Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection (Xbox One)

I keep coming back to one question whenever a remaster collection lands on Xbox: who actually needed this, and did Ubisoft serve them well? For the Ezio Collection, the answer splits almost perfectly down the middle depending on whether you've played these games before. Three titles are bundled here - Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations - tracing Ezio Auditore da Firenze from a reckless Florentine nobleman all the way to a grey-haired mentor in Constantinople. That arc is genuinely one of the better character journeys in action-adventure history, and the sheer volume of content (reportedly around 80 hours when you factor in all the included single-player DLC) makes the package look generous on paper. The gameplay across the trilogy is classic pre-parkour-overhaul Assassin's Creed: freerunning across Renaissance rooftops, counter-heavy swordfighting, and social stealth built around blending into crowds. AC II introduced the dual hidden blade, a money economy for buying weapons and armor, and the villa upgrade system at Monteriggioni - mechanics that felt fresh at the time and still give the game a satisfying loop. Brotherhood adds the recruitable Assassin Brotherhood mechanic, where you can call in trained operatives mid-mission for kills or distractions, which adds a light strategy layer. Revelations wraps things up in Ottoman Constantinople and leans harder into hookblade traversal and a bomb-crafting system. None of these are complex by modern standards, but they layer on top of each other across the trilogy in a way that rewards playing all three in order. The honest caveat is that this is more re-release than ground-up remaster. The graphics received improved lighting, textures, and post-processing, and the visual leap is uneven across the three games. Revelations fares best and looks genuinely clean; AC II shows its age the most, with some character models that look rough even after the touch-up. The HD work was handled by Virtuos rather than the original development team, and it shows in places. More significantly, the multiplayer modes from Brotherhood and Revelations - genuinely inventive competitive modes where players hunted each other through crowds - were stripped out entirely. If you have fond memories of those modes, they are gone. For newcomers to the series or players who grew up on the RPG-style modern AC games (Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage) and want to understand where the franchise came from, this collection holds up as a worthwhile history lesson. The storytelling and music have aged much better than the controls, and Ezio remains one of the most charismatic protagonists in Ubisoft's back catalogue. Veterans replaying for nostalgia will find the experience functional but unpolished - Ubisoft did the minimum to get these titles onto current hardware without meaningfully rethinking the quality-of-life gaps that have opened up over a decade of genre evolution. Xbox 360 saves do not carry over either, so any prior progress starts fresh.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection (Xbox One).