Assassin's Creed Revelations Needs a Remake - Here's Why
Brotherhood is my favorite Assassin's Creed game. Revelations is second, and on certain days the two switch places in my head. I've finished Brotherhood close to ten times. I go back to Revelations almost as often, and Istanbul is the reason.
Ezio Auditore's story should have ended in Rome. Brotherhood closed his revenge arc and put the Borgia in the ground. Revelations picked him up anyway, older, searching for Altaïr's library beneath Masyaf, carrying the weight of two prior games. That premise could have felt like a victory lap. It became the strongest stretch of his story instead.
Istanbul does the heavy lifting. Market stalls crowd narrow alleys, minarets break up the skyline, and the call to prayer drifts over rooftops while merchants argue prices below. I've sat through missions forgetting a controller was in my hands, convinced for a stretch that I was standing in a city that stopped existing centuries ago. This game managed that on a regular basis, which is rare for an open world.
The Hookblade Changed How the City Felt
Revelations gave Ezio a new way to move through that city: the hookblade. Zip lines strung between rooftops let you cross half of Istanbul without touching the ground, and a hook-assisted counter turns a routine kill into something with more flair than Brotherhood offered. Ledges catch you mid-fall now instead of ending a climb outright. None of this changed the parkour system underneath it, which already worked fine on its own. It changed how much I wanted to use that system. I'd load into the game with no mission active and spend twenty minutes swinging across the city because the movement felt good for its own sake.
Sofia Gave Ezio Something Different
Sofia Sartor gave Ezio something the earlier games never did. Where Caterina Sforza tangled with him through politics and danger across two separate entries, Sofia offered a bookshop, a shared interest in old texts, conversation instead of conquest. Their scenes carry a tenderness that fits where Ezio stands by this point in his life, older and looking for something other than another fight. I bought into their relationship completely.
Ranked against each other, Caterina still wins for me. Her arc built across Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood, two full games of history between her and Ezio before anything settled between them. Sofia's story works well contained within Revelations alone, but Caterina's stays with me longer. The extra runtime probably explains most of that gap.
Den Defense Is the One System That Doesn't Belong
One mechanic in Revelations never earned its place. Templars assault your strongholds throughout the game, and defending them means assigning assassin recruits to rooftops in a setup that plays like a tower-defense minigame dropped into an assassination story. The rest of Revelations builds a fantasy of moving unseen through a city as a master of your craft. Den Defense interrupts that fantasy and hands you a strategy board instead. It's the one piece of the game I'd cut without hesitation, or rebuild completely if Ubisoft wants to keep the stronghold concept.
A remake gets a real shot at fixing this properly. Templars pressuring your territory fits Ezio's position as Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood, so the concept has a place. The execution needs to change into something that keeps players in character instead of pulling them into a different genre for twenty minutes at a stretch.
The Multiplayer Deserves to Come Back
Multiplayer might be the part of Revelations I miss most today. Brotherhood introduced the format and got the credit for the innovation, blending crowds of NPCs with real players hunting each other through disguise and patience. Revelations refined that system into something I liked even more. You'd blend into a crowd while stalking a target, aware the whole time that someone else might be stalking you the same way. Breaking cover meant losing your advantage. Staying still too long meant losing your target.
I put real hours into this mode, and my favorite skin was the White Doctor. That plague-mask silhouette gliding through a crowd made blending in feel unsettling in the best way a game has ever managed. Ubisoft dropped this entire multiplayer format after Assassin's Creed III, and nothing since has replaced it. That gap has sat empty for over a decade now.
Jesper Kyd Scored His Best Work Here
Jesper Kyd scored the Ezio trilogy, and his work on Revelations might be the strongest of the three. Istanbul's ambient tracks carry the city's identity even in quiet stretches with nothing happening on screen. Chase sequences build tension without drowning out the action underneath them. The cues beneath Ezio and Sofia's scenes tell as much of the story as the dialogue does. Pull the music out of Revelations and Istanbul loses half of what makes it feel real.
What a Remake Should Actually Do
Brotherhood and Revelations both deserve remakes, real ones rather than a resolution bump dressed up as a re-release. Istanbul needs lighting that matches how I remember it looking rather than what 2011 hardware could actually render. The city itself could stand to grow, filling out districts that felt compressed on original hardware. Character models need real work too, especially in close-up scenes between Ezio and Sofia, where the writing's subtlety deserves faces capable of carrying it.
Bring the multiplayer back, built properly this time. Keep the White Doctor and every skin from the original roster alongside it. Players who missed this format the first time deserve to understand what made it special, and longtime fans deserve a reason to relearn the tension of hunting someone while being hunted yourself.
Fix Den Defense, or replace it outright. It's the one piece of Revelations that never matched the quality surrounding it, and a remake is the only realistic chance anyone gets to address it.
Leave the story untouched. Ezio's search for Altaïr's library, his relationship with Sofia, the closing chapter of a character built across four games: none of it needs rewriting. That story is the reason Revelations means what it means to me. Expand the world around it. Sharpen the systems supporting it. Rebuild the technology underneath it. The writing earned the right to stay exactly as it is.
If Ubisoft ever announces this and keeps that promise, I'm preordering the moment it goes up.