Time-Travel Tip for Constantinople: Pack Daggers

With its latest installment, called Revelations, the Assassin’s Creed series is flirting baldly with the second category. It hasn’t gone over quite yet. In five years, perhaps, we will look back and remember Revelations as the one bald spot of mediocrity marring an otherwise lush field of creative ambition and insightful design.

If not, if by then Assassin’s Creed is a bargain-bin franchise fallen far from its glory years (like, say, Lara Croft and Tomb Raider), we will remember Revelations as the game where things went bad.

Not bad in the sense of sloppy or unrefined. Just bad in the sense of a bit tired. Revelations, published by Ubisoft of France for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows (and rated M for mature), provides an enjoyable 30 hours of action-adventure gameplay, but it’s never especially dynamic or fresh. Most of it plays exactly like the previous two Assassin’s Creed games, except in less interesting locations populated by less interesting characters. The story, meanwhile, dissolves into an almost “Matrix”-like hash of time-traveling and alternate realities (speaking of franchises that imploded under their own weight).

Nominally, the game is set in 16th-century Constantinople. You are Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Italian nobleman who is actually the leader of a secret sect called the Assassins, who are engaged in an epoch-bridging battle for control of civilization with the evil Templars. In reality (such as it is), the whole 1500s adventure is a computerized simulation within the mind of your real character, Desmond Miles, a present-day descendant of Ezio who is strapped into a brain-reading machine. (Cue “The Matrix” again.)

It gets a bit more complicated from there, but you get the point. In most of the game you are exploring Constantinople’s markets, sewers, temples and palaces. The Byzantines and the conquering Ottomans are locked in a predictably, wait for it, byzantine political battle. You infiltrate the city’s elite while scaling walls, flying down zip lines and putting daggers through your enemies’ throats.

As in previous games, you can take control of precincts to generate income used to buy equipment upgrades. You can recruit computer-controlled assassins to your posse and dispatch them not only around Constantinople but also to take over representations of other cities around the Mediterranean.

The game tries to adopt some of the cinematic pretensions of the Uncharted action-adventure series but without the panache and visual flair. More broadly, Revelations suffers because Constantinople, as accurately rendered as it may be, does not offer the variety of recognizable locations for most players — Renaissance Rome, Florence and Venice — that were the settings for previous games in the series.

Likewise, while the writing and acting are generally excellent, I found it more difficult to care about the ins and outs of the plot. Compared with rubbing shoulders in previous games with Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, the Medicis and the Borgias, including a pope, the core Revelations story seems stale.

Ubisoft’s ill-advised decision to tack on some strange sequences ripped from different and unrelated video game genres, like desktop tower defense and first-person jumping, is actually not inexplicable. They make sense as ham-handed attempts to add fresh trinkets to an otherwise familiar experience.

That is not an entirely bad thing. But it is instructive to compare Assassin’s Creed with Uncharted, which features a globe-trotting treasure hunter in the mold of Indiana Jones. In 2009 both series hit a high point. Sony, Uncharted’s publisher, reacted by giving Naughty Dog, the Uncharted studio, two years to release a sequel. The result was a hit and the year’s best adventure game, Uncharted 3.

Ubisoft, by contrast, reacted to the success of Assassin’s Creed II by queuing up a new game in the franchise every year. So in 2010, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was a bit more of the same. Revelations is a lot more of the same.

Ubisoft has now used up its mulligans or get-out-of-jail-free cards with Assassin’s Creed. It is allowed. But one more like this, and Assassin’s Creed is headed for Tomb Raider territory.