Assassin's Creed has got to be the only game in existence whose movement becomes less interesting after implementing a grappling hook. How is that even possible? Syndicate is such a dull and monotonous slog, I can't help but think that this is the exact experience that comes to mind for people who aren't that familiar with this series and just assume all the games suck. Do not play this. If you want to give Assassin's Creed an honest chance, play the Ezio trilogy instead. They aren't representative of what AC has become but those games are everything Syndicate wishes it could be.

As stated in my first review I started playing this game a long while ago as my first entry to the AC universe, but shelved it mid-game - (a) because I felt that the game was getting repetitive and not too much fun anymore and (b) because I felt I understood too little from the background story to really play this game just for its story.

After playing through AC1 - Unity some years later I finally unshelved this one and attempted a replay.

Syndicate is already the ninth entry in this series, and uses the same engine as its predecessor, which makes its gameplay similarly fun - parkour is at its best, the fighting works perfectly as well, and we get a couple of new mechanics.

In the modern day, we are still the same character as the last game - the Assassin's new "Initiate". And again, modern day story is mostly consistent of inbetween cut scenes, containing Shaun, Rebecca and Bishop - and not much more. Our goal is to - once more - locate a powerful piece of Eden, this time by experiencing the memories of the Frye siblings Jacob and Evie who in 1868 recapture London, which by then is totally under Templar control. But though they are twins, they couldn't be any more different: While Evie is interested in gaining knowledge and collecting artifacts and steeling from the Templars what they seek and what they believe makes them powerful, Jacob is more interested in liberating the people to form gangs and actively fight the Templars (and other oppressors) with cheer power while building up a mob-like structure. Thus there is a lot of struggle between those two and some missions will require you to play Evie, while others are only playable by Jacob. Both characters get some unique abilities and both of them are leveled separately and have their own gear and clothing, making this game a two-character assassins game. Outside of missions we are free to choose whom we want to play for all the side missions or just exploring, and can easily switch between the characters. The real fun - however - is when both of them work together, and this is apparent the most in the final mission where we get to switch the roles inbetween the missions back and forth. Here you can see and feel the strength of having two characters with a different set of abilities work together; unfortunately - and this is my biggest downside - its only fully used here. The rest of the game you rather feel forced to use one or the other for the missions; and outside of the missions you probably just pick one of them and play the whole game with that character - here it depends if your playstyle is more sneaky (Evie) or openly aggressive (Jacob).

Story-wise both Characters are fun to play - each has their own character and then have a wonderful chemistry amongst themselves and their team that consists of Henry Green (Head of the London Assassin's) and Agnes MacBean (train conductor), and their associates, that consists of Alaxander Graham Bell, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Frederick Abberline and even Queen Victoria. The tone of the game contrasts the ear - while everything is poverty struck and people fend for their lives, everything is humorist and and comic. All in all the stories and situations are some of the most fun in the entire series.

Gameplay-wise we get a couple of new mechanics; three of which revolve around movement: There is the rope-launcher which lets us catapult up high buildings and zipline inbetween buildings that gives us a new and really fast way of moving and escaping and therefore makes traditional parkour necessary - you'll rather swing from buildings than try to find the perfect jumping and climbing opportunities. Then there is riding a train. Trains move through London all the time and even your headquarters is an ever circling train. This lets you with your locations in mere seconds and as you need to be on the train to switch characters or accept new (side)missions, you'll often be there and just wait for the perfect stop or location to jump of your train. But you can easily also just use other trains to ride along. And then there is the ability to anywhere just hijack a carriage. There are different carriages around, some more stable (but slow), and some much faster (but also more brittle and prone to fall over if you cut corners too fast). Also a lot of missions revolve around carriages, and there is a whole series of side missions that consist of carriage races. Besides carriage races there is also a side mission series consisting of fight clubs, and one addition to the fighting system is the ability to chain different attacks with each other making them either faster and/or more effective or allow you to include multiple enemies - there are even a lot of achievements for, e.g. for longest chain or including the most enemies in a chain of uninterrupted hits, and these are actually pretty challenging to manage.

The missions again do have opportunities, however they are not as elaborate and freely to chose from as in Unity. In syndicate they feel more streamlined and not as free - but again you are rewarded with additional cut scenes and exceptional kill animations that always are more fun to do than your standard procedure would be.

While we have our main mission and side-missions with different personalities, there is also the territorial battle, and here's where things get rather repetitive and dull:

In order to proceed with a territory, you need to do different tasks in that territory:

- Hunt Templars, by identifying them and killing them
- Liberate children that are forced to work in factories
- Liberate strongholds of the rival gang by killing all the members, burning some flags and/or liberating own captured gang members
- Fullfill some bounty hunts for the police by identifying and following a criminal, incapacitate them and drive them to the police.
Bounties

Once all these are done there is the possibility to kill the Gang Leader of the territory, and after that follows the gang war where you need to kill more enemy gang members than they can kill yours.

Once all this is done, you rinse and repeate with the next territory. And you have to, because to proceed in the main story you need to capture the territories. And there are 18 Bounty Hunts, 11 Child Liberations, 12 Gang Strongholts, 18 Templar Hunts and 7 Gang wars, each with the same cut scenes, etc. This kind of grind is nothing new to Assassin's Creed players, but after coming from Unity it feels like a giant step back. And that is what's the biggest downside for me.

And that's what really bothers me; the world building is beautiful, the connection to history and historic characters is really fun and the twins are wonderful lovable characters. The story is okey, but especially the end was really beautiful and heartwarming; and yet - if you try to get it to 100% you feel like there is a lot of content that feels like doing chores rather than having fun. Which is why I cannot rate it along side games like Unity or Black Flag, who - even though they also had this repetitiveness, felt less annoying over all.

That being said, all in all it is a game that is worth your time and that, story and gameplay wise can easily hold up with the other games in the series that are rated better.

We again get an anomaly that will bring us to one of the World Wars, this time however it's the first one, and we get to play Lydia Frey, granddaughter of Jacob, who works for Churchill and eliminates German spies (that are backed by the Templars) in the heart of London. This also was quite fun to play and I really liked the Lydia character; it's a shame that for this kind of added content the characters stay really shallow.

Then there are also three DLCs which are really fun to play. "The Dreadful Crimes" and "The Last Maharaja" are add-ons to the map and can be played while playing the main story, and where included in the game I bought. "Jack the Ripper" feels to Syndicate as "Liberation" (which wasn't even a DLC) felt to Assasisin's Creed III (plus it wasn't included in the standard editions of Syndicate that I own, so I had to buy it separately and only played it after [Origins], which is why I'll include that one in an separate review.)

PS: And just because I mentioned it in my first attempts review - after playing a bunch of these, AC Syndicate doesn't feel any harder than any other AC game, and actually the entire series is quite accessible, even for casual players.

this game is... meh.
i found it extremely enjoyable just exploring the city, but the main quests are... boring to say the least.
it feels like Ubisoft was too scared to have a female protagonist so they made Jacob. he is such a bore to watch and play as.
i enjoyed the side quests a lot more.
customization is fun as always

In my youth I wasn't too much into third person games like Assassin's Creed but more into strategical games like Command and Conquer, Star Craft, Warcraft or Age of Empires.

So while hearing about Assassin's Creed, I never had the motivation to try it out myself. This changed, when I saw the "Assassin's Creed" movie in 2016; a lot of people - especially players of the series - hated it, for its lack of certain elements. But I was so intrigued by the premises of the world, and the idea to relive history, that I was then and there considering to try out the game. So after watching the movie, I looked up the current game of Assassin's Creed and it was Syndicate. I looked up it if was a good starting point to the series and what it was about, and was even more intrigued as it played in Victorian London - and I both, love London (one of my most favorite European cities), as well as the Victorian era.

I got a cheap PC version of the "Rooks Edition" and started playing the game, but soon run into a couple of obstacles:

1. For someone who hasn't played this kind of games in a long while, this game was really hard to get into. I especially remember a tailing and chasing mission, where you are on the rooftops jumping from point to point, executing any shooters on the way, while having to stay in reach with your target, that got me frustrated for a long time.

2. While marketed for PCs (and therefore should be able to being played with mouse and keyboard), I had to do incredible finger acrobatics on the keyboard. This let me to actually buy a XBox controller, which made the rest of the game a much smoother and more enjoyable experience

3. While the immediate story was generally fun to play and follow, I especially had a problem to understand the overall story. Who exactly are those Templars, what are they trying to achieve; and what the hell where all those "modern-day" scenes in-between? There was this weird drone - and these two people, and someone attacking them, but why? What's this all about?

This is, when I decided mid-game (and in parts because I felt it was getting more and more repetitive), to stop this game and shelf it. I was so much intrigued in all of this that I wanted to understand the entire world and mechanics of the game, and only return to it, once I catched up with the lore. I was considering reading everything on Wikipedia or watching the entire story on YouTube, but in the end I didn't, and instead went the hard way: Catching up with the games, starting with the original Assassin's Creed.

The past is MY playground, bitch!

REBECCA'S BACK!!

That "press X" screen being as good as Rogue's is like Gordon Ramsey when he's starting too cook some good fucking food.

Another that starts you off as an Assassin from the very beginning? I smell a masterpiece.

I love how the cinematic after assassinations is like in the first game. They even do the feather thing except it's a handkerchief.

Also, train levels are the best, and starting this game with one is promising.

This is my dream Assassin's Creed game. Victorian England with a female protagonist.

I can't believe that it's taken this long to have a main game installment with a female protagonist. But even then, she can't be the only protagonist.

I adore how they're literally speaking English, but the subtitles still translate certain words to non-slang English.

Characters are better written and more memorable than in Unity.

I feel like street enemies are less of a problem and take longer to go to the attack. Thank fuck. And with upgrades, they just won't.

And I LOVE the score.

Entering through windows is a lot easier than in Unity. Like, it actually works.

I feel like I'm more in control of the traversal in general.

Basically, everything is Unity, if Unity worked.

I've hated the idea of the grapple hook since I heard about it, but once I saw the wide streets of London, I understood, and I didn't even know you could use them as a zipline, and this game is so much fucking fun.

And, listen, I like swords, but going around absolutely fucking people up with a cane is just superior.

And the gang and territory element is fire.

It's like Need For Speed: Carbon if you murdered all the rivals.

I love how they basically give you free reign to go through the territories in whatever order you like, but that they still give you a recommended order.

The structure is fucking fantastic. I fucking love it. How the twins go off in different directions each sequence and God this game is so fucking good. It makes the sequences actually feel like separate sequences.

The gang missions are challenging enough to make you stop and think about your approach, but still just straight fun enough to make you want to do them perfectly, with the bonus objectives, and easy enough where you KNOW that you can do it.

Even the box opening animation is way faster and better, which is such a small thing, but makes the experience so much better.

I don't love the Thames, but I love that getting across it is just Frogger.

Side activities are an absolute BLAST. The fight clubs are fun as all hell. And all the London Stories side missions are intriguing and have characters that I actually enjoy, and remember. Even in Revelations and 2, games I consider masterpieces, the side-missions truly feel like side-missions that are just slapped in there to pad out what you can do. Here, in Syndicate, they legitimately just are a part of the game. They feel like a part of the world that you actually want to play to completion.

The Dreadful Crimes are killer. I only did a single murder mystery in Unity because it was so deadly boring and having to actually walk all the way over to the crime scene was murder, but this is just so good. And the last mission blew my mind.

And do not—DO NOT—even get me fucking started on the Lydia Frye shit. Absolute masterpiece!

Load times on console are a bitch, though. If the load times were better, I would have zero problems with this game. The more frustrating sections are only frustrating because every time you die, you have to wait 30 seconds before you can try again.

When it comes to story and characters, while it's probably not my absolute favorite, it's definitely in the top 3. Rogue and Revelations are still just such peak stories. But if I had to choose an Assassin's Creed to play at any time, or could only play one for the rest of my life, this is it. 100%.

This is the only Assassin's Creed where I've bought any DLC. And I've bought every DLC.