"London calling to the faraway frowns" - Assassins Creed: Syndicate PC Review.

So, after the controversial, technical mess that was Assassin's creed unity on every platform. Has Syndicate wrote Unity’s wrongs? Yes! The problems you found with unity are gone. But, does the game fix the bad changes to the Assassin's Creed formula within the last few years? No. And here’s a review and why I think that that’s OK.

So first of all, let's start with the setting. It's London in 1868. Right in the heart of a industrial revolution and the game really feels like it. The gritty, damp back alleys serve as a breeding ground for the gangs festering the city. The main roads are large and filled with carriages owned by the upper class that runs the city. And the Thames brimming with dirty polluted water and steam powered boats full of cargo from overseas. The amount of detail put into making this game feel like a industrial era of London is astonishing. Everything from the beautiful detail in the buildings to the sound effects keep you stopping yourself and just going into a daze as you amaze yourself with the world you're in

Now the story, without giving away any spoilers. The story is about two assassins, Jacob and Evie Frye. They have taken it upon themselves to take control of the crooked London. Jacob Frye, the male protagonist has one idea in mind. Take control and grow his own gang “The Rooks”. He wants to destroy the corporate control of London and give the underdog a much needed leg up. This is a more aggressive and all out style of gameplay and is quite fun doing side missions that help take back control.

Now for Evie Frye, the female protagonist. Evie is going for the more traditional Assassins Creed story. She wants to hunt down a piece of Eden. Her missions are a lot more story focused and while can be played all out like Jacobs. The missions are designed much more around stealth. These missions are a nice contrast when put with Jacobs brutal gang brawls and have been paced well throughout the game.

Now onto the gameplay. With how formulaic the Assassins Creed games have become it's easy to denounce the combat and parkour mechanics. But if you go back to an older game and then play this. You'll find that the mechanics have been improved greatly. The problem that was surrounding combat in the Assassins Creed games was that it was too easy. It was a one button counter and then a simple second button to kill the enemy. This idea was soon blown off the table and then replaced by Unity’s combat. Unity had combat that was similar but also very different. It drove a more fencing style approach to swordplay and required a much smaller window of timing to be able to successfully counter an enemy. This felt new, but felt like they were making it too difficult, the gameplay wasn't quite as fun meaning a worse game overall when the majority of the game is based on combat.

Syndicate changes the combat again, aiming for a faster more brutal approach. The combat is done well. It still uses the old premise of, hit, counter, hit, kill. But counters are a little harder to time compared to when the much older games but not as difficult as unity. This is a nice change as it makes for a much better experience making the game more fun over more difficult.

Now the parkour, this mechanic has never really been changed but more improved on through the years and that's because it has always worked. The clunkiness of the parkour is still there though, with you getting stuck onto different objects when trying to climb certain areas. For the most part though, the parkour feels smooth and fluid. One major change is the addition of a grappling hook. With 1868 London being a huge city with enormous buildings and gaping roads between the houses. Having a grappling hook is a very nice addition that makes traveling across the huge open world enjoyable. There are times though that I felt like I should be able to use the hook but the game decided otherwise. The grappling hook doesn't quite have the, climb everything everywhere feel that the grappling hook in the Arkham series does. But it still feels great to use to traverse all of the buildings and roads. Speaking of the roads, the game has also added horse and carriages. These strangely control much like a racing game. And honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about them. They are very awkward to control and don't feel very intuitive. The horses seem to be able to crash through lamp posts and people with zero damage taken to them somehow. When given the chance I will always choose to use the climbing and grappling hook over the horse and carriage.

The game is a well paced and beautifully crafted world. But as amazingly detailed as the world is. The combat and parkour are more of the same. This isn't exactly bad as it seems a case of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”.

Now I played the game on PC. The performance overall is.. Well. It's better than unity. Assassin's Creed has never had a great track record with their PC versions and syndicate’s PC version was delayed which was hopeful for us in the PC community.

Now the performance is.. Decent. I don't have a high end PC at all. A AMD A10 and 750TI OC with 8GB RAM doesn't run everything at a huge framerate but it doesn't exactly struggle with games when they're made well. Syndicate for the most part runs at a good framerate. But when I got into a carriage. The game decided it wanted to stutter and slowly load the details ahead every 10-20 seconds. This may not be a problem you have when playing the game but for me it made the game unplayable. I found that using nvidia control panel to lock the game to 30fps by using adaptive(half refresh rate) seemed to fix the stuttering. But other than the stutters. Frame Rate seems to be stable with few drops here and there but overall quite good. This is definitely a great step forward after unity but still not a Metal Gear Solid 5 or Mad Max level port.

 

So, if you didn't like unity. Give this one a go, enough is different that you may give the Assassins Creed franchise a go again or at the very least just enjoy this one. If you gave up on the franchise long ago. This one probably won't be pulling you back in again. And if you've never played an Assassins Creed before.. You'll probably love it.

It's available now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

On PC though you can choose to buy it from steam or uplay. When brought on steam you are of course met with the uplay DRM anyway so buying it on one over the other wouldn’t make much difference other than where you launch it from.