Syndicate released in 2015 and is the ninth (Christ almighty) installment in the series.
First off, Syndicate is set in Victorian England which is the perfect setting. I loved the setting and it's the best by far. Walking around London in the 1800s, scaling Big Ben, it's fantastic. For the first time you play as two assassin's, Evie and Jacob Frye, brother and sister. I really liked both of them, Evie is one of my all time favourite assassins.
Jacob is a brawler and is open to fighting, Evie is more stealthy and is better for a quieter approach. You can pick and swap anytime you choose. A lot of missions are specific to a certain character and will automatically change if you're the wrong one. It seems like it should be coop being able to play as two characters, but it's not. Your sibling isn't even AI controlled which is disappointing too, you're always alone and your sibling is nowhere to be seen once the cutscene ends.
London is in Templar control, lead by Crawford Starrick, one of the stronger AC villains. You'll see some significant historical figures throughout including Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens, even Winston Churchill in the WWI segment. Jacob and Evie must take back London, they can takeover each area by completing side missions in each area and then defeating the gang leader of that controlled zone.
The design of London is perfect, the tight roads, riding horse carriages, the people and children roaming the streets. There's plenty of activities like fight club, carriage racing, child liberation missions where you free children from hard labour. You can upgrade each character and unlock new skills relevant to each. A lot of the side characters are pretty weak, some aren't given any time to develop and some of the more important ones like Henry Green, an avid ally, just fall flat. I couldn't tell you what was going on in the present day plotline, frankly I stopped caring about that long ago and just disregard it lately. God knows what the WWI segment was about and why it was even included, it just felt so irrelevant.
The combat was very weak, it was just smashing the fight button and then occasionally countering when needed. I almost always tried to avoid open combat and stay stealthy because the combat got boring almost instantly. The hallucination darts were a huge help, as they turned enemies against each other. Being able to recruit your friendly gang mates and order them to fight enemies, leaving you to skip past them and continue your objective. The grappling hook was an amazing tool, it allowed you to scale tall buildings instantly and let's you cross building from across the street, finally a useful tool and the ability to climb faster.
The horse carriage riding was good, but the small roads made it impossible to drive through, especially when a carriage going the opposite way was coming. Fighting on rooftops of horse carriages and trains were incredible. Kicking an enemy off a moving train was so satisfying. The free running was fucked here, having the press A to scale building and B to climb down messed with you, even when you just wanted to vault over a wall you'd have to press one and it was always the wrong one, I can't even remember which let you vault over the wall, they had a system that worked for years and tweaked it in Unity, but they failed miserably here. Multi-finishers were a great idea, but they never ever worked.
This should've been my favourite AC game, by far, but it wasn't. It was almost a chore to play at times. It's a decent game, but it should've been far better. An improvement on Unity, but far from the levels of Black Flag. Please stop making Assassin's Creed games every year, actually give yourselves time to craft a great game, you're only hurting your own reputation releasing games of quality that are so inconsistent. I hope they revisit this era and the Frye twins again one day, but they wont. They always bin off their setting and characters after one game, unless you're called Ezio.
7.5/10
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