Video Game Review: Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate deserves every word of praise it gets, as a game it is brilliantly put together and shows that Ubisoft does listen to its players. In the last game, Assassin’s Creed Unity, we had many things that we enjoyed taken out, with loading screens set as plain black and the combat system overly complex. In Syndicate fixes that bringing back the free run character loading screen and it fixes the combat system, no need for cherry bombs and each directional key having seven items attached to it. Despite Ubisoft taking Syndicate back to the things we enjoy, they have kept some things from Unity that wasn’t as good in it, and greatly improved it from the last game.

 For instance in Unity, they had levels, gear upgrades and skill points, but these were only obtainable from doing main missions perfectly and the levels had no major point in the game. In Syndicate, they put experience as a way of earning skill points and making skill points easier to obtain. This means that our skill system worked better than before and gave us the ability to learn more about the game.

The system of levels is something that takes slightly longer to learn, our characters level after a certain amount of skills are learnt for instance, I have all the first and second tier skills learnt and that has raised my level up to three, whilst another has gone into the third tier with the more expensive skills but he is still level two. 

However, this is something that we can learn over the time we will spend in this game. Another great feature of Syndicate is they have brought back the gang and group idea with the ‘Rooks’ which much like in Brotherhood, the only other game to feature this, you must rescue people and they join you in your game. Adding to this, Syndicate has taken on an aspect of Grand Theft Auto, in the fact that you can steal and drive carriages around London whilst evading the police and killing the people you irritate by doing so. 

On to another amazing part of the game with the dual assassin idea, the fact that we have our assassin twins Evie and Jacob, and we can switch between them to do missions and play to each of their strengths, Ubisoft has put so much thought into this with the fact that Jacob, who is meant to be a confrontational fighter, has three skills aimed towards that, while Evie has three linked towards stealth. This means that instead of just playing as one and the other just sitting left alone in the shadows is not a good idea. We should never hesitate to send Evie in to assassinate a Templar while Jacob should always be the lead into a major fight. 

The only point that could be made against Syndicate is that there is no multiplayer, however, this is something that was not brought in until Brotherhood and we loved the first and second games in the first place. So why would Syndicate be made any worse in the fact they spent more effort on the single player by ruling out the multiplayer? All in all, I would give Assassin’s Creed Syndicate top scores.  It is a beautiful and well-made game without glitches or mistakes.

Words of  Jack Hardwick.