Whether you're new to the Assassin's Creed series or a seasoned acolyte, there are some things you can do as you prepare to play the new Assassin's Creed: Revelations that will make your time with the game much better.

Consider the following starter tips. They're not spoilers; they're my advice to you so that you can have the best time with the game. Think of it as me suggesting what you should pack before you go on a trip. Except this trip is to Constantinople, 16th century.

1) Get the PlayStation 3 version, if you can. It includes a free copy of the first Assassin's Creed which installs to your hard-drive. That first game is now looked back on as a tech demo for the flourish of the three big AC games that followed, but it's also the start of the series' story. Surely it'd be nice to have it handy.

2) Brush up on the lore You don't have have the intricacies of the Assassin's Creed storyline memorized, but these games are much more rewarding if you know what's going on. You'll benefit from knowing what happens, in the macro-sense, but you also should go into Revelations aware of the crazy cliffhanger that happened at the end of last year's Brotherhood. One way to brush up is to watch this video. Or, I could tell you some stuff...

(OK, some plot SPOILERS here: The short-short version of the larger story is that there's been a centuries-old secret war waged between the Knights Templar and the Assassin Order. In all of the main games, we play on the side of the Assassins, with the ostensible lead character being Desmond Miles, a man in modern times whose ancestors were some of history's most legendary Assassins. A device called the Animus lets Desmond re-live the memories of his ancestors: those of 12th-century Altair in the first game and as Italian Renaissance-era Ezio in the three that have followed, AC II, AC: Brotherhood and now Revelations.

Desmond's playable exploits in the games have involved the events that take place immediately after his September 2012 capture by Abstergo Industries, a front company for the Templars. He escapes at the end of the first game, begins to show assassin-like skills in the second and goes on the run with Lucy Stillman and other members of the struggling Assassin Order in the next.

Desmond, like his ancestors, also starts to experience visions of The First People, an ancient group of what appears to be technologically-advanced humans who prophesize some sort of world-ending event for late 2012. That deadline adds urgency to Desmond's Animus-enabled vision quests into his ancestor's shoes. Those quests are ultimately about locating the pieces or entirety of the Apple of Eden, an artifact of the First People. The quests also send our heroes after other knowledge that supposedly will help Desmond and the 2012-era assassins repel the ascendant Templars.

One problem: at the end of Brotherhood, a vision of one of the First People seems to take over Desmond's body and compel him to stab Lucy, his biggest ally in these on-the-run adventures, to death. And then Desmond passes out.

We begin the new game, Revelations, unsure of why the First People made Desmond do that, unclear as to who the unseen people are who picked up the passed-out Desmond and strapped him into an Animus... and we also get to spend the bulk of our time in this new game as Ezio, who is on his own quest to learn the life story of Altair and unlock keys to a door that will open into a secret vault of crucial information hidden by the great Altair.

Yes, that was the short version, because I didn't mention Christopher Columbus or Niccolo Polo or Ezio's various love interests or the rules of what can and can't be re-experienced in the Animus. END SPOILERS)

3) Don't brush up on the lore by reading the Assassin's Creed Encylopedia The new book's a beauty. It also spoils a lot of Revelations. Play the game first.

4) Start the story, but break away early and do the Den stuff You can play the campaign of Assassin's Creed: Revelations straight through without touching the heaps of side-quests tossed into the streets of the game's beautiful, busy main territory of 16th-century Constantinople. You can't even start the side quests until the game's linear action-movie-style first chapter ends. Let the second one begin but then do like I did and break out on your own by the middle of chapter three. The reason I suggest this is because the game's city is essentially one grand chemistry set.

Doing the right sidequests will make the game a pleasure... and makes it the most fun. The main thing you want to do is keep the Templars from over-running the city. If they do, you'll have a harder time getting through the city and the missions baked within the city without constant hassle from the authorities.

Keeping those Templars at bay is complex. Here's what you do: go to the six Templar Dens in the main, southern landmass of Constantinople. Hunt down the captains of those dens and light their signal towers. That will cause handy ziplines to be built in the region around the Den but, more importantly, will let you start recruiting assassins to your brotherhood. Those recruits can be summoned at any time in the game to help you in a fight, but what you want to do is to also dispatch them into the game's Mediterranean Defense strategy game, where you can assign them missions and level them up. Getting them to level 10 lets you go on a fun mission with each of them in Constantinople. It also lets you assign them to a Den and rank them up to level 15, at which time you get to go on another mission with them (these missions are good!) and, more importantly, locks the Den off from Templar incursion.

All of this is useful because, until the Den is locked off, the Templars will try to reclaim it. They'll attack if and when you commit enough suspicious or aggressive actions to fill an awareness meter atop the screen. You don't want to fill that meter up because it will put your Dens in jeopardy and because the tower defense mini-game you have to play to protect a Den isn't very fun. Get your folks to level 15 and so many of your problems are solved!

5) Collect Animus Fragments ASAP There are little sparkling cube-like things floating throughout Constantinople. You usually have to climb to get them. Listen for them. Turn on your eagle vision and scan for them. One way or another, grab them, even if you're in the middle of a mission. You want them for two reasons:

6) .... because they unlock the Desmond content The Desmond content in this game is good! And weird. (It's a first-person puzzle game). The Desmond sections fill in the guy's back story via some excellent voice-over by Nolan North. Not only are these sections increasingly entertaining, but they flesh out Desmond who is becoming an increasingly important character in the series. Soon enough, we'll probably play an Assassin's Creed that primarily stars him, so you better get to know the guy. There are 100 Animus fragments in the game world. You need 25 or 30 to unlock all five chapters. I did that early and played through Desmond chapters 2-5 in one sitting.

7) ... and because they get you a map. At 30 or so Animus fragments, you can buy a special map. That map you can get is for pages hidden throughout Constantinople by one of the city's elite assassins. You want that map, because it puts the locations for those pages on your in-game map so you can climb to them and grab them (you can't get the final page until you play through the game's fifth chapter, during which you gain access to the Arsenal district). You want those pages because they unlock access to the game's great hidden location level: the Hagia Sophia. And at the end of that level you'll get the coolest suit of armor you've ever been able to wear in the series.

8) Buy maps from bookstores Once you start renovating the city's bookstores, buy the treasure maps sold in them. These maps will clutter your map with icons of treasure chests. I'm not saying you should collect all of the chests, but, in the early going, being able to spot them and plunder them for money and bomb ingredients is very useful.

9) Use the bomb-testing option Once you learn how to craft bombs, use the option in the bomb-crafting interface to test them. This quick-loading test area will swiftly let you try out any of the game's overwhelming variety of customizable bomb types, letting you quickly toss one at or near enemy soldiers or civilians so you can see what the results will be. This testing mode will help you understand the nuances of the bomb system. It will make ACR's best new feature more useful, as you learn which kinds of bombs suit your play style.

10) Try to get 100% synch on all the missions Most of the missions in the game have secondary goals which usually ask you to be more stealthy by sticking to rooftops or not being detected. Completing that side-goal rewards you with 100% mission completion, rather than 50%. Always try to meet these goals as they will compel you to play the game more in the character of Ezio the assassin and less in the mode of ruckus-causing, system-exploiting gamer. Your rewards for clusters of perfectly-synched missions are game cheats, but that's a fake goal. They're irrelevant. Go for 100% synch to improve the mood.

11) Play the multiplayer, too Oh, yeah, that's pretty good, too.

Got any other questions about how to start the game? Ask me below. As for the game's ending, I'll get to that later this week.

(If you want to see some of the game's best new features, check out this video of Revelations highlights I captured off of my PS3 copy.)

Assassin's Creed: Revelations, the latest game in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series, releases tomorrow. As was mentioned in our "Yes" gut-check of the game, this is without a doubt the most "inside" Assassin's Creed yet.

Revelations concerns itself with wrapping up three games' worth of story, which has been told between three different characters—Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad, the assassin who starred in the first game, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, who starred in the next two and makes his final appearance in Revelations, and modern-day bartender Desmond Miles, who is actually the "main character" of the series. You see, Desmond relives the adventures of the two men in order to to learn more about a global Templar conspiracy that has been going on for untold years.

As you can tell from that tortured last paragraph, it's really, really complicated. And while understanding all of the smallest details and plot threads isn't integral to enjoying the game, it's fun to at least have a grasp of what's going on.

This video from Ubisoft does a pretty good job of catching folks up, though really, if you're brand new to the series, there's something to be said for backing up and playing last year's Brotherhood first. That said, it's still a fine breakdown of the events (if not the characters) leading into Revelations, and it sets up the new game nicely.

And it wouldn't be an Assassin's Creed video without a montage of wicked-awesome swordfighting kills, so it's got plenty of that, too.

At first glance, the new Assasin's Creed looks like the last two, just in a new city. Not quite.

Let me show you.

Assassin's Creed Revelations introduces some excellent tweaks and new ideas into the franchise's formula. I captured some of the best today from my PlayStation 3 copy of the game.

Check out the improved climbing, the better sites, the versatile new hookblade, the intensified action, the expanded assassin-training system and the two best new things in the game: 1) the surprisingly excellent bomb system and 2) the radical gameplay shift for the game's modern-day Desmond sequences.

I compressed it into 11 minutes (some compression, huh?). And I didn't even get to multiplayer. Or den defense. or other cool stuff. Give the video a look and you can see for yourself how much they've changed in this new game.

(The Desmond stuff is at the end, if you don't want to be spoiled. I warn you before it starts.)

With everybody from Mario to Saints Row scoring perfect 100s from game reviewers this season it's good to see a big-name title that bucks the trend. I suppose that doesn't apply if you're Ubisoft.

The Ezio saga finally comes to a close in Assassin's Creed Revelations, the third and final chapter of the series that kept getting announced instead of Assassin's Creed III. Fans will explore the ancient city of Constantinople, walk in the footsteps of the original Assassin's Creed's Altair, and finally put this puppy to bed so we can move onto a fresh setting, like New York City, Moscow, or ancient Egypt. As long as we've got handholds, we'll be happy.

But are game reviewers happy with the third installment of Italian-style exploratory killing? Not 100 happy, at least.

Yet it can't excuse everything. Assassin's Creed Revelations has been developed by six studios across three continents - and in a little over twelve months. It shows. Revelations' fractured campaign doesn't suffer from a lack of ideas, but the new inclusions either fail to add anything meaningful, or, in some cases, actively detract from the experience. You can't really blame Ubisoft for not trying here; there are plenty of new additions to deflect the common accusations hurled at yearly updates. You can, however, criticise the way in which these concepts have been integrated.

Destructoid
Revelations offers the same game as Brotherhood, but in a straitjacket and a new coat of paint. Gameplay-wise, it's still a fun, deep experience that any fan of the franchise will enjoy playing because it's not very different from what you're used to; you've just already played it last year, and the year before that. Ezio's final chapter in the franchise is a shadow of the past two games, and you realize how sorely you miss the "real-world" characters like Shaun when they do make an appearance for a few seconds. More importantly, there are just no great characters in Revelations.

The famous Piri Reis is far from a Machiavelli or Leonardo da Vinci and feels like a throwaway character, while Yusif, the leader of the Brotherhood in Constantinople, is just not interesting enough to care about. A female character inspired by one of Albrecht Durer's famous paintings acts as Ezio's love interest in the autumn of his life, but even she seems to be there just to make Ezio a little bit more human. That leaves Suleiman I, still the young scholar during the game's time frame, as the game's strongest support character, although his impact on Ottoman rule is mostly lost to all but those familiar with the period's history.

Telegraph
...the map is always covered in quest markers that vie for your attention. Recruiting soldiers is as much a part of the game as buying up property, perusing bookshops, acquiring art and renovating rundown parts of town, so much so that its easy to forget your primary job description. Even a Tower Defence minigame manages to make its way into this year's update, in which you protect threatened Assassin Strongholds from invading armies. The huge amount of content is generous, but the series has reached a tipping point where the distractions are now eroding the core.

And it's a strong core. Traversing the city is a joy, as it's always been, while the central premise that has you searching for five keys to unlock a door is reassuringly straightforward. Each key is located in a different dungeon, and these are the standout moments of the game; intricate, smart puzzles that mix platform design ingenuity with a purity of focus. Here, away from the hobbies of the outer city, the strengths of Assassin's Creed shine, adding to the sense that the copious embellishments are all filler, not killer.

GameSpot
Nevertheless, Revelations is as absorbing as its predecessors, because it's so much fun to move through Constantinople and other key areas. This is due in part to the world's sheer beauty. Deep golds and reds make a stroll through the grand bazaar a feast for the eyes, and famous landmarks like Hagia Sophia cut striking silhouettes against the night sky. Row a boat across a strait, and you marvel at the authentic wake that ripples behind. A mauve haze softens the horizon as day passes into night, and makes you keenly feel the passage of time—a thematically relevant effect, considering how conscious the older Ezio is of his mortality. Of course, previous Assassin's Creed games looked stunning too, but Revelations is no less impressive for it. Not that every detail is perfect: citizens still occasionally pop into existence before your very eyes, and you might spot a guard clipped halfway through a rooftop. But such quibbles hardly matter in a game this visually spectacular.

The other reason exploration is so joyous is that the simple act of moving from place to place is so satisfying. Animations remain superb. Ezio doesn't grab some unseen outcropping as he scales towers: he reaches for actual ledges and outcroppings, which makes his impossible acrobatics feel authentic. Climbing a tower reaching into the heavens, admiring the view, and then making a leap of faith into a hay bale hundreds of feet below is a delight, as it always has been. But Revelations expands the parkour aspect of the game by giving you use of a handheld hook. With this hook, Ezio can scale upward more quickly and glide down ziplines—and even assassinate rooftop guards as he skims past.

GameTrailers
The stab-or-be-stabbed multiplayer returns from Brotherhood with a few tweaks. Set inside the Abstergo templar training program, as you level up you unlock cinemas that give you some insight into the organization. Where you had to earn all your abilities before, you're given some right out of the gate this time. It doesn't help much, though. Higher level players have a distinct advantage—particularly in the team-based modes where things like invisibility give them a decided edge. There's a plethora of options including variants of deathmatch and capture the flag across nine different maps, but if the perks aren't ruining the good time it's the skill-free instant kills. It's a fun diversion, but it still feels like empty calories.

Strategy Informer
We really have been spoilt this year. With the release of Revelations, Ubisoft have finally turned their initial concept into a truly unmissable game. Pulling the narrative together alongside some vital gameplay additions, this is the best, most complete Assassin's Creed title to date. In the space of four years, the series has turned it's infantile expectation into a showing of maturity and extreme class. It seems the developers have grown up alongside their assassins, nurturing the series with enough confidence and pizazz to execute a top contender for game of the year

With the regularity of a flip of the calendar page, November brings us another Assassin's Creed, the fourth major console game in the series in four years. This year's edition is Assassin's Creed: Revelations.

More Ezio. More adventuring 500 years ago. More towers to climb and Templars to kill. They're pushing it, no? But maybe this game is worth your time…

Stephen Totilo, who enjoys this series a lot: This game starts badly. Actually, it's got problems even before it starts, because the sales pitch is that this game wraps up all of those unanswered questions you have about Assassin's Creed. If you don't have any questions—if you don't want to know why Desmond stabbed so-and-so or how a guy named Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad is connected to a dude named Ezio Auditore da Firenze—and if you wouldn't buy a game just for its multiplayer—then stay away. Far away.

This one is for the fans, the fans who might be happy to know that somehow Ubisoft's phalanx of Assassin's Creed studios have managed to make a game that is as stuffed with single-player content as last year's bursting AC: Brotherhood and has even more multiplayer options. You mostly play as an older but still nimble and deadly Ezio in 16th century Constantinople, exploring the most beautiful if topographically uninteresting city in the series. You also play occasional flashback missions as Altaïr and some very strange inside-the-computer-world missions as modern-day Desmond, whose consciousness has been fractured.

You have to have an appetite for the series' formula, established most successfully in 2009's Assassin's Creed II, to even tolerate Revelations. If you do—if you like climbing through an open-world city, taking on main story quests, tons of side missions, lots of stealth, acrobatics and assassination, the new game presents the most intoxicating version. I spent five consecutive hours yesterday ignoring the storyline in the campaign, because I was pulled into a loop of taking over sectors of Constantinople, recruiting and training assassins, sending those assassins on missions around the Mediterranean, and becoming such a master of the game's elaborate chemistry set that I had two minions ranked up to Level 15 Master Assassin before I hit a storyline mission that introduced the concept of training people to become Master Assassins. And the Desmond stuff… wow. It's very good, for once. Plus there's the wonderful stealth-based multiplayer, expanded this year to even include more lowbrow deathmatch options. This game starts rough with a Michael Bay-style first chapter that pretends the series if Call of Duty,. And the genius of the new bomb tools take a while to reveal itself. But this is no mere franchise-milking here. This game is, somehow, the real deal. Should you get it? Yes

What happens when bad-asses get old? They look back into history at the fates of other, long-dead badasses. Watch the latest trailer for the finale of Ezio Auditore's saga and see how UbiSoft plans on making the gray-bearded assassin go out with a bang.

Hollywood loves nothing so much as copying successes. It's how gladiator, vampire and zombie trends start to run amok. And now that historical action hybrids are all the rage—Sherlock Holmes, The Da Vinci Code, we're looking at you—there's apparently a rush on projects centered on Leonardo DaVinci. Slashfilm's got the scoop here.

In a way, the prototypical Renaissance Man could be a great polymath action hero. He may not have been a brawler but he invented amazing contraptions during a time of antiquarian tumult. That's enough for Tinsel Town. It's probably not a coincidence that these projects are finding traction at a time when the Assassin's Creed games have introduced Da Vinci to new audiences via a powerful entertainment medium. Now, if DaVinci's in the Assassin's Creed movie that's in development, then someone might have to call in the Templars.

Young Leonardo Da Vinci Action Movie ‘Leonardo' in Development at Universal [Slashfilm]

Whether it be Florence or Jerusalem, Vence or Tyre, Assassin's Creed has done a remarkable job of bringing cities to life. Constantinople is the lastest city to get the AC treatment.

This teaser trailer for the upcoming Assassin's Creed: Revelations shows life in Constantinople. It dazzles, just like the city it portrays.