Vehicles have been well integrated into the game's various other systems too, acting as a refuge from pursuers, a mobile firing platform for a shoot out with adversaries, a police box for bundling captured goons and a source of income if you opt to enter yourself in races or steal other vehicles in heists. Then there are the new horse and carts, which give you a fast and fun method of moving larger distances without a lengthy run or a long loading screen while you fast travel. Special mention should be made to the game's score, which stretches from energetic Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes strings during chase sequences to soft, mournful vocal tunes as you perch atop the smog-filled city. Assassination missions become cat and mouse affairs where you can zip in and out of sight, losing your pursuers only to drop down and silently snuff out another. Alternatively, it works as a faster connection between two buildings during a chase - there's no need to find a rope linking rooftops or climb down from your stalking zone when tracking targets. It lets you quickly zip between the towers of the Palace of Westminster or rappel down from St Paul's and stop midway to drop vertically onto the heads of two Templar targets. Syndicate's new grappling hook - a brazen but welcome lift from Rocksteady's Arkham games - streamlines your rooftop exploration and stretches it out over vast distances. Next, here are all the things Syndicate adds back to the series' sandbox - simple things such as picking up and hiding bodies, whistling to attract attention - as well as several new methods of traversal to reinvigorate the game's parkour gameplay. It's like a human being actually sat down to design a game with the simple requirement that it felt fun, rather than it being a £50 experience designed by a committee to link up a web of interconnected transmedia nodes. It doesn't require you to play a companion app to acquire everything in the game. It doesn't have any connections to a broken web service. There's no bolted on multiplayer mode or any co-op options. Thankfully, after Syndicate, I think Assassin's Creed can finally move on.įirst things first, here are all the things Assassin's Creed doesn't have this year. The whole episode left such an impact on the franchise that any discussion about Assassin's Creed must currently acknowledge it, and any expectations for Syndicate's subsequent trip to Victorian London must be matched up to what came before. The intense negative reaction upon Unity's initial release lingered through its slow cycle of post-launch patches, to the extent that the game's season pass was cancelled and its major add-on was offered free as a result. Plenty has already been written about Assassin's Creed Unity, last year's underwhelming entry in the series. For a series focused on history, Syndicate feels refreshingly free from Assassin's Creed's own.

Assasin creed syndicate