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| At the press of a few buttons Jacob or Evie can jump on board an enemy’s stagecoach |
I’VE been a fan of the Assassin’s Creed series ever since seeing the first glimpse of it almost ten years ago.
The footage from the 2006 E3 gaming extravaganza stunned me – showing a mysterious white cloaked hooded figure stalking through a huge crowd and killing his enemy before disappearing.
And while the eventual game fell well short of that impressive trailer – being filled with linear or dull missions, I was still blown away by the scope and ambition of the game.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen before – so I could easily look past its flaws and get completely immersed in the whole experience.
Jump forward to the present day and with the release of the latest iteration in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, it is difficult to give it the same good faith.
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| Assasin's Creed: Syndicate takes place in Victorian London |
The latest chapter in the battle between the Assassins and Templars (the game’s respective forces of good and evil) is set in the Victorian era of London.
You take control of twins Jacob and Evie Frye who travel to the capital on a mission to deliver a deadly blow to the Templars’ operations.
They soon set their sights on Crawford Starwick – the Templar Grand Master who controls large swathes of London and like all good villains has his sights set on world domination.
The 19th century London is a beautifully realised city for players to explore - a faithful recreation of how the capital looked then which teems with life.
Streets are packed with people, shoppers, children selling newspapers, pickpockets and stagecoaches.
The latter is one of the best introductions to the series – not only for the horse races against Templar controlled gangs but also for the fights on top of carriages.
At the press of a few buttons Jacob or Evie can release the reins of a horse and then jump on board an enemy’s stagecoach and fight them on top of it while travelling through the streets of London.
It is an exhilarating feeling and is among the game’s highlights along with sections where you fight Templar forces on top of moving train carriages.
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| After the bug filled release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity last year Ubisoft have righted some wrongs |
The script of the game, which draws on one of the most lauded games in the series – Assassin’s Creed II, recaptures the series’ spirit of fun.
The central characters, Evie and Jacob, are charismatic and likeable figures whose sharp witted dialogue perfectly fits the backdrop of a cultured city like London.
Supporting characters draw on the city’s rich history, with players encountering world changing figures such as Charles Dickens, Alexander Graham Bell and Florence Nightingale among others.
However, where the game falters is in its most important aspect – how it plays.
There are plenty of missions and side quests for players, but many of them feel drab and repetitive – with objectives such as follow a certain person coming up over and over again.
Likewise, the ageing stealth mechanics severely let them game down.
Clunky sneaking controls and the way enemies react mean, much like with previous iterations of the game, it is extremely hard to carry out missions in a stealthy fashion.
Items such as smoke bombs and darts which make enemies hallucinate help to mask over such inadequacies.
But if you don’t want to resort to them efforts to be stealthy often just end up with you alerting the enemy and the situation escalating into a straight up fist fight.
The assassination missions, the centre piece of the game, are where such issues truly come to light.
Instead of a vast number of ways players can tackle such missions, as is the case with its peers, Syndicate only offers a few approaches.
One of which is a very linear way that the game clearly pinpoints, funnelling you down a certain path where you achieve very specific objectives to eventually get a very stylistic stealth kill.
While this approach undoubtedly looks very cinematic and helps to make players feel like the ultimate assassin, it does limit their choices on how to tackle such missions severely.
After the bug filled release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity last year Ubisoft have righted a number of major wrongs – with a game that on launch only has a handful of glitches.
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| The 19th century London is a beautifully realised city for players to explore |
However, the yearly release pattern is becoming more and more compromising for the series – with many of the early games flaws still in place.
Despite the advances in technology, poor stealth mechanics, repetitive missions and a one note combat system are issues that have continued throughout the years.
For all the positives features of Syndicate, it is severely hampered and held back by long-term issues.
And during a period where gamers are inundated with numerous newly released triple A titles vying for their attention, the latest Assassin’s Creed game needed to do more to stand out.
But it hasn’t. The series needs to take a break from its yearly release schedule not only to fix issues that have plagued it since the beginning but to refresh and revitalise the franchise.
Only then will it move forward and recapture the potential it has to be a great game.
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