Got this the other day, very late to the party, as I had in the past really bounced off of AC stuff. But many, this is GOOD. The voice acting, the world building, the action…all good. Really engrossing stuff. Playing as Kassandra, because it seemed more interesting. I like how she’s not just “Hercules with breasts,” too.
It really is great TheWombat. I may dedicate a month of this summer on just it so I can concentrate. It is a HUGE 9and by that I mean really huge) game that requires some dedication. But characterization, world building, visually stunning graphics (lol), and out right amazingness: This game has all that. Oh and voice acting. Oh and ship traveling and combat (which I ended up liking). OH… and exploration.
(What am I not playing this again?)
Kassandra is one of the best-realized videogame characters in recent memory, and perhaps in the all time pantheon.
If you were a newbie to Assassin’s Creed and were considering jumping in would it be better to try one of the older games like Black Flag and Syndicate or just jump ahead to the semi-rebooted ones like Origin and Odyssey? The latter two are 70% and 50% off respectively on Steam, so I’m pretty tempted to give one of them a shot, provided people think they’re okay to start with. Do they provide enough tutorials to get up to speed with the climbing and stealth mechanics?
MrT --I jumped in at ac odyssey and loved it. I hear it plays different that some of the older ones. It is clearly more of an RPG that some of the older ones. Plus there is very little connection. Though the one connection with the older AC’s is pretty minimal --if a bit annoying.
Just jump into the new games. Jump into Odyssey specifically. :)
The gameplay mechanics have evolved enough that Origins and Odyssey are basically a series reboot/restart as open world RPGs.
Thanks Kristi and triggercut! I’ll buy Odyssey this evening as I have a serious hankering to explore a massive open-world.
I envy you for what you’re about to get to experience!
And massive it is, and beautifully detailed. And epic.
I still recall finally sailing off after hours on ‘tutorial island’, the opening credits rolling with the theme tune, realising I hadn’t even started yet…
Dammit, I think I’ll play it this afternoon. :)
I was blown away when I realized that all that stuff on the first island was just the friggin’ intro.
Syndicate is a 40-45 hour long do all the content game, play as brother and sister, so good. Also the last TRUE assassins creed game. ;)
Origins and Odyssey are easily 80+ hours each.
Yeah, I’d say Syndicate is probably the culmination of years’ worth of development of Assassin’s Creed games. The controls are smooth and I love the stealth in this, and how fully realized the world is. The player characters are also likeable, which is a plus.
I never got Origins, but Odyssey is definitely a completely different thing from the other games in this series. There are ties to the (rather uninteresting) Assassin’s Creed story guff, but you can mostly ignore that and play it like a full-fledged action RPG set in ancient Greece. The main story is not very interesting as far as plot goes, but it makes up for it with good characters and some excellent quests, and some good nods towards the actual history of the period.
Both are great, but different experiences.
I think Syndicate is actually kind of a terrible game, the more I think about it and years go by and I get perspective on it. I love the setting. The graphics are beautiful. Victorian London is one of my favorite places/times in all of history.
But the gang mechanic in the game isn’t fun, and commits a cardinal sin of game development: if you create a big, beautiful, amazing world for gamers to explore…LET THEM EXPLORE IT. Constantly fighting off badguy gangs and/or the cops the fights attract just makes exploring for exploring’s sake not fun. I get that there need to be challenges and combat in there, but the balance is an utter mess in Syndicate. The carrot and stick equation of exploring and combat is just bad.
And honestly, the rest of the game is pretty terrible too. It’s uninspired crap. I would argue, and strongly, that Syndicate is hardly the “culmination of years’ worth of development of Assassin’s Creed games.” It is, rather, a publisher and development studios on autopilot, thrashing out a lame duck product that everyone involved knew was going to be the last, dying whimper of the bloated carcass that AC games had become. They knew they were going to be rebooting everything about the games for the next go-round, and Syndicate is just rote and uninspiring, like a TV network dumping unaired TV episodes at the end of a season for a show they know they’ve already canceled.
I thought the infiltration and assassination missions for the main bad guys inner circle were the best the franchise has done (in Syndicate). Far better than the long drawn out mini-boss fights we deal with now.
The hidden blade should never have been nerfed by having to upgrade it in Origins / Odyssey. Worst change ever in the franchise.
I thought Syndicate was rather good too. The gangs, the grapple, the carriages, the mission types were all good ideas in my opinion. I don’t remember any constraints on exploration, though it has been a while. The two switchable characters were also a cool innovation for the series. The one step ‘back’ was combat, where I think they gave up on Unity’s more fluid style and went back to something more familiar. Big thumbs up overall. Surprised you’re down on it Trig.
I hated everything to do with the carriages in Syndicate.
Yeah that was a bad addition. ;)
Gang fights vs rival lieutenants on the bridge were fun though!
You’re kidding. If you hijacked a carriage that was too small for your gang buddies, they hijacked one of their own to follow along. One of my favorite things in gaming ever, watching them cram themselves into a hansom cab or something and careen off.
Nope. All the carriage activities were terrible. Additionally, putting carriages in the game pushed the designers to accommodate their presence. They had to widen the streets so you could fit the vehicles in them, but that meant the path along the rooftops was interrupted by the now too wide avenues. To solve that, they gave players a grapple gun so they could fire a line over to the far rooftops, but the gun then negated the need to actually climb anything.
It changed the balance of traversal methods a bit, but that’s a good thing. Not all entries in a series have to be identical. Kassandra leaps off mountains…