[rwp-review id=”0″]
It’s a beautifully sunny day in London (a rare occurrence even in video games) and I take Evie Frye – one of the protagonists – down for a stroll. At the corner of the block is a bar, with a collectible beer bottle inside highlighted on my map. In the same building complex, I can see two treasure chests, a “Helix glitch” collectible, and a collectible poster. At the very corner of the mini map, I see the outline of a collectible pressed flower. The middle section of my mini map is big, red area with a Templar’s symbol inside, indicating a mini-mission. The mini map shows me a tiny fragment of the city of London – no more than 50 metres – and yet there is much to do.
So much for enjoying a nice day out in the sun.
This description of the mini map has become almost synonymous with Ubisoft’s approach to Assassin’s Creed games, a gameplay mechanic philosophy that has proliferated into its other IPs. For better or worse (in many ways, the latter), Assassin’s Creed Syndicate feels immediately familiar, yet has its own unique charm that distinguishes itself from the rest of the series very much like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Black Flag before it.
Syndicate takes place in industrial revolution, 1868 London. Crime and corruption run amok in the streets; organised crimes and gang wars are rampant, and key city offices have been overtaken by the Templar Order, taking advantage of the crimes and corrupting the government to further its own agenda. It’s a setting that is familiar to the series; what is unique, though, is that this time you get two assassins to play with, and an antagonist who is genuinely worth your while.
Evie and Jacob Frye are assassins from the start, so the story wastes no time with the initiation and rites of passage process that has plagued previous titles. You don’t spend the first few hours in helping your characters finding their true purpose. As soon as you begin the game, you know what you need to do.
Both Evie and Jacob are fully realised characters and are absolutely likeable. Evie is the stoic sibling. She’s pragmatic, righteous, and has a laser-focus agenda in finding the Piece of Eden that is hidden in London. She’s out to save the Creed and the true purpose of the assassins. She’s also incredibly loveable and has her sweet moments – you can immediately tell that she’s been raised into this role and feels the need to fulfil her duty and purpose, and you cannot but oblige. Jacob has other plans, however; he’s arrogant and mostly nonchalant about the whole Pieces of Eden thing. He has more grounded goals of liberating London from the corruption running it and in forming his own gang. She’s the assassin; he’s the street fighter. You will identify with one more than the other, but it is hard to dislike either.
Equally fully realised is the beautiful city of London. It’s mind-boggling in scale, and is rendered beautifully. It’s also one of the most depressing settings in Assassin’s Creed – the bulk of the city is dirty and grey. The day-night cycle and weather system add to the realism and immersion, and this unfortunately does include a lot of rain and gloom, accentuating the depressive, industrial look of the city. When you’re on rooftops, plumes of smoke rise in the sky; at ground level, streets are full of machinery, homeless people trying to keep warm, and puddles of rainwater that are telling of impending cold and plague. When it’s bright and sunny, it’s an absolutely beautiful and refreshing city. The streets are full of people going around their business, and often things happen organically for you to engage in, like a thief who steals something whom you can tackle, or beating up thugs giving some poor chap a hard time. London is just gorgeous even if it’s depressing, and the soundtrack is superb – it’s a shame that most of the music you hear is when you’re climbing or descending a viewpoint or during a fight or as missions start and end. I wished there was a more persistent ambient score.
You’re free to traverse this massive city as either characters outside of missions. Switching between the two can be done on the fly practically anywhere on the map, and you can explore every nook and cranny of London with either of them. Initially, their skill set compliments their personalities; Evie starts off with more stealth points in the stealth skill tree at her disposal, and Jacob’s more with brunt. It’s unfortunate, however, that their overall skill set is 95% identical. Aside from two or three skills that are unique for each, they share the same skill tree. In the initial part of the game, this overlap is not as pronounced as you invest in either extreme. The more you explore, though, and the faster you unlock the rest of the skill sets and the quicker this uniqueness of each character diminishes, making the character choice in open-world exploration a matter of whose butt you want to tail.
Ubisoft completely failed to capitalise on this opportunity of having the two characters play differently. Missions are specific to each character, though, so the story plays out from their perspectives. It’s refreshing to play a mission where you have to assassinate an official as Jacob, and then look for a Piece of Eden as Evie. The repercussions from their missions eventually intertwine later on, bringing both characters into a family feud. It’s quite fun to see both quip and bicker and take jabs at each other, and you slowly see the rift developing between the two which takes interesting turns by the end.
The missions themselves are your standard Assassin’s Creed checklist, with some different elements to spice things up. In essence, missions are broken down into escorting, kidnapping, stealing, and of course killing. Each mission introduces some caveats for a “full synchronisation” – for example, a mission that involves investigating a certain crime and hiding evidence presents the added option of not killing any police on patrol. You can choose to ignore those challenges, but they provide the necessary difficulty and makes the best of each mission. Sneaking through the entirety of the mission undetected to get you that extra tick mark is thoroughly more satisfying than just fighting your way through. Major assassinations give you a multi-layered approach as well. You can go straight for the kill (and massacre your way through), or you can follow different routes, such as investigating people, stealing keys to unlock shortcuts, or using NPCs for secret access or a unique kill. Missions are thrilling, so it’s a shame that most of them are quite short.
In between missions, you’re free to explore London, and this is when the best and worst of the Assassin’s Creed franchise comes into play. On the positive side, the secondary missions in Syndicate are engaging and interesting. London is host to a plethora of quirky characters, including Dickens, Darwin, Bell, and Marx. They each have their own story missions which I do recommend you play and finish. For starters, they break the monotony of the negative aspect of the game (more on that later), and as you help them achieve their goals, you gain their loyalty. As your loyalty goes up, they reward you with unique weapons, armour, and crafting items to unlock other weapons, gauntlets, capes, and belts for your characters. What’s better than the material reward, though, is that these missions are usually different than your standard Assassin’s Creed. You hunt ghosts for Dickens and collect weird things for Darwin and sabotage plans for them. They’re fun and entertaining. Another unique set of missions is Dreadful Crimes. It’s a PS4 exclusive DLC which has you investigate crimes in London. They are well thought-out, each involving interrogating different suspects, finding, clues, and finally having to resolve the case. It’s Sherlock Holmes meets Assassin’s Creed, and in the limited context it’s in, it works. When you finish the game completely, a new set of missions unlock as well.
Other missions that pop up include plenty of escorting services — whether people or carriages with plenty of loot. You can also raid trains for treasure, sabotage counterfeit shipments on the Thames, and of course spend inordinate amounts of time finding every single collectible in the game. You also get “community missions”, which are identical to those filler missions but earn you extra loot and experience points. Each borough also has its own fight club which you can participate in. Overall, the city of London has no shortage of things to do. The only issue is that aside from the main missions and the secondary character missions, everything else seems to exist just to have you spend more time in the game.
This all makes Syndicate seem like the awesome Assassin’s Creed people have been waiting for – and in many ways, it is – but the main issue with the game is repetitiveness. You see, London is divided into boroughs, and each one more or less plays the same. Main missions involve stalking and assassination, but they are at least story-driven. Most of what takes place in each borough, though, involves liberating children from labour camps, killing a few templar leaders, and kidnapping a templar to escort him or her via carriage to a destination. It’s fun in the beginning, and the way you come about them is mostly organic. They do appear on your mini-map and you can mark the location, but simply by traversing the different neighbourhoods you’ll most likely stumble upon these on your way. Once you clear the neighbourhood of these nuances, the rival gang leader shows up and you engage in a gang war. Victory grants you full control of the neighbourhood, making main missions and side missions that involve escorting much easier, since rival gang members will be significantly reduced. Unfortunately, by the third neighbourhood this gets very old – particularly where you have to kidnap and escort in a carriage. At the end of the game, coupled with the rest of the fillers I talked about, I had absolutely no energy to even bother and just wanted to get the main story over and done with without having to free the neighbourhood (I did kill the gang leader, though, who showed up at one point).
The map is just so full of filler missions and collectibles (Helix glitches, pressed flowers, beer bottles, posters, envelopes, and music boxes) for completionists, but really don’t add much to the gameplay at all. You still need to climb viewpoints as well, although their number is much less and vertically traversing the environment has become much easier thanks to the grappling hook – the best and much needed mechanic in the franchise. It makes the environment much easier to navigate and London a joy to explore.
And if you’re all wondering about the present-day universe setting of the series, it’s only present in the very beginning and the very end of the game. Ubisoft might have as well completely ditched it. I fail to understand why that aspect of the game is force-fed. The way the whole “Animus” story has been introduced in the original Assassin’s Creed has been a disaster and ever since it has stuck with the series, making little to no sense and completely disengaging people from the main story. In Syndicate, it’s introduced as the opening and closing sequence of the game when the game should have started without the confusing intro and the credits should have rolled sooner than that horribly laughable ending. Rest assured, though, that Evie and Jacob’s story does start and end in a great way. It’s unfortunate the Ubisoft is adamant on keeping story elements that no longer need to exist, since they themselves struggle to explain it.
Ubisoft also needs to reconsider their approach to the gameplay mechanics of the series. Once can argue that a franchise like Super Mario always involves star-hunting and any Zelda game almost invariably has a forest temple, but for a series to remain successful after nearly a decade, there needs to be change. Just as Black Flag breathed new life into the series, the next installation needs to do something that is drastically different than introducing a new city and dividing it into sections where you have to climb viewpoints and repeat the same gameplay elements across the entire map.
What makes Assassin’s Creed Syndicate successful is how the two protagonists play out together in an engaging story with a solid supporting cast. Strip away this and you’re left with a game that has been recycling near-identical game mechanics for the better part of the past eight years.
