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After 6 years, I finally completed the game
Why did it take me so long to finish it? Good question. First of all, there is nothing wrong with it. It´s a very decent AC game, with its strengths/weaknesses. I think the issue is what I call “gameplay fatigue”. I´ll explain:
Most games nowadays are somehow forced to have 15-20 hours of content. However creating new challenges is costly, hence most projects – particularly open worlds – create gameplay templates which are copy-pasted into each region of the game space
To be fair, they commonly add small twists to the cloned content: A new enemy type, a new fortress layout, different enemy combinations… but at the end of the day you can identify the patterns and they end up feeling less and less unique. This leads into a certain boredom that makes you feel unexcited to play more
This has happened to me in several games after 5-6 hours of playing. There is a point where you start thinking it´s all same old same old, and wonder if you shouldn´t try that other game in the library. In AC Revelations I played around 60% of the campaign until I became disinterested, and abandoned it for years
Thanks to the PS3 hard drive´s ridiculously small capacity, I had to delete all I could, plus finish any ongoing game before I could consider installing any new one, which eventually gave me the gentle push to complete it. I even went for a bunch of small trophies just so I could truly say “I´ve done all I wanted to do in this game”
Aside from this, like I said the game is very decent and if you like ACs you should enjoy it. It is the end of the “Ezio Auditore” trilogy, and it might be a good compilation of all that is good and bad of the IP up to that point:
On the plus side it´s a new and interesting location (Istanbul) and the team successfully built on top of previous titles to add new options, and discard those that didn´t completely worked out. There is a fair amount of variety of things to do (at least initially) and it does feel like a quality product in all its aspects
On the minus side, I felt the controls painful (high/low profiles never worked for me, plus mapping item selections on the trigger makes it to open unwillingly all the time). It features too many options for the player in my opinion (you end up not using many of them). And as usual in AC the story is just meh, good enough as a skeleton for gameplay but not as much as to make you really feel excited about what´s coming next
Anyway, I can´t help to think I would have enjoyed it way more if it would have been only 6 hours long, but that´s how games are made these days. Maybe that will change in the upcoming next gen?
