We have finally arrived in Constantinople to search for the Masyaf Keys. And for once, we’re greeted by friendly faces. But we also have enemies, so it’s best we begin our work now.
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To some extent, this intro suffers simply by being in such close proximity to the intros of the other Ezio games. Both of them (yes, even Brotherhood) do a good job of both thrusting players into their role by giving them a ton of gameplay segments to introduce core mechanics, which slowly easing them into the world with light cutscenes sprinkled in.
I give Revelations some credit for the former. We do have a good amount of tutorial missions and opening segments to start out with, but they don’t do a great job introducing us to the game. Thankfully, we’re playing straight after Brotherhood. Remember though, for most players it would have been a year between games and a refresher couldn’t hurt. Doubly so since that made some changes to the controls that even I still fumble with in this session.
The real problem is just the sheer amount of time we spend in these opening hours watching cutscenes of people talking to each other. There are times when I’m taking breaks of ten minutes or more between portions of gameplay where characters are just speaking to each other. I wouldn’t even necessarily mind that if the dialogue was interesting or told us a bit about the people talking, but largely it is pure exposition that is used to describe the state of the world. It’s the equivalent of a large text crawl at the start of a Tactical RPG, where they have to establish the world and factions before the player takes control, and those rarely hold a player’s attention.
I imagine that the reason is simple: This game was developed in a year and the developers had to budget their resources wisely. We don’t have the benefit of an established villain and supporting cast since we’re no longer in Italy, so the new power players need to be quickly introduced. I just wish there was time to do so more elegantly.
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