It’s been a while since I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with an Assassin’s Creed game. I play them more out of weird interest in the series, than out of love or even liking anything they have to offer lately. They have good ideas, but usually fall flat at being actually interesting. I think last time I was genuinely invested in the AC game was with 3 – there was a truly great storyline, which devolved into crap, but had really strong themes. Black Flag and Rogue had some fun gameplay and Rogue wasn’t a complete flop as a story. Unity had potential to be the next AC1 – properly well done story driven stealth action adventure, but turned out to be a mess. Syndicate tries to be something like Brotherhood to Unity’s ideas. Tries is the key word here, though.
As with Unity, the game starts strong. Strongest in a long while, really. The truly great and long welcome changes and additions to controls from Unity are put to use here to make the intro work like an exciting and witty adventure of the Frye Twins, the two playable characters of this game, as they casually disrupt Templar activities in England countryside and wish to finally go for liberating London. It feels fluid, exciting, with updated combat now focusing on fist fighting or using sticks or knives, and is actually well written, easily engrossing in the atmosphere of 19th century Britain and getting you interested in the characters.
And, in the usual Assassin’s Creed fashion, this falls apart pretty quickly. You get to experience interesting varied things in the opening hours. And then they become the usual tedious side-activities you need to indulge in at least a few more times. Then get a hookshot which sounds exciting, but it makes the free running feel like a weird mix of really good parkour from Unity and awkward half working mix of ropes from Revelations and Batman: Arkham’s Grapnel gun. It also rarely works the way you’d want it to work when there are several spots it can latch onto around you and for some reason you cannot cancel the process mid-grapple.
The story almost seemingly stops as well. I mean, it is happening in the main missions, some of the characters even get some sort of character growth, but it’s nowhere near as well paced as the introduction. Rather it’s like watching a porno shot by a group of talented people who wanted to make some amazing story-driven tale but then remembered that they are making a porno and gave up. The story kind of remembers it exists in the ending missions, which actually try to get back to the original pace, as if 20 hours of boring stuff haven’t happened in between. And talk about events that were barely implied as if they happened and we were there to experience them.
It’s all made worse with this constant desire Ubisoft has to force the people from real history in some wacky way into the story. There are very few titles in the franchise that treat these people in a smart way, as something of an important background to the actual story, crossing paths with them, but not emphasizing them. And Syndicate is one of the worst examples so far, where you just casually hang out with several well known real people from history, who constantly act like idiots and get into “funny” and “wacky” situations. If you wish to suffer more of that, Gold edition includes several DLCs with that too.
Speaking of terrible misuse of people from history and Gold edition – Jack the Ripper DLC is terrible garbage. It takes a history page that could work well with a mystery or thriller, and turns it into a very predictable and honestly stupid comic-book battle. Jack the Ripper was an assassin, and controls a gang and is, in general, a supervillain and you battle him the same way you battle everything in the game, without any real detective work involved. It’s badly paced, badly written and isn’t worth the time.
Which is disappointing, because the main game contains (also as DLCs if you don’t own Gold edition, because Ubisoft) a series of crime investigations which are actually fun. Simplistic and at times badly paced and explained. And also misusing real people from history. But extremely fun nonetheless. Same goes for some other occasional “not the usual AC gameplay” activities that remind you the games were made by people who wish to develop something fun and exciting and weren’t constructed by a machine using a checklist.
Because, so much of the game is exactly like that. Like printing from the template we’ve seen times and times again, except occasionally with some new features involved. Usually, not the ones you’d actually want, but rather the ones that can make the game longer and can make you think about using microtransactions which are, of course, also part of the game. There’s the crafting, the crapton of weapons and other horrible crap that hasn’t really changed since Assassin’s Creed 2, but there are also levels now, which expand on the concept of the skillpoints from Unity. And of course you are prompted to buy the XP boosts and crafting materials with real money on all the screens those are involved. Of course they are.
And it’s such a damn shame, because the framework introduced in Unity still works so well. Take this engine, that looks stunningly good (when it doesn’t glitch, and that does happen), take all the types of activities and ideas that Ubisoft has come up with up until now, put it all in the original Assassin’s Creed and, if done right and with all unnecessary fluff removed, you get a 8-15 hour exciting stealth adventure, with amazing parkour, really cool social stealth mechanics, amazingly varied assassinations with multiple valid ways of doing it and actually good story. But, of course, that would mean removing busywork that might prompt people to spend money on microtransactions or whine that it doesn’t waste enough dozen of their time, so Ubisoft isn’t doing that. It made Syndicate.
I had high hopes when the game started. I thought – wow, maybe this time they don’t screw it up and make an Assasin’s Creed game, not a “Ubisoft’s big open world game 2015 number something”. But no, It’s exactly that, yet another Ubisoft game. Something to waste time while not really having any fun apart from occasional witty dialogue or cool missions. And really good looking London. Unless it’s your first Ubisoft game in several years, don’t even bother.
P.S. I actually tried to get the game for years now, but Ubisoft is still not selling non-Russian-only version in Ukraine, or even doesn’t allow a person from a different region to gift it. Gotta love the publishers with their own digital distribution platforms who have no idea how international digital distribution works.
P.P.S It’s a Ubisoft game, so it’s full of bugs and weird stuff and the performance, while better than in Unity, is still hardly good.