For a series focused on history, Syndicate feels refreshingly free from Assassin's Creed's own. Plenty has already been written about Assassin's Creed Unity, last year's underwhelming entry in the series. The intense negative reaction upon Unity's initial release lingered through its slow cycle of post-launch patches, to the extent that the game's season pass was cancelled and its major add-on was offered free as a result. The whole episode left such an impact on the franchise that any discussion about Assassin's Creed must currently acknowledge it, and any expectations for Syndicate's subsequent trip to Victorian London must be matched up to what came before. Thankfully, after Syndicate, I think Assassin's Creed can finally move on.
First things first, here are all the things Assassin's Creed doesn't have this year. There's no bolted on multiplayer mode or any co-op options. It doesn't have any connections to a broken web service. It doesn't require you to play a companion app to acquire everything in the game. It's like a human being actually sat down to design a game with the simple requirement that it felt fun, rather than it being a £50 experience designed by a committee to link up a web of interconnected transmedia nodes. It's a huge relief. Next, here are all the things Syndicate adds back to the series' sandbox - simple things such as picking up and hiding bodies, whistling to attract attention - as well as several new methods of traversal to reinvigorate the game's parkour gameplay.
Syndicate's new grappling hook - a brazen but welcome lift from Rocksteady's Arkham games - streamlines your rooftop exploration and stretches it out over vast distances. It lets you quickly zip between the towers of the Palace of Westminster or rappel down from St Paul's and stop midway to drop vertically onto the heads of two Templar targets. Alternatively, it works as a faster connection between two buildings during a chase - there's no need to find a rope linking rooftops or climb down from your stalking zone when tracking targets. Assassination missions become cat and mouse affairs where you can zip in and out of sight, losing your pursuers only to drop down and silently snuff out another.
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