Desmond Miles returns to Renaissance Italy to follow the life of his ancestor Ezio Auditore. After seeing his home destroyed, Ezio travels to Rome in an effort to rebuild the Assassin Order and bring down the Borgia family, who rule the city with an iron fist. Along the way, the modern day assassins hope to discover the location of the Piece of Eden, or 'The Apple' before the Templars find out first.
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Climb around Rome's rooftops long enough and you'll eventually hear a passing NPC mutter 'another capering crusader' under their breath. It's a pretty blatant jab at Batman, dropped into a game about a guy who spends most of his time jumping across rooftops in a hood.
Brotherhood is full of secret weapons hidden away for players who go looking, and one of the coolest names among them is a blade called 'La Volpe's Bite', tucked away as a reward for anyone thorough enough to track it down.
One of Brotherhood's memories has Ezio disrupting an assassination attempt in the ruins of the Colosseum during a stage play depicting the death of Jesus Christ. Reviewers at the time singled it out as an unusually mature moment for a game about historical stabbing, handled with a lot more care than you'd expect.
If Subject 16 sounded a little different to you this time round, that's because he was. Cam Clarke voiced him in AC2 and Brotherhood, but for Revelations the North American version swapped him out for Graham Cuthbertson instead.
The framing story picks up right where Brotherhood left Desmond in pieces. After being forced to kill Lucy, he slips into a coma, and the only way to pull him back out is by diving through the Animus into Ezio's memories, which is really the whole reason we're reliving Constantinople in the first place.
Brotherhood had you burning Borgia Towers to loosen the Templars' grip on Rome. In Revelations that system gets swapped out for Assassin's Dens scattered across Constantinople, each one demanding a different set of objectives before you can flip it to your side.
It's easy to lose track of time across three games, but Ubisoft has pegged the House of Auditore saga as covering somewhere between 23 and 30 years of Ezio's life, from the hot-headed young noble of AC2 to the tired, world-weary man wrapping up his story in Constantinople.
