Today Ubisoft previewed Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (formerly codename Victory) for all the internets to see. If you missed it, here’s our quick rundown of the capers and japes our industrial revolution assassin Jacob Frye will get up to.
The game takes place in the latter half of the 1800s. Money rules in place of kings and queens. The Templars control much of England through the use of gangs. Jacob and his rich crew of assassin allies seek to wrest control of several English boroughs and cities by taking over the crime syndicates previously run by the templars.
Jacob is a brash, charming, angry young fighter. Sound familiar? If you said “Practically every Assassin Ever” you’re right. Though Jacob at least seems a bit livelier than his prior counterparts, so maybe he’ll be allowed to have, dare I say? Some fun in his quest.
Assisting him in wresting gang control away from the Templars are a few new tools. Including throwing knives, a hidden kukri, the “Assassin Gauntlet” which is a grappling hook, dart gun and hidden blade all in one, and a bare knuckle boxing combat style. The bare knuckle boxing for me was one of the biggest draws, it looks visceral, real and painful, so proper for the setting.
Jacob also gets more mobility than in the past, via the use of his Assassin Gauntlet which works as a grappling hook and zipline in one. One of the biggest sticking points in Assassin’s Creed is the land traversal, so ideally this would fix that problem. Time will tell. New to the series is the ability to hit a button and enter and exit stealth at any time, denoted by Jacob removing his fancy little top hat and replacing it with a hood. I’m not really sure what kind of impact this will have on gameplay, I think Ubisoft just really wanted to give you the power to wear a top hat.
Perhaps even more exciting is Jacob’s use of a revolver. That’s right, you get a for real actual gun in this game. The further modernization of this game also includes vehicles and traffic. So far it’s all horse drawn carriages (maybe trains will come into the mix?) but Ubisoft promises you can drive these carriages, fight atop them, use them to hide and jump from the top of one vehicle to the next. By including two things Ubisoft said they’d never touch in the Assassin’s Creed series, modernized firearms and traffic, we could be inching closer to a modern day Assassin’s Creed. Or at least something focused around World War 2. Of course this is all pure speculation.
The sample city Ubisoft showed us in the event is London, though Ubisoft says it’s only “one of seven boroughs” the player will get to take over. London looks great, frankly. Despite my earlier fears that this was going to be yet another boring, vaguely European setting, they really did a great job of bringing Victorian London to life with its grit and grime. Beating out maybe even the recent Bloodborne in how well they’ve captured the setting.
There are more ladies than ever be for in the series, which I know is exciting for some, including myself. They make up the goons you’ll fight (gasp!), the membership of the Templars and the brothers… sisters of the Assassins. Quite literally the sisters, as the game co-stars Evie Frye who was Jacob Frye’s sister. There are rumors circling the internet that a few missions will allow you to play as Jacob’s more level headed twin, and she features fairly prominently in the preview (though in no gameplay footage) so this might be true. That said, despite the rumor we’re getting two characters, there is no multiplayer in this title. Ubisoft instead choosing to focus “solely on the single player experience.”
Slums are now the target of your territory missions, fulfilling the gameplay role of towers and fortresses before them. Gangs will apparently power Jacob’s army and, according to the preview, be capable of engaging in gang wars against Templar controlled factions. The gang combat looks pretty exciting, hopefully it makes it into the final product and won’t have to be scaled back for the sake of performance.
The story maintains echoes of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, with its similar focus on gang territories run by the assassins. In fact, in pretty typical Ubisoft fashion, a lot of the systems in Syndicate look vaguely familiar to other Ubisoft games. The travel mechanics of Far Cry, the destroyable environments of Chronicles China (which they swear is brand new to Syndicate), even the GPS system of The Crew. I’d go as far as to say this game seems to have much more in common with Far Cry than it does with Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which is in all honesty a good thing, as the Far Cry series at least manages to be fun.
The game will be released on October 23rd. I admit, it’s hard for me to get super excited for an Assassin’s Creed the way I did in the good ol’ days when I first saw Connor racing across a battlefield and Aveline taking a leap of faith in Lousiana’s bayous, but I suppose this Syndicate preview did what little it could to spark my interest. Ubisoft promises us that they “learned from all their mistakes” in Unity and are vewy, vewy sowwy about everything they did wrong, While it’s nice that they at least addressed the issue I’m still a bit cynical seeing as how they’ve had less than a year to complete Syndicate’s development cycle while also addressing Unity’s complaints. I’ll keep my fingers crossed however that this at least manages to be a fun romp, even if it might not be the most mindblowing of AC titles.
