Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Formerly 'Victory'

I just started playing and I’m also disappointed at the lack of challenge in combat. As Pogue mentioned above, I really liked how challenging Paris/Unity was in terms of where and who you fought. It made the world feel more dangerous. It made the upgrades feel more meaningful. But here in London, I can’t lose, and therefore I couldn’t care less about upgrading my equipment, which then makes the economy of leveling up and getting richer seem pointless.

I’m almost tempted to just go back into the Paris game instead of continuing with this one. :(

-Tom

I’d recommend playing as stealthy as possible. Lots of the game has unavoidable combat, unfortunately, but most of the gang missions work moderately well as simple sandbox stealth levels. And some of the stealth upgrades have a reason to exist as a result.

Personally, I think the series should make fights more challenging but scale the number of enemies way down. Make a city that’s like a single huge open-world Hitman or Dishonored level, improve stealth, and boom.

Syndicate is a step back from Unity in a lot of ways. It’s interesting playing both at the same time to see the differences. You can definitely spot the bits where someone said, “Okay, less of this in the next game.” Less pedestrians, less environmental clutter, streets are wider meaning the engine needs to render less detailed buildings as you traverse the terrain, lockpicking is simplified to the point of ridiculousness, less equipment and costume stuff, less ambient noise, and less attack animations because there is less weapon variety.

The hook shot/zip line is cool at first, but then you realize it’s there only because the streets are wider so they had to give the player a way to quickly cross streets when they’re doing parkour on rooftops.

To me AC combat has never been enjoyable or interesting, so trivialising it somewhat gets a thumbs up from me. It means the volume of it involved in liberating London from… whatever, is pleasingly manageable.

Likewise the parkour is not endlessly enjoyable, so introducing a short circuit in the form of the grappler is fine by me too.

I disagree the hook shot is only there because of wide streets. I’d much rather have wide streets (and thus carriage stuff, which I enjoy) and a hook shot than NO hook shot. Also, the missions seem a lot more interesting than Black Flag (bear with me), A LOT more variety in them (and in the side activities) though I can’t speak of if that’s also true vs. Unity (I didn’t pick that one up … read on to find out why), however I remember reading reviews of Unity and being disappointed to find the missions mostly sounded just like the stuff I did in Black Flag. To me, Syndicate is just an outstanding open world game, with a LOT of cool stuff to do and an actually engaging story (mostly due to the likeable main characters). I really am having a blast doing side content, unlocking the sectors on the map, earning income and crafting materials, etc.

Besides the wider streets and fewer pedestrians like you mention, what other bits were stripped down in Syndicate vs. Unity? I’m honestly curious, having never played Unity. Syndicate feels better in a lot of ways to Black Flag, which I really enjoyed, not the least of which I much prefer Syndicates combat.

I agree that there are some good decisions here. The “step back” isn’t bad in all cases.

The amount of incremental weapon upgrades and costume bits in Unity were just too much. It was ridiculous to get equipment from quests that were completely underpowered compared to whatever you’d unlocked through grinding and exploring for money. The technical issues like people just suddenly appearing in front of you as you’re running through the streets, and house interiors “loading in” seconds after you point the camera that way remain unresolved even on a high-end PC with copious amounts of RAM and a beefy video card. Drawing the crowd numbers down and boarding up more interiors was a good call. Nixing the lockpicking mini-game was probably a bit overboard, but the one in Unity was just frustrating to a lot of people because the higher end locks still required cat-like reflexes or luck to pick.

Some of the new stuff is good as well. The GTA-style carriage gameplay is pretty cool and mirrors what most players have come to expect from various movies with horse-drawn carriages ramming each other. I like the ability to change from Evie to Jacob at will. Marking enemies to track them makes a welcome return.

The hookshot is a net negative to me because it largely renders a large part of the AC gameplay redundant. Why climb when you can hook everywhere? It’s neat to use at first, but then it’s a crutch for the wider city streets. The lowered environmental effects is kind of a bummer, but I see why they did it. The combat is definitely a minus to me. Combat in Unity was a lot harder and I appreciated that. Here, it’s kind of a step back to spamming the counter button and just killing the heck out of everyone.

Overall, I’m not sure where Syndicate is going to fall for me. I think part of the “meh” for me is that I’m overly familiar with all the age and place from a zillion bits of steampunk and ye olde Victorian London media. The French Revolution was a refreshing setting for me.

I see what you are saying, though for me the London setting feels pretty fresh just due to my lack of general exposure to that setting (in fact, playing the game has made me want to read some Sherlock Holmes or other works set in that time period!) but I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I do see where you are coming from with the hook-shot sort of negating the need to actually climb, I’ve had that very thought, but in the end I am actually enjoying the speed and agility of using it than just climbing, which I feel like started to be grind-y in past games I played when trying to get somewhere.

Unity - had lots more ‘stuff’, was more ‘busy’, was ‘bigger’. Slightly difficult. Weird climbing problems.

Syndicate - is cleaner, prettier (imo), the Frye twins are eons more entertaining than Arno, rope launcher is something I will miss while I’m playing other AC games. Yeah the combat is easier but it’s still my favorite AC game.

Been playing a fair bit of the Jack the Ripper dlc, or at least I was before I went out of town for the holidays. But as you would likely expect, it’s pretty much more of the same, only slightly scaled down. You’ll play only as Evie with only a few short exceptions, and in just the northeastern section of the London map (Whitechapel and City of London).

If you’re a student of history or the Ripper murders, you may find yourself slightly annoyed with the liberties taken but then again it’s AC, you know what you’re getting into.

On the plus side, there’s a new intimidation-based combat Evie practices that is, or can be, non lethal. You can drop into a bunch of enemies, start a “brutal” hit chain on one of them, and once you’re done the rest will likely be terrified into fleeing. It’s cool.

On the minus side, the new side missions are bad, bad, bad. One involves driving a falsely accused Ripper suspect to safety while avoiding attention. So that means low speeds, taking side roads to avoid crowds, dodging cops. It’s so dull. But overall, not having finished, I like it so far.

Where’s the cheapest place for this iteration of Ass Screed for PC?

Probably CDkeys.com or the like. Around $24 there.

Oh, I will jump in to say I absolutely, unequivocally love that Syndicate brought back whistling to lure guards.

I was going nuts in Unity without the whistle. The cherry bombs sucked.

Hold on. People found combat in any AC game challenging?! I always thought it was cute how a crowd of 20 guards would politely take turns, one at a time, letting you beat the piss out of them. AC guards are the most polite enemies.

-Todd

Not in Unity, they don’t. They’ll encircle you and while one is engaging you head on, another will stab you in the back. And it’s instant death.

Yeah, Unity is very different. You can’t just spam the counter-kill button, because there isn’t one. You actually have to defend against attacks and strike during opportunities. This is harder than it sounds when you have four or five guys on you, one of them heavy dude that can’t be parried, and there’s a rooftop rifleman taking aim at you.

Video example starts at 3:23: https://youtu.be/uztTbjXQrR0?t=3m23s

You guys are making me wish I’d taken up those Unity deals on Black Friday for $8.

It’s a really good idea in Unity to practise combat with the bunches of bad guys in the Versailles tutorial area. One aspect of Unity’s combat that I found incredibly frustrating is the tendency for Arno to enter cover (and exit combat) when you want him to dodge. They put both functions on the same button and made it context sensitive, so if you’re near a tree or wall or something, you could end up pressed against it with your sword suddenly sheathed while the baddies chop you to bits.

Oh, yeah. Super frustrating. My go-to was to never dodge but use the smoke/stun grenades like a maniac. Take out the big guy first, preferably with a berserk blade, then work on the others while they’re still coughing. Even then, a couple of hits from a rifleman could take you out at any time.

I get why a lot of people didn’t like the combat in Unity. When people play Assassin’s Creed games, they’re usually not looking for difficult engaging melee combat. They want to be ninja assassin supermen that stab faces, flip bad guys, and generally look awesome. Unity’s hand-to-hand stuff was not that at all.

Of course, there were also a lot of other things in Unity that turned people off, even when you discount the bugs and glitches. The icon clutter when you first popped open the city map is ridiculous. Missions had weird difficulty spikes. The pull back into one big city was a disappointment to people used to the gigantic open maps of AC2, AC3, and Black Flag. Other than the landmark buildings, a lot of the row structures in virtual Paris look like they were copy-pasted from an asset farm. (This is further amplified by the samey interiors.) For a lot of people, the French Revolution bounced right off them.

I think Unity had some good stuff going for it, but Ubisoft’s ambition really went beyond the technical boundaries of their engine. Coupled with some weird design decisions and I think the criticism against Unity was inevitable.

It’s too bad that backlash hurt Syndicate’s sales. I think Ubisoft course-corrected and got back to what people wanted in AC with Syndicate while keeping their tech within specs.

I just wish the combat in Syndicate was more like Unity, but I acknowledge that my opinion isn’t the popular one on that point.

I’m wondering, do you guys have any thoughts on whether I should check out this entry in the series? It looks so cool and some of my least foggy memories of primary education was about the industrial revolution in the UK, mainly as it related to London. An AAA sandbox rendition of the most famous chunks of the city set in the 1850s sounds really appealing to me.

Unfortunately…

I played most of the first two games in the series, and ended up walking away wondering why I’d stunk that much time into them both times. The combat was… Well, after the first handful of combat encounters you knew everything there was to know about fighting, and the timings were leisurely enough that you virtually never missed them.

The parkour left me almost as cold. I’d kind of expected you would have to analyse your environments and plan how to get from point A to point B using the admittedly awesome-looking parkour. But that was never the case. And in the end the whole parkour thing felt no different from running down a wide open road. Sure, you’d get interrupted occasionally by misjudging distance or whatever, which resulted in a little stagger animation being played (or full-on faceplanting in the street). But… It was all style & no substance to me. There wasn’t any gameplay in it really. The closest thing was unlocking/collecting stuff, but much like Cheevos, that sort of thing doesn’t do anything for me.

So with those pretty major reservations about AssCreed 1+2 in mind, is there any chance I’d click with this installment? - I’d appreciate your input, Oh Wise Ones :)

If 2 didn’t grab you, probably not. Unless you really want to see a facsimile of Victorian London. For all its shortcuts and silliness, they’ve done a really good job with the world.