Another year and another Assassin’s Creed steps forth to
fulfil our running and stealth based needs. The games have certainly come a
long way since Altair first donned his white garb and disrupted the Middle
Eastern streets. Since then we’ve moved to Italy, Turkey, France, America and
even the Caribbean. Our next destination is Victorian London and we eagerly
dived in hoping to find a game to put into the series’ ‘good’ category.
We’ll have to be honest and say we didn’t really spend
enough time with Unity to form an opinion on it so we are coming at this after
the excellent Black Flag. We loved Black Flag and it’s about as close as we are
ever likely to get to a modern version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Jumping into
Syndicate was a change of pace right from the start and the game certainly has
a personality of its own. Syndicate is like sneaking your way through Guy
Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes version of Victorian London.
This time you take control brother and sister Evie and Jacob
Frye who come to industrial London to loosen the Templar grip and stop them
from taking over the world. You can switch between both characters freely and
each one is a bit better at certain things. Evie is better at stealth and
knives while Jacob is a better fighter and is better with a gun. You can level
up your assassins by completing the various tasks and missions and then
choosing what to spend experience on. You can also level up more quickly by
paying real money which is something we are never a fan of. That said we never
really found the ‘pay to win’ mechanic intruded upon our play through and is
easily ignorable.
Evie and Jacob are excellent characters and each has a
distinct personality. Their voice acting is excellent throughout and everything
always stays the right side of ridiculous cockney accents. The strong voice
cast help to make the story seem important and interesting and it’s one of the
stronger entries in the series from a narrative point of view.
London itself is pretty much completely open to you from the
very start. Different areas display the recommended level for you character to
be but there is nothing stopping you going and trying to undertake side
missions if you so wish. There are far fewer viewpoints though, so fast
traveling around can be a bit of a pain. You do have a train which trundles
around the map (and acts as your mobile base), which you can also fast travel
to and this proves very useful at times.
The detail of London is excellent with horse drawn carriages
rolling along the streets and a large population of NPC characters going around
their daily lives. There’s been a bit of geographic manipulation but it gives a
real feel of a city in the midst of an industrial revolution. When the sky dims
and all the lanterns come on it can be very impressive to look at and we never
grew tired of wandering around the streets on our way to the next objective.
Speaking of objectives, you are certainly not going to be
short of things to do. As well as the main story missions there are countless
other side quests to get involved in and endless amounts of trinkets to find.
Each area of London is under control of a gang called the Blighters. In order
to take it back you need to kill Templars, free work house children, take out
gang members and kidnap criminals. These tasks all follow the theme of sneaking
in somewhere and then either killing or capturing targets within enclosed
areas.
Once the missions have been carried out the Blighters will
challenge you and your gang the Rooks to a fight for the area. These are the
only real low point of the game as the enemy gang leaders are huge tanks with
massive health bars and you are stuck in an enclosed space with them and not
able to use much of your equipment. We got stuck on one for hours as the boss
could kill us with four hits and the game kept forcing us into quick time event
sequences where he would continually strike at us when his health bar reached
certain levels.
The easiest thing to do is try and kill the bosses when they
first appear at the end of the initial gang war sections. If you can get them
before they get away then you won’t have to deal with them later in the
territory fight.
Aside from the tank bosses the only other major issue we had
is the fact it has no colour blind options. There are now a ton of things
represented on your map and for gamers with colour blindness you are likely
going to struggle with identifying what they are. You now have your enemies,
police, ally Rooks, escaping criminals, street kids, carriages and a host of
other things. All represented by coloured dots with no other symbol. It’s
really bad in this day and age to think that this hasn’t been taken into
account and is certainly something that needs to be addressed to make it more
accessible.
On top of these side missions you can also get involved in
fight clubs, raid cargo, go looking for flowers, beer bottles and other
collectibles and take part in ‘memory’ sequences which explore some of myth and
folk lore of London. There’s so much to do that we spent hours skipping around
away from the main quest and seemingly never even really made a dent in it.
Of course, if the game doesn’t play well then you aren’t
going to want to spend hours with it. But this time everything works
excellently. Your characters are fluid and control as you would want and combat
is pretty much as it’s always been. You get a new gadget to play with which
lets you grappling hook to the top of buildings and across large streets which
solves the problem of London not perhaps fitting a free running world as cities
have done in the past. The only bugs we found were that occasionally weapons
didn’t appear in enemies hands and sometimes characters would vanish in cut
scenes.
Overall, we had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed:
Syndicate. It’s different enough from the other games to feel fresh while still
holding onto the core of what makes the games great in much the same way Black
Flag was. It’s a bit more action based than a lot of the other games and has
bucket loads of personality. It’s certainly closer to the quality of Assassin’s
Creed 2 than the miss-steps of the series. There are still a few frustrating
sections and there will be many that feel the series should have stopped being
an annual outing but you can’t deny that when the formulae works it creates a
great adventure. Just sort out your colour blind options Ubisoft.
Overall 8/10
Colour Blind Issues - Yes
Review Code - Yes
Colour Blind Issues - Yes
Review Code - Yes
No comments:
Post a Comment