Anybody who has played Assassin’s Creed 2 can tell you how fantastic Ezio Auditore da Firenze is. Great games have a great character, and Assassin’s Creed 2 really delivered when it came to developing a character. Ezio was in this well as its two sequels. But did they beat a dead horse by him appearing in most games?

Ezio really made a return in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood,  evolving from his previous appearance. Ezio seemed more refined, more rounded out. Ezio’s character is great in all aspects, even when it comes to Ezio hitting on women is fantastic, he could put “The World’s Most Interesting Man in the World” to shame. Beating Brotherhood would have been a great wrap up for Ezio’s story, and I was hoping the next game would be a fresh start for the series with a completely new character that I could fall in love with the same way I did I first met Ezio.

However Ubisoft did not do that. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations suffers from the biggest mistake game developers can make: pushing the game out to soon. I felt that the creators were more concerned with the bottom line, completely forgetting the ever important player enjoyment factor. Playing as Ezio in this game almost became a chore. He became two dimensional and wooden, he even seemed apathetic. In the prequels he was more motivated, first driven by revenge for the killing of his family, then he wanted to defend Rome and be the leader of the Assassins. In Revelations however he doesn’t really have a drive. He just wants it to be over with. Which is how I felt about the game half way through beating it.

 Ubisoft didn’t come out with a new game when they released Revelations; they just came out with an end to Ezio. On paper that was a good idea but paper didn’t really transfer so well when it came time to actually playing the game. Ezio was dragged through the mud in this game; he became boring, old, and frankly a little sad. Ezio was after all 60 years old in Revelations, which is definitely too old for a character notoriously known for surviving 50 story falls. They shouldn’t have brought Ezio back for another game. It made me sad to see a character end up like this. Hopefully Ubisoft now understands their mistake and in the next series they won’t make it again.