You know, Chevy Chase woke up one day and just wasn't funny anymore

Despite being rather late to the party I really enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series to date, demonstrated by how I played them all at the start of last year back to back. Sure the first one was as repetitive as peeling potatoes and more of a tech demo than a game, but the story was unique and surprising and the core gameplay of exploring a city from the streets and the rooftops and assassinating enemies of the creed was incredibly satisfying. So it was with great disappointment that I discovered the latest entry in the series wasn't up to snuff having finally caught up with everyone else.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations clearly suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Despite feeling like games that have taken several years to develop, Ubisoft have been shitting these out every year since 2008 like they have erratic diarrhea and it's finally starting to show on their pants.  

Sure the core experience is still there and I love it, but everything new feels as ill thought out as claiming to have fallen into a life boat. For those who hated playing Desmond you will be glad to hear you will be doing no more of that tomfoolery, but unfortunately it's been replaced with first person flash back sequences which have you completing deficient block puzzles that wouldn't entertain a three year old.

Even returning features feel completely soulless. In Brotherhood burning the Borgia towers made sense for the story, but in Revelations these locations exist without any context. In the same vein you can buy and restore every bank, shop and cake establishment in the city and I will because I have OCD, but there is absolutely no explanation as to why you are doing it and there is almost no real benefit for doing so. 

To introduce unnecessary complexity, assassin dens can come under attack and be re-taken. To defend them you must participate in another oddball addition, a tower defence mini-game which isn't terrible, but doesn't hit it out of the park either. Just about every side task to the main quest seems out of place in Revelations, like it was simply included because it had debuted in a previous title.

Perhaps the worst offence of Revelations is in the title, as it provides no real revelations. We get some nice inception action as Desmond views the end of Ezio's adventure, who views the end of Altair's tale, but none of this moves the overarching story forward. 

The fact Desmond is unconscious for the entire game should give you the hint that this is the game in there series to skip. Revelation's is still a fun game, but it is in no way the must play experience of its predecessors. Let's just hope Ubisoft realises that they need a change of trousers before it runs the series into the ground.