and disappointing that it takes up so much of the content.
(I feel like Uncharted is the reason they wanted to make cinematic, explosive chase-setpieces. The dates… kinda line up? UC1 was Nov.'07 UC2 was Oct.'09 – ACBro was Nov.'10 and ACRev was Nov.'11) UC2 had more setpieces and were more complex so I feel like that inspired Ubi quite a bit.)
There’s another type of Side Mission and its Master Assassin Missions. They take up the bulk of the list. Basically, you recruit citizens, send them on mobile-game timers to gain XP, and once they hit Lvl 10 you get Part 1 of their mission, and Lvl 15 gets you Part 2 of their mission.
The issue is, the setup for each (someone is causing trouble in the city and you have to track them down and stop them) is so quick and simple, and the gap between getting your recruits to Lvl 10 then 15 is so large and long, you’ll probably forget what the context is for the quest’s ending when you start Part 2. At least I did.
Oh yeah, and the other special mechanic Ubi had to add were Tower Defense missions (Den Defense, whatever)
They are pretty darn tough because I never managed to finish any of them apart from the first main tutorial one.
It’s simply setting up guards with various weapons along an alleyway for them to shoot enemies approaching, but it always ends with the baddies bringing in a super weapon that melts through all your barricades like butter and has sooo much health and armour.
What’s worse is that they changed the Notoriety system where you no longer have Wanted Posters to take down 25%. They’re gone.
You do still have Heralds [-50%] (and they lowered the bribe from 500 to 100 which is GREAT, plus you can pickpocket to get it back) and Couriers [-75%] but they have also been nerfed to -25% and -50% respectively.
AND WORST OF ALL, renovating buildings - which is the only way to earn passive income and have mostly accessible areas to upgrade or heal, adds notoriety to your meter. And that’s like about 20% per shop.
So if you go on a renovation spree, you’ll be Wanted and more enemies will spawn which will be harder to avoid, and if you do anything else illegal then one of your Assassin Dens get attacked, remaining a flashing icon on your map forever until you deal with it (and lose. like me.)
Still though, I really enjoyed my time with Revelations on the main gameplay loop side of things – and since they had a nifty feature where after collecting 50/100 of the misc. Collectibles in the world, the other 50 get added to your map for free!
And since I did such a great job getting full sync on all the main missions, I said screw it, went for the 100% trophy completion (with weird random trophies for doing things no one would ever need nor stumble upon easily) and got the platinum for ACRev as well. And that’s that!
TL;DR
Overall, I’d rank it as AC2>ACRev>ACBro, though each title has their own strengths and weaknesses in their campaigns and amount of side-content.
Also, AC2 and ACBro have a great cinematic video that plays on the Main Menu if you wait enough, and are just great CGI showcases meant to build hype for the game while revealing the new mechanics (the gun, parkour/assassin improvements, and the faction systems). ACRev’s mostly serves to set up the first mission and doesn’t show off the hookblade all too well.
Oh yeah and you can definitely see Ezio’s Action Hero persona get more and more prevalent the further into the trilogy you go. It’s a little strange since AC2 did such great heavy lifting building him up as a character, and in the rest of Bro and Rev he’s usually an always-on-top-of-it badass who can’t be stopped and performs inhuman feats of skill. (He fist-fights the main baddie while falling off a cliff in ACR for goodness sake!)
Sidenote: I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’ve heard a lot of Roger Craig Smith recently and I like the guy, it’s just baffling the games I keep playing feature him.
I played Dying Light with Silvereyes, he’s the main guy in that. I played AC2 and he’s Ezio with an italian accent in that. I then started RE5 with Silvereyes and he again was the main character Chris Redfield in that. Omg get out of my life you rugged-voiced man! 
So I might just go with my typical neutral/chaotic good run, even though at this point it’s a bit old hat.
