DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

REVIEW: ASSASSIN'S CREED SYNDICATE (PS4/Xbox One/PC - PS4 version tested)

26/10/2015

12 Comments

 
Picture
And so Assassin's Creed comes to Victorian London. Specifically, the London of 1868.

Ah yes. This is how Britain is often depicted in foreign media: a smog-shrouded, rain-drenched, place, full of Cockney thieves in flat caps.

Presumably, it's because the 19th  Century was when Britain was at the height of its Imperialist powers, before we - particularly the English - developed a profound sense of nationalist shame, and became less interesting as a result.

The work of Dickens and Conan Doyle cemented a portrait of a Britain that is no more like that today than America is still full of cowboys, or France is full of men in blue and white striped sweaters and berets, cycling around with onions hung from their necks, going "Aw-hee-haw-le-pompt-de-do".

Anyway. Let's jump to the chase here: Assassin's Creed Syndicate is alright, but nothing more. It plays fine and looks great. However, when you plop that into a broader context, this is one of the worst and most infuriating games I've played all year.

CUT TO THE CHASE
It's impossible to play Syndicate without hearing UbiSoft's executives rubbing their hands together, as they imagine how much money they stand to make. It feels like the design brief extended to "Victorian London" and nothing more. It's a profoundly familiar mix of third-person free-running, fist-fights and stealth. 

There are really only five things that set this apart from other Assassin's Creed games: you now have a sub-Arkham grappling hook thing to help you get around the city (though it's nowhere near as smooth to use as Batman's), there are two playable characters (virtually interchangeable barring their genders), you can drive horse-drawn carriages, and you get to recruit gang members to your cause and fight alongside them in blink-and-you'll-miss-it turf wars.


Unfortunately, while these four things may be new to the series, they do nothing to set Syndicate apart from other games. Everything on offer here is painfully derivative, but delivered with zero wit, and an almost apologetic shrug. There's no conviction and no vision. Whatsoever.

The plot, the characters, the sheer storytelling are so thin that you'd be able to see through them if you held them up to a weak light. The story, such as it is, feels like a dismal excuse to cram in as many Victorian celebrities as possible - from Charles Darwin to Benjamin D'Israeli. The two main characters are bland and cliched, virtual ciphers, and practically interchangeable in terms of their skillsets.

The gameplay is achingly plagiarised - from both the series that Syndicate is a part of, and every other map-based, open world game out there (frankly, Ubisoft  should change its name to Ouroborosoft, so content is it with devouring itself).
 The capturing enemy outposts, freeing prisoners, cutting alarms, collecting this and that... how many more times are we going to do these things in the games?

The story missions aren't much better. Oh, yeah, occasionally you'll be asked to do something slightly different - such as, say, shoot at bad guys with a stationary gatling gun, from the back of a train. But even that is just cribbed from countless other titles, presumably because someone decided that it's exactly the sort of thing that they have in video games.


EMPTY CHALLENGE 
There's little to no challenge either. You'll level up so quickly that you'll soon become unstoppable. And that's a problem when you're dealing with missions and objectives that are so repetitive. Boredom sets in - and in a game of such enormity, if you're already growing bored (as I was) 30% of the way into the game, you're never going to finish it.

As for bugs... well, I never really had any massive problems with last year's supposedly unplayable Unity. In fact, if anything, Syndicate feels more unfinished to me. I've not had any major issues with it - there are just little niggles throughout, a feeling that it lacks one final coat of polish.

Things such as context sensitive controls not working when they're meant to. Or the repeated appearance of a stout, top-hatted gentleman, whose suit jacket blazes an anachronistic - and clearly unintended - scarlet. There are texture issues, some iffy pop-up. That sort of thing.


And then there's the dialogue... ohhhh... the dialogue. The same NPC lines repeated endlessly - often a dozen times in succession. There's no excuse for it. It feels sloppy, rushed out in time for Christmas - unfinished even. And it breaks the sense of immersion that the undeniably gorgeous graphics (a few iffy character models aside) otherwise do such a stellar job of conveying.

Picture
WASTE OF MONEY
Frankly, Assassin's Creed Syndicate is a waste of money. Not your money, mind - the tens of millions of dollars it cost to produce. Not a cent of that has been invested in producing a game that is anything other than safe to the point of tedium.

Artistically - and I'm speaking in a broad sense - it's an enormous failure, an exercise in resting on laurels rather than pushing either the series, the genre, or the medium into new areas. It comes across as cynical. And in some respects there's nothing wrong in that - UbiSoft don't owe us a masterpiece. But I honestly believe that if Assassin's Creed doesn't reinvent itself (as it admittedly did once already with Black Flag), then it's goodbye for the franchise. 

People are only going to be fed the same bland gruel so many times, before they start clenching their jaws, and turning their heads away.

​There'll be no more "Please, sir, can I have some more?" next time.


​SUMMARY: Gorgeous to look at, but painfully bland and derivative. It feels like all the effort went into the art design. I'm getting so sick of these sorts of games, and this has to stop.
SCORE: 1.868 out of 10

Watch Mr Biffo play a mission in Syndicate:
Picture
12 Comments
Granthon H
26/10/2015 12:43:42 pm

I'm never going to play any of these games -- I had my fill of this sort of thing with Thief 2, and nothing in your video suggests there is anything more worthwhile here. The impression I get is of a kind of creative dearth, leading to a massive missed opportunity.

What I come away from the video with is this: this game goes to great lengths to create immersion through realism, and then lets you run over a lamppost with a horse.

Surely this can't have been missed? Surely, this game at some point had the potential to be truly great? Aren't there ethical dilemmas and implications which could be asked of the player, things that could actually give their decisions in the game some kind of meaning? Is this completely shirked? Is there any actual interaction with characters, or do you just get a sequence of video cutscenes? (I feel as if I already know the answer.)

...I almost dread to ask, but: will people buy it?

Reply
Mr Biffo
26/10/2015 12:53:11 pm

Cutscenes all the way...

Reply
Kelvin Green link
26/10/2015 08:11:26 pm

I have this sad feeling that there are probably individuals who work on these games and have lots of great ideas for them but they never get implemented because of the pressure to get two or three of them out every year at regular intervals.

It's easier, quicker, and cheaper to use the same basic engine and change the superficial stuff, so that's what we get. Almost zero risk because people will buy it.

Reply
Merman link
26/10/2015 12:57:03 pm

Assassin's Creed 2 got so much right - good setting, plenty of side quests and a plot that drew me in.
Seems like it's all gone downhill since then and the series is still not fulfilling the promise that hyped the first instalment...

Reply
Mr Biffo
26/10/2015 12:58:18 pm

I've said it before, but Black Flag is GREAT.

Reply
Clive Peppard
26/10/2015 01:58:36 pm

Pre Black Flag, the repetitive nature of AC was sort of acceptable - they were polishing the mechanics to the nth degree and that was fine to some extent. Then Black Flag blew us all away by being flipping brilliant. Then Unity was released and we all hoped and wondered aaaand they went back to the standard dross. because of this i WILL NOT BUY SYNDICATE.

mitz
26/10/2015 01:06:30 pm

let me tell ye of a tale from days gone by (around 2006/7), 'twas from a time whence my comic shop did also selleth video games. occasionally we did receive emissaries from game companies - sony, microsoft and the like, but none were as down-trodded and beaten as the ubisoft rep.

this poor man had to visit our shop and show us clips of whatever dribble ubisoft had spurting out from it's greasy anus this upcoming quarter. a cooking mama ripoff, a rockband ripoff, another tom clancy turd. he had no gusto for these games, he knew what they were and how little ubisoft cares for the medium outside of the pound signs that flash in it's eyeballs at the thought of easy christmas sales from confused grandparents.

we used to tease this poor chap with cruel jibes about the quality of the product, and never once did he defend it. just sighed and took it like the defeated husk of a man he was. and we were terrible. once (and i'm not even making this up) we made him wear the anti-tom clancy hat (a piece of A3 card rolled into a dunce's cone with "tom clancy" written on it but also covered by that red circle thing like the ghostbusters logo. we told him he has to wear the hat and he's not allowed to tell us there a new tom clancy game coming out.

eventually the ubisoft rep stopped coming to visit us

Reply
mitz
26/10/2015 01:09:35 pm

the sony guy was pretty cool and wised up quick to the fact that if he wanted our attention for very long he had to bribe us, and so he used to bring us pick n' mix.

the microsoft rep was also nice but when he first gave us a business card we threw it aside and told him his name was now "mike r.o. soft" and we never bothered to learn his real name

reps were great because they basically had to take it and smile

Reply
Da5e
26/10/2015 03:13:07 pm

So, that shop doesn't sell games any more, eh?

Lex Man
27/10/2015 05:24:10 am

The rockband rip off was probably rocksmith which usp is that you get to play a real guitar it's good fun.

Ubi make rayman, zombi, far cry, grow home and this war of mine. They do make a fair few decent titles.

Reply
Steve McCreed
27/10/2015 08:59:26 am

Back in the early 2000s, Ubisoft were great. In one year they released Beyond Good and Evil, XIII, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The first couple of Assassins Creeds were (respectively) interesting and brilliant, before it became their annual Tomb Raider or FIFA. It's been a real shame to have seen them just become EA with a French accent.

Lex Man
27/10/2015 05:29:09 am

I'll get it when it's cheap. I'd kind of like knocking around victorian London for a few hours.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ