The fourth Assassin’s Creed game is out on PC now, for once merely weeks rather than months behind the console version. I’ve been dragging old man Ezio across its rooftops and into its underground lairs of conspiracy for the last few days, and as such… well, you know how this goes.

Experimentation, calibration, celebration and now stagnation: that’s been the course Assassin’s Creed games have taken, and until Revelations it’s been a course of sustained improvement. In some ways, and when looked at alone, Revelations is the best of the bunch, but it’s also the most unnecessary. Especially on PC, where delays meant we only saw the last game, Brotherhood, a piffling eight months ago. After a half-decade of tinkering, AssCreed has settled on its formula and Revelations presents an impasse – stay the course, do the COD-style franchise thing and hope the fanbase is loyal enough to stump up for iterative updates, or return to the reinvention it once embraced.(more…)