Assassin's Creed : Syndicate Review

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is an upcoming historical action-adventure open world stealth video game being developed by Ubisoft Quebec and to be published by Ubisoft. It is set to be released on October 23, 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and on November 19, 2015 for Microsoft Windows. It is the ninth major installment in the Assassin's Creed series, and the successor to 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity.

For a series focused on history, Syndicate feels refreshingly free from Assassin's Creed's own. Plenty has already been written about Assassin's Creed Unity, last year's underwhelming entry in the series. The intense negative reaction upon Unity's initial release lingered through its slow cycle of post-launch patches, to the extent that the game's season pass was cancelled and its major add-on was offered free as a result. The whole episode left such an impact on the franchise that any discussion about Assassin's Creed must currently acknowledge it, and any expectations for Syndicate's subsequent trip to Victorian London must be matched up to what came before. Thankfully, after Syndicate, I think Assassin's Creed can finally move on.

The story follows twins Jacob and Evie Frye (the first playable female protagonist in the series) as they navigate the corridors of organized crime during the Victorian era and fight against the established order, controlled by the Templars. The game retains the series' third-person open world exploration as well as introducing new traveling systems and refined combat and stealth mechanics. Ubisoft has confirmed that Syndicate does not feature any form of multiplayer gameplay.  In 1868, at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, with the Assassin Brotherhood all but eradicated, twins Jacob (Paul Amos) and Evie Frye (Victoria Atkin) leave Crawley for London and arrive to find a city controlled by the Templars, with both the Church and the Monarchy losing their power. Raised as Assassins to follow the Creed, Jacob and Evie aim to take back the city from Templar control by infiltrating and uniting London's criminal underworld, aided by notable figures of the era such as novelist Charles Dickens, biologist Charles Darwin, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Nurse Florence Nightingale, Duleep Singh (the last maharajah of the Sikh Empire), and Queen Victoria, How cool is that???

And yes, the two protagonists have different attributes, male lead Jacob Frye is meant to be more of a hot-headed brawler, specialized in close combat, while his twin sister Evie is strong in stealth and relies on her intelligence and wit. The Assassins' main weapons this time around include brass knuckles, a compact revolver, a cane sword and the traditional Nepalese curved kukri knife and combat is faster-paced than before with latency having been cut in half and multiple enemies attacking the player at once. Additionally new travelling systems make their debut in the game, such as a rope launcher which allows the player to rappel up structures as well as create a zip-line between buildings, and carriages, which can all be piloted or simply occupied by the player, and trains. The rooftops of moving carriages can also be the setting of fights and parkour chases. Side missions in the game have also been designed to reflect the fight for power in London and are cohesive to the main story of the game. Players can also kidnap enemies for ransom then put them inside horse carriages and take them to a drop-off point.  There's no bolted on multiplayer mode or any co-op options. It doesn't have any connections to a broken web service. It doesn't require you to play a companion app to acquire everything in the game. It's like a human being actually sat down to design a game with the simple requirement that it felt fun, rather than it being a £50 experience designed by a committee to link up a web of interconnected transmedia nodes. It's a huge relief, i guess.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to play a game that’s set in London. Building on the glorious graphical prowess of Assassin’s Creed Unity, Syndicate betters it, bringing with it an atmospheric and dynamic day/night cycle and the possibility for the heavens to open on you mid-way through a mission – well, they couldn’t make a game in London without rain now could they? The game’s events will span seven London boroughs on a map that’s approximately 30% larger than Unity’s. Some of these boroughs you’ll be very familiar with, some perhaps not so much. Of course, there’s Whitechapel, Westminster and The City, but there’s also Southwark and with it the huge Waterloo train station. As with Assassin’s Creed Unity, you can see the levels of poverty change and fluctuate as you move around the city, giving you an indication as to which parts of London you’re in without having to check the map. 
Syndicate's new grappling hook which is a brazen but welcome lift from Rocksteady's Arkham games , streamlines your rooftop exploration and stretches it out over vast distances. It works as a faster connection between two buildings during a chase - there's no need to find a rope linking rooftops or climb down from your stalking zone when tracking targets. Assassination missions become cat and mouse affairs where you can zip in and out of sight, losing your pursuers only to drop down and silently snuff out another. Then there are the carriages. A huge part of traversal in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is that you can hijack horse and carriages GTA-style, kicking their drivers from their perches to take them as your own. Vehicles have been well integrated into the game's various other systems too, acting as a refuge from pursuers, a mobile firing platform for a shoot out with adversaries, a police box for bundling captured goons and a source of income if you opt to enter yourself in races or steal other vehicles in heists. 

Side-missions and objectives have been restructured to give you more reasons to engage with them. Many are now tied to the game's bulging cast of historical characters, meaning you get to hang out with great people such as Dickens, Darwin, Nightingale, Marx and a young Conan Doyle. Many contacts now have reputation gauges with tiers of powerful rewards - new gear and schematics - which unlock if you continue to engage with their quests. Other open world activities now calm individual areas of the map's half dozen main boroughs, slowly pushing back Templar influence until you trigger a boss for final control, making London a real fight to completely conquer. Stealth is, more than ever, very key in the way that you come at missions in Syndicate. Enemies are a lot quicker to spot you and hunt you down than they have done previously, meaning that you’ll need to watch where and when you make your move and when you do find yourself facing a pack of police officers, or the Blighters, you’ll quickly realise that combat has been ramped up a notch. Enemies now have a level indicator above their heads, which will let you know just how difficult they’ll be to tackle head-on.

  Assassin's Creed : Syndicate's legacy is its memorable cast of characters, its entertaining script and - most importantly - how it manages to recapture the series' sense of fun. Its success is a proof to the work of Ubisoft Quebec, which was in charge of its first Assassin's Creed game at a pretty precarious point for the series. Thankfully, it delivers.