Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

I went into Syndicate expecting a competent cleanup job after the mess that was Unity, and came out genuinely surprised by how much fun it stacks into a single playthrough. The setup is straightforward enough: you control Jacob and Evie Frye, twin assassins dropped into an 1868 London squeezed dry by a Templar-backed industrialist. Jacob is the brawler - blunt, reckless, built for gang warfare and street fights with knives, swordsticks, and knuckle-dusters. Evie is the planner, a stealth-first operator who makes actual silent runs feel viable for the first time in the series. Swapping between them depending on the mission type keeps things fresher than a single-protagonist structure would. The rope launcher is the real star here. It lets you scale any rooftop in seconds, zip across streets mid-chase, and set up aerial assassinations without the usual fumbling for handholds. Combined with dedicated ascent and descent controls that finally stop your character from climbing things you didn't ask them to climb, traversal across Syndicate's seven-borough open world just feels good. The map is large - sprawling, really - and using the rope launcher instead of fast travel means you organically stumble across side work on the way to story missions. Carriage chases add another layer to street-level movement, though they handle more like a breezy distraction than a deep mechanic. Gang territory control, where you push the Blighters out of each borough by completing missions and building up your crew the Rooks, gives the open world a loose but satisfying sense of progression. Combat is Arkham-style, built on attack, counter, and stun. It works well in short bursts. The problem is Syndicate never really evolves it - later in the game you are doing the same rhythm against larger crowds, and the novelty wears before the credits. The stealth mode, mapped to a single button that raises your hood and drops enemy detection range, is a genuine improvement over previous entries. Stealth finally feels like a real choice rather than a grudging alternative to just fighting everyone. The story holds up through most of its runtime, helped along by encounters with figures like Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale, but the main villain is undercooked and the final boss fight is an anticlimactic quick-time scramble that squanders the narrative momentum built before it. Side missions are plentiful but lean repetitive after a few hours. For anyone approaching this in 2025 rather than at launch, Syndicate benefits enormously from playing after the Unity disaster - it shipped in solid technical shape, runs reliably on PC, and has none of its predecessor's notorious bugs. It is not a reinvention of the formula, and it knows it. What it does instead is refine almost every element Unity got wrong, give you two distinct protagonists with genuinely different playstyles, and wrap it all inside one of the series' best-realized settings. If you have never touched it and have any affection for the pre-Origins style of Assassin's Creed, this is the one to play.

Alex · Scout Team

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