#Assassins creed cyndicate series

Together, they’re actually quite an enjoyable pair, whose skill-sets both complement one another and cause antagonistic tiffs in equal measure. She’s a missions-by-the-book agent with a powerful curiosity for Assassin history and Pieces of Eden. He’s an impetuous, charming jerk (there’s never a shortage of those in the Assassins) who has an almost childlike glee in forming a ruthless gang of ‘Rooks’ to take back the streets from ruling criminal element ‘The Blighters’. To that end, Syndicate puts you in the implausibly over-stylised threads of Jacob and Evie Frye, Assassin siblings and aspiring power players in 1860s London. That’s honestly fine by me, as it relegates that side of things (which I think peaked with Black Flag’s cry-for-help satire on games development) to a framing device for historical parkour jaunts. All the modern stuff happens in three or four cut-scenes, and the set-up for the entire game is effectively this: there was a Piece of Eden in Victorian London and the current-era Assassins want to know where it is, so please find it for them. Syndicate, though, has pretty much dispensed with it entirely. I’m not entirely sure how heavily Unity leaned on the external ‘modern day’ stuff, because it was too poorly optimised at launch for me to be able to get far into it. But it’s also a very safe, very familiar Creed.

#Assassins creed cyndicate series

It has some sensible, iterative ideas (as some of the stronger games in the series do), a fantastic setting, and decent characters. Black Flag, meanwhile, just looked at the sailing portion of Assassin’s Creed III and thought “fuck it, let’s mostly do a pirate game instead”.Īssassin’s Creed: Syndicate will not go down as a third innovative turning point in the series. It did what good videogame sequels do retained the foundations of the original, but expanded the concepts (traversal, stealth, combat and so on) in new, interesting ways that gave players greater interactivity with the open city. Series progression has been strictly iterative in nature (particularly of late, when Ubisoft has multiple studios working on overlapping Assassin’s Creed projects), but there are two releases in the timeline that felt to me like significant, innovative jumps: Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.ĪC II radically fleshed out the skeletal mechanics established by the first game. If you include absolutely everything, the number is up there in the 20s, but once whittled down to the ‘core’ set (the big budget, PC/major console ones, basically) Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is something like the eighth or ninth entry. Back when I reviewed Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, I tried to figure out how many games there were in the Creed series.