Assassin's Creed Syndicate

So this is probably the newest game I’ve played in a very long time and the first of my Christmas 2015 collection to hit the completed list (this shows how far behind I am with reviews.)

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate shows that sometimes developers do actually listen to people that buy their games. There is no multiplayer that, in my opinion, has blighted the franchise since Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Blighted might be harsh but it’s certainly an unnecessary addition to the franchise.

Syndicate follows the story of Jacob and Evie Frye, two already established assassins who travel to London to thwart the plans of Crawford Starrick, a Templar Grand Master who is after the Shroud, another piece of Eden. There is also some modern world framing but you are required to a lot less during these sections that you were in Rogue and Black Flag, let alone the stuff you had to do with Desmond Miles. They are basically just cut scenes now. I’m not sure if this is a good thing. I kind of enjoyed having an interaction with the modern world but I guess not everyone else felt the same.

It’s graphically and musically excellent, I have to say. The only real criticism here is that the generic guards repeat their lines a lot and they are all overly aggressive for no real reason. While this isn’t so much of an issue for the first few hours, as with all Assassin’s Creeds if you are playing it to completion, you will be playing until it’s insufferable.

The gameplay is also strong. Another piece of feedback on franchise seems to be that having to climb buildings all the time was boring after you’ve done it 100 times. Quite early on in the game you are given a grappling hook which makes getting across the city and up the tallest buildings a piece of cake. It real terms, this cuts at least 10 hours off of a full completion, if not more.

However, it does do the standard Assassin’s Creed thing of introducing three or four new items to kill people with, which is all very blah. The most notable thing about the game, and the franchise in general, is that we have almost moved completely away from the stealth element of being an Assassin. If you are spotted by guards, in most circumstances you can kill your way out of trouble and once there is a big pile of corpses, no one seems to care. And can you blame them? Who in their right mind would take on either of these two when they can singlehandedly massacre a small army and walk away like nothing happened?!

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 56 Achievements

I managed to get this done, including DLC, in just over 60 hours. There’s a lot of random crap that you have to do that mostly goes towards your 100% completion so I won’t go into too much detail about collectibles and story missions as the collectibles get marked on the map and if you bought the game, why would you not do the story missions as a minimum?

There are also the side missions and the standard, ‘get full sync in the main missions,’ but Syndicate does what Unity did and doesn’t actually require you to get the full 100% sync for the game. Syndicate goes one further than Unity though as it doesn’t require you to get all of the chests spread across the landscape of London.

For the random achievements though, there are a few things you have to do which make you go well off the beaten track. The two most notable are for shooting 50 enemies before they shoot at you and destroy 5,000 destructible objects in a carriage.

There is supposedly a counter shoot function that can be used to make shooting the 50 enemies easier but this hardly worked for me and I ended up doing a lot of them manually. The carriage one is an absolute fuck ass though. I’m guessing that the only reason it’s an achievement is because they introduced the carriage driving as the main game play gimmick and they will make you use it and use it a lot! I was actively trying for this for most of the game and only unlocked it at the end.

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC which is actually quite cool. It takes place several years after the events of the main game and sees Evie try and hunt down Jack the Ripper who is portrayed as a misguided assassin. There are seven achievements to go with it which see you use new skill sets to instil fear into your enemies, and complete a new set of missions.

The bizarre thing is there is an achievement for getting 100% sync in the DLC, not the game as before. I’m not really sure why but it was quite fun so I was happy to do everything anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is a very safe game that doesn’t push any major boundaries of the franchise and goes a little bit further by appearing to deliver on feedback given by the fans of the series. Getting rid of the multiplayer made this a very enjoyable completion. Ubisoft have announced this will be the last main stream Assassin’s Creed for a while and it’s a good memory to leave behind.