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.
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.