I didn’t play Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (Syndicate from here onwards) when it came out in 2015. It came up at a discount on the Xbox game store at $11.99 a couple of weeks ago during all the ‘Black Friday’ noise, and I decided to give it a try.
I’ve played about 20 hours of Syndicate so I got my money’s worth, but I likely won’t be finishing it. It isn’t a bad game, just not good enough to hold my attention. And it reminds me why I got bored with the Assassin’s Creed series back in the day.
Combat
Syndicate takes the stealthy assassination concept of combat from earlier entries in the series and adds… guns and fisticuffs? This kind of makes sense as the setting for the game is 19th century London, and ignoring guns would be an odd choice. But mechanically it doesn’t work very well.
The biggest failure of the combat changes in my opinion is that the guns are almost comically useless. The fact is that 19th century firearms were quite advanced and more than a little deadly. Yet a foe can block a bullet at point-blank range by holding up their arms in the same way they do to block a punch… the believability is stretched beyond the breaking point.
Additionally there seems to be no such thing as a one shot kill. I found that it would generally take multiple gunshots to kill an opponent even from stealth, but I could easily kill that same foe with a single throwing knife. All the available firearms in Syndicate are pistols so I can accept that range is limited, but by the 1800s a pistol was dozens of times more deadly than a thrown knife.
So in practice a gun is essentially a noisy, weak-ass knife: practically useless. It makes me wonder why they included such weapons at all other than as a ‘historical accuracy’ bullet point.
Open world
The Assassin’s Creed flavour of ‘open world’ was largely established by the time Syndicate arrived in 2015, and this game does not add much to the ‘tried and true’ mechanics. Basically a map exists from which you remove the ‘fog of war’ by climbing tall architecture. What is revealed is a map section full of icons indicating ‘challenges’ or obstacles to overcome in order to take control of that mapped area.
The overall map consists of multiple such sections that in totality represents the city of London, and it is an interesting and well-realized simulation. There are wagons to use as transportation and the tall map-revealing structures you climb also become fast travel points. As you wander you will also encounter random challenges that don’t otherwise appear on the map. These are generally very simplistic: a criminal is doing a bad thing, and you should kill them.
There are also ‘character’ missions for some historical cameo people who you encounter- folks like Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Darwin who, for some reason, is acting like a detective. These missions are perhaps some of the most interesting things to do in the game, despite often straining any sense of narrative rationality.
Your home base is a moving train, which is at least a novel idea. But the train’s continuous movement in space is rendered more of a concept than tangible reality due to your ability to fast-travel to it.
Disconnected story
Syndicate’s story is about freeing London from control by a Templar industrialist by the name of Crawford Starrick. It is set during the 1860’s during the industrial revolution. The backdrop of child labourers, abusive shop managers, and the dirty streets of a gigantic city provides an interesting setting to explore.
I enjoyed wandering around and seeing the sights of Victorian London somewhat more than I enjoyed the actual core story of Syndicate. I am probably no more than a third of the way through the narrative so it is entirely possible that the game’s plot will connect with me if I continue playing. But at the moment I find the story snippets to be disjointed and lacking in any real cohesion.
The Templars are… there, I guess: Starrick thus far in the game is at least developing a bit of interest as a villain. He has a dialogue about tea in a cut scene that is intriguing and gives some depth to his bad-guy persona.
I haven’t found any of the area bosses to be more than the shallowest of cutouts. They have no reason or history for their behaviour that I can find although there is some effort to make them different. Like one of the bosses who seems to spout nursery rhymes, and another who takes drugs before launching their attack- a bit of difference, I suppose, but ultimately meaningless since there is no further explanation or background to speak of.
The tension between the two Frye siblings, Evie and Jacob, likewise feels incomplete. I am not really attached to either of them, although I find Jacob to be portrayed as a bit too much of a hot-headed ass to like. Evie on the other hand is at least somewhat introspective and smart, but after 20+ hours I still don’t really care about either of them.
A few bugs
I encountered a few bugs with Syndicate, although it bears noting that I’ve been playing the Xbox Series X “60 fps/4k” patch so maybe that is to be expected. The most obvious problems have been a couple of scenes where certain NPCs were completely invisible leading to some rather comical conversations with blank spaces. Nothing seemed to break any quests or cause complete crashes, so I’m fine with the issues.
Wrapping up
As I mentioned at the start, I’m not finished playing Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and the sad truth is that I may never complete it. I moved on to playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and am enjoying it much more. I’ll write about Circle later.
Syndicate isn’t a bad game: there is a lot here to consume time in a mildly entertaining way. It is an original generation Assassin’s Creed game, though, at peak Ubisoft levels. There isn’t a lot of depth to the story, and the RPG elements that were added to later instalments in the series have not yet been incorporated.
The game is more focused on completing checklists and climbing/swinging around Victorian-era London while killing a series of samey gang bosses. Syndicate is definitely fun so long as you don’t ask too many questions and don’t care too much about the lack of engrossing narrative.