ASSASSIN'S CREED: SYNDICATE
- jackcooper98
- Jan 6, 2016
- 4 min read
Ladies and Gentlemen! We are Jacob and Evie Frye. As of this moment…You all work for us!
It seems weird, but the thing that first stood out to me when playing Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate wasn’t the utterly amazing graphics, or the brilliantly fun gameplay. It was the dialogue between twins Jacob and Evie Frye. It actually feels like sibling banter. It’s something that may sound odd, but believe me, it helps the player link with the two playable characters a lot.
Oh yeah, about those two playable characters… We have Jacob, the headstrong and punch-loving brother, and Evie, the stealthy and probably the smarter of the two. When Ubisoft announced Jacob would be, like almost every other character you can play as in the series, naïve and, well, a bit of an arsehole, I wasn’t really impressed. Thankfully though, I was pleasantly surprised with Syndicate’s male half of playability. Jacob is naïve, yes. But his arsehole-ness is actually quite likeable.
Evie, on the other hand, adds new life to the series. She’s not the damsel-in-distress like Elise was back in Unity. She’s a warrior, much like Jacob. She’s the smarter and the more concentrated of the pair.
The gameplay, for the first time, is shared between two ancestors. I was a bit sceptical about how, and how well this would work. Basically, each have the own missions, and each can play in what I call ‘shared missions’. When in free roam, you can switch between the two in just a couple of button presses. Each have their own skill sets and gear, which you will unlock and upgrade as you level up the game. At first playing as the two won’t feel very different, but as you level up and unlock their character-specific traits, you’ll start to feel the differences between brother and sister.
Gameplay itself is much like Unity’s when it comes to free-running, with the exception of the grapple hook, or whatever it’s called. You can use this to quickly scale buildings and create zip-lines over large gaps. It’s a pretty nifty tool to have. The other addition is the horse-drawn carriages, which while a good way to get around quickly, take some getter use to. They like to go all over the place. Combat is different from past games. It’s more brutal, and that’s clear to see. I’d say, to compare it to others, it’s like Unity’s the most, but instead of swords, you use knuckle dusters and knives. Since it’s yet again a new combat system, it takes some getting used to, but not long.
Ah yes, we have arrived at the location part. London, 1868. The height of the Victorian Era. London, like Paris in last year’s Unity, looks OUTSTANDING. The attention to detail is off the scale, and the familiar monuments we all know look perfect. The streets bustle with huge crowds, and you can see the varying levels of poverty as you move from one district to the next. I can’t stress how good the map is in this game.
The story is slightly different from past games, mostly due to the fact we have two playable characters. Jacob wants to take back London from the Templar-run Blighters Gang, and kill Templars in the process. Evie, on the other hand, wants to recover a new Piece of Eden from the Templars. That’s right. No more Sages or any of that crap. We’re back to good old Pieces of Eden. The story, unlike 3’s, 4’s and Unity’s wastes no time in setting up our characters as Assassins. From the moment the game starts, we’re part of the Order. But don’t expect it to be like the past. It’s gone…Underground.
The story, on the whole, is pretty good. You follow Jacob and Evie as they rid the city of London of the Templar order, led by the, shall we say, eccentric Crawford Starrick. Along the way you meet up with a lot of famous faces, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale to name a few. Jacob attempts to rid the streets of the Templar’s influence, whilst Evie searches for the Shroud of Eden, which is basically a magic flannel with power of eternal life. As the story goes on, and Jacob’s actions leave Evie clearing up the mess, the relationship between the two clearly begins to fracture. It’s actually….quite saddening.
On to the end. Let’s face it, that’s what you’re here for. Syndicate has three endings. I should know, I finished it about thirty seconds ago. Ending number 1: Jacob and Evie, after quite the boss fight, complete their mission and rid London of the Templars. They make up, and all is well in the world. Ending 2: Shaun and Rebecca’s team track down the Shroud and enter a bit of a scuffle with a Templar strike team that only makes sense if you’ve played Rogue. If not, just accept they’re bad news. The fight doesn’t exactly go well, and things are less hunky-dory. Ending 3: The interesting one. We are shown the inside of a Templar lab, were, using the power of the Shroud, the Templars plan to bring one of the First Civ (Juno, Minerva, etc.) back to life. In that moment, only one thought went through my head: If the Assassins get the Shroud….Desmond.
Rifts return too, but not like anything Unity’s hellish Rift missions had to offer. Instead, you play as Lydia Frye, Granddaughter of Jacob, in World War 1 London. Her missions are centralised to Tower Bridge and the area surrounding it, but all in all, they’re fun missions, and they also link with the modern day storyline as well. There isn’t much to the modern day storyline. Basically you play as an un-named character searching through the Frye twins’ memories, whilst Shaun and Rebecca (Hooray, they’re back!) track down a piece of Eden and escape the capture of some Templar Agents. Meanwhile, Juno is still hovering in the digital realm not doing much.
On the whole, Syndicate is definitely a return to form for the series. The story is back up to a level I had hoped for, and the gameplay is more fun than ever. Saying that, I still don’t know why they called it Syndicate. I was happy with the leaked title: Victory. And, with rumours the series may not return until 2017, we can only hope the series get even better again. It’s no AC2, but it certainly close.
8.5/10
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