There are two protagonists, the twins Jacob and Evie Frye, and while I was a bit put off by Jacob's lame one-liners, I really liked how the played off each other. You can play as any character for every non-story part in the game. Both characters share money XP, but have different equipment and 3 exclusive skills each: Woke Ubisoft decided that Jacob, the man, had to have the strength/combat based upgrades, while Evie gets the stealth ones, because she's a woman. To be honest, both characters are practically identical so not to worry.
The game finally went GTA, you can hijack carriages and drive around, and you can even cause some light destruction around the city. The police will come after you, however.
The controls are a bit weird, more limiting, probably to help with how inaccurate movement could get sometimes. I always tolerated it because it felt like a byproduct of the freedom you had in climbing pretty much anywhere, well, the new tweaks are unnecessary and to the game's detriment. Holding R2 enters parkour mode, and holding X will move you upwards and O will move you downward, just like Unity, except that now you can't press X to jump any time. This means that if you are on a ledge and you want to go below, to a pool of water for example, pressing X will result in Jacob and Evie staying rooted to their place. The water is below, even if you want to jump down instead of dropping down, so you have to press O. It's counter intuitive to how we've been playing Assassin's Creed, so it produces more issues than the ones it solves.
Equipment has been limited a bit, now you can customize wrist guards, belts and outfits. It's alright I think, while I miss the larger variety in pieces and clothes from Unity, you also don't have as many pieces that turn obsolete because their stats are atrocious and you should be wearing something with better stat increases.
1880's London is smaller than the piece of France we got in Unity... but I actually like it this way, Unity was a bit TOO big. As a result, this piece of England feels a bit more dense. Sure, at the end of the day it's just a lot of busywork, collect the flowers, collect the posters, find the chests, yadda yadda, but I like the mini dopamine-rushes. Lockpicking is no longer a mini game, praise the gods.
I'm not too fond of the Experience system. You only earn XP by doing missions or doing actions that unlock perks. For example, only your first 120 assassinations will give you any XP, afterwards you won't get more XP from simply assassinating enemies. The perk system, however, is kinda neat. Performing a certain task a certain amount of times will give you a small, passive enhancement to an ability related to said action. For example, use sub-weapons mid-combo 75 times to get a damage boost on sub-weapons mid combo.
That said, I am a hard-headed explorer, so I toughed it out and managed to outcheese some harder level missions by using subweapons and stealth, and thus was ready to continue the game at level 8. I hadn't even gotten the dart rope!
The dart rope works similarly to Batman's grappling hook in Arkham City but worse. It's hard to gauge the correct distance when using it on foot, and a lot of times pressing L1 just had Jacob use the rope behind him, behind where I wanted to go. That said, when it works it's a neat new way to explore the city, it gives you a lot of horizontal freedom when scaling.
Present day parts are still only cutscenes. I can only ever be so thankful.
Bugs and glitches, oh boy, boys and glitches. People said Unity was buggy? I played both games unpatched and this one was way worse. Evie was invisible in a few cutscenes that involved Greene, and he himself was duplicated in another cutscenes, not to mention the many bugs and glitches mid missions that forced me to restart a mission. The Hypnotist's mission was particularly bad, I had to restart like 3-4 times because something would go wrong, like the Hypnotist entering an alert state while in the carriage so I couldn't get him out to the fact that the mission doesn't tell you that if you knock him out it's game over. The game crashed twice, Blue screen of death kind of crash. Honestly, this made Unity look like high art.
There's an entire zone dedicated to World War I. A portal stealthily appears after Chapter 6 at the right edge of the Thames. If I didn't know that this part existed I could've easily missed it, which is really dumb. You don't get a single hint or notice that something appeared over there.
Syndicate is alright. Honestly, it's just another Assassin's Creed game, you know what you're getting. It's a safe, fun way to spend some time, but it's very forgettable. Unity was simply more ambitious and more interesting, which is disappointing considering how I love this era's wardrobes. At least we finally get a female Assassin tied to a more than decent game. Aveline deserved better.
7.0
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