Oliver Bowden is back to take yet another stab at writing for video games with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. But, like his previous work with the Assassin’s Creed franchise, he stabs with a limp wrist and dull knife.
The book’s cover claims that Revelations is “an original novel” based on Ubisoft’s video game of the same name. If only. There’s hardly anything original about this novel. It follows the story of Ezio Auditore, a master assassin in his fifties, and his life-long fight against the tyrannical Templars. His quest for freedom takes him to early 1500s Constantinople. And much like Assassin’s Creed: Renaissance, Revelations does little more than rip out the game’s cutscenes and transform them into bland text. Bowden copies and pastes throughout this book, rarely writing anything new. But when his earlier work was like this, what can we really expect? We can expect effort, at the very least.
I wanted to like this book. I hoped it would touch on things the game didn’t. Bowden takes every chance he can to remind the reader that Ezio is getting older. Before most of his assassinations, Ezio wonders if he will come back alive. That concept excited me. It was something that the game didn’t cover too well. Sure, Ezio thinks about his age, but when it comes to gameplay, he’s as young as ever, able to endure sword-strikes to the face and falls from three-story buildings. Bowden had the perfect chance to tell a compelling story of an old man’s struggle with his aging body. It could have been a dramatic, emotional work of historical fiction.
But instead, Bowden lets Ezio keep all of his god-like strength and endurance. He’s able to grab the trailing rope of a fleeing Templar’s carriage and be dragged across the ground, kill dozens of trained soldiers all at once, and fall down cliffs without receiving any serious injuries. Scene such as these were tolerable in the game, but are jarringly unrealistic here. Why did Bowden have to copy these scenes verbatim?
The better question is: Who is this book for? Is it for fans of the game? I can’t see how. Fans already know the game’s story. The only original content that Bowden wrote was a series of choppy, exposition-filled chapters about how Ezio got from Rome to Constantinople. It’s a family-vacation-style slideshow of meaningless events that don’t reveal anything about the characters or the world. I would imagine that fans would want something more than that. They’ve played the games, so why would they want the same thing?
Perhaps Bowden should have taken a lesson from the Halo books, which expand on that franchise’s universe, exploring stories untouched by the games. A story about Ezio’s travels would have been great if it was handled properly.
So is the book for normal readers? People who haven’t played the game? That can’t be it, either. Bowden’s descriptions are minimal at best, nonexistent at worst. Often times, characters will speak to one another and point in a direction, saying, “You see that over there?” The characters will look and discuss what they’re seeing, but the narrator never describes it for the reader. They’re left in the dark. Readers who never played the game won’t know what Constantinople looks like in this story, because Bowden gives such little detail.
First-time readers won’t find the book exciting, either. Almost every action scene lacks tension. Imagine for a moment that Ezio stands before a small team of assassins, building their moral and preparing them to defend their base from a Templar assault. Scene’s over. They won.
Most of Bowden’s action scenes play out this way, with a fair amount of build-up and absolutely no pay-off. They end before the reader can get invested. Those that manage to tense up the reader and deeply explore a conflict only do so because the game did. Scenes such as the burning boatyard and the carriage chase were scripted in the game and meant to be played out only one way, so Bowden didn’t have to be creative.
If Revelations fails to bring anything new to the table, and can’t be bothered to describe scenes and settings, then it can’t really be a book for anyone.
Thomas Aaron Ryefield | Technical Writer 