My hype for Revelations was gratuitously exaggerated, mostly because of the very well done trailer. It shows Ezio going on an epic journey arriving to an ancient snow covered temple with Templars waiting to ambush him, returning to the roots of his profession. I saw this as Ubisoft going back to its basic mechanics and making the game similar to the original AC, which stood out to me for its intense atmosphere and mystery. Also seeing the old environments really got me hooked, I just loved walking around the castles and jumping into haystacks in the first game. Showing Ezio arrive in winter with him outnumbered and surrounded by his enemies gave the tone of a much darker experience and hints at the possibility of Ezio dying. But my favorite idea from this trailer was how Ezio was able to see Altair as a ghost-like figure which seemed to be guiding him. Ezio was more or less forced into the brotherhood for the purpose of extracting revenge on those who killed his family, being an assassin gave him the skills that he needed to extract justice in what he saw to be a corrupt world. Unfortunately Ezio has the maturity of a sexually frustrated college frat boy, and comes off as the Forrest Gump of assassins rather than a logical, deductive, and professional one (like Altair). By revisiting the roots of his legacy, Ezio has the opportunity to be guided by his ancestors towards a more mature and noble role. With so many great ideas with a mature tone (in a market that seemed to be based on grinding out conventions so superficial I could find myself having a more prolific experience reading the back of a cereal box), the finality of a story arch, and my general hard-on for arabian architecture, I was confident that this was going to be a game that I could set a new standard for modern games...

BUT BOY WAS I WRONG

-Ezio is more immature than ever [his one liners have the charisma of soggy laundry]
-you spend less than 1% of the game in the actual ruins which you can't explore anyway
-ghost Altair doesn't do a damn thing
-Yusuf is the ANNOYING comic relief
-Suleiman is the best character
-the game mechanics are ridiculously overcomplicated
-you have an unnecessary amount of weapons [your equipped with everything from a pea-shooter to an AK-47]
-Altair's memory "levels" are disgracefully simple (press x: a winar is you!)
-Sofia, the "please kill her at the next chance" character
-Ezio does not die (he kills the bad guy, gets the girl, and takes a figurative dump on everything AC1 related)

To put it bluntly Revelations could not be more removed from the original. It panders to ALL of the stereotypes in a "oh yeah baby, I still got it" action hero story. Sofia is FORCED into the story and becomes the shove-down-your-throat/ supportive-love-interest/ brain-and-brawn/ strong-women-in-a-man's-world character, HERP DERP I AM SOFIA AND AM SOOOOO IMPORTANT. Aside from story issues the game overall was simply over-cluttered with meaningless filler and was disappointingly short. If there's any element of mystery here its as to how AC got so bad so fast.