I gotta say, I'm feeling a little hornswaggled.
Leaps of faith are an integral aspect to the exploration of any given Assassin's Creed game, as your hooded figure tumbles gracefully into a convenient stack of hay from high vantage points, but by now it may well also refer to choosing to play a new entry in the Assassin's Creed franchise because of positive word of mouth. To say that the series has stagnated is redundant; the games have thrown away any pretense of an overarching present-based narrative, with each successive game since the maligned Assassin's Creed III simply spinning their wheels with the same basic plot about the modern day Assassins and Templars tracking down the ancient and power Pieces of Eden and using the Animus, which is capable of allowing the user to relive genetic memories from those in the past, to determine their present locations. It feels like a narrative holding pattern from which to create as many sequels and spin-offs as Ubisoft deems necessary, or can get away until the bottom finally drops out.
However, the bigger issue is that the Anvil engine is creaking under its own weight and has been doing for years. It receives the occasional reboot - it switched to AnvilNext for 2012's AC III and AnvilNext 2.0 in 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity - but it's clear from the issues that persist from game to game that these updates are to facilitate expansions and additions to the same model rather than one crafted entirely anew, like building a conservatory on a house that should probably be knocked down and rebuilt from scratch. Either that, or these problems keep sneaking in every time they rebuild the engine, and I'm not sure which possibility is the more troubling.
When I say that leaps of faith have become the norm when choosing to pick up any given year's annual Assassin's Creed game, I'm only in part referring to the surprisingly poor Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed Unity, neither of which impressed as they launched with a copious amount of technical issues and unnecessary feature creep - presumably an aspect of their new engine reboots. I'm referring to the fact that, more likely than not, you're going to get disappointed by the same problems that have plagued the series for the many years of its existence, in spite of the fact that you've been told by reputable sources that "this is the one Assassin's Creed that will bring people back into the fold" or "they finally got Assassin's Creed back on track this year". I got burned when they said this about Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which I didn't particularly care for, and am discovering the same sinking feeling once again while playing last year's Assassin's Creed Syndicate.
Let me be clear: there's a certain sterling baseline quality to these games, to the extent that I'd never rate any of them - though I very much doubt I'll ever play Unity - less than three stars going by this site's metric for reviews. The stealth is fair with regards to detection and offers variations in its approach; the combat, if not always the preferable option in a scenario, at least moves quickly and cleanly; and the open-world exploration and city investment meta-game is as curiously engrossing as it's always been. AC: Syndicate does all three of these aspects supremely well for an Assassin's Creed game due to its myriad tweaks and enhancements. My dissatisfaction is entirely due to how AC: Syndicate, while a perfectly capable game when taken on its own merits, is indicative of a greater issue with the Assassin's Creed franchise; namely, that its core gameplay never seems to improve in a significant way or that anything ever seems to get fixed. It almost feels lazy, which is an incredibly unfair assessment given the amount of work put into the game's setting, its plot and its new features - I particularly love the zipline and how it makes vertical traversal that much more palatable - but instead applies to Ubisoft, by which I mean the corporation rather than the city-based studios that developed the game, and how little investment they exhibit in the AC series.
While a few of the following persistent gameplay issues are subjective in nature, I can't help but feel that Ubisoft has received enough negative feedback on them to acknowledge, and then apparently ignore, their detrimental effect on the games. Therein lies my biggest problem with all of this: Ubisoft is happy to play the heel insofar as its ubiquitous flaws are concerned, hiding behind their villainous facsimile Abstergo and poking fun at their own brushing off of user feedback and the increasing presence of obnoxious and immersion-breaking social media and microtransaction hooks. When the AC games introduced the user feedback feature in Black Flag, it felt like a joke to many players: was Ubisoft genuinely taking our concerns to heart, or was this part of the game's narrative framing device as one of Abstergo's faceless playtesters? Naturally, people were hopeful for the former, but given the amount of anecdotal evidence of people rating tailing or eavesdropping missions as low as they could coupled with the fact that those same missions would continue to appear in future games, we had our undesired answer. I will say that Syndicate doesn't go to the tailing mission well quite as often as Black Flag does, but then Ubisoft probably read a few of the same "Why I'll Always Rate an Assassin's Creed Tailing Mission One Star" response articles that I did, irrespective of their in-game focus testing results.
Of my two biggest issues with the Assassin's Creed franchise since AC III, Syndicate actually accounts for one of them: the awkwardness of a free-running engine that relies on a single button. Previously, it was very easy for the player to accidentally run up the side of a building when chasing an NPC through the streets. Syndicate has countered this by providing additional contextual buttons when free-running to indicate whether you want the protagonist to move upwards or downwards: without holding the buttons for either of these extra modifiers, they'll continue to move forward on the plane they're on, which greatly improved this aspect of the game when the player was required to move quickly. However, my second issue was with the psychologically manipulative and restrictive "full synchronization bonus". These bonuses were held over the heads of those poor saps - I count myself in their numbers - who are insistent on achieving 100% completion, and often required that the player perform actions or follow strategies that they wouldn't have opted for naturally because it clashed with their preferred approach to missions. They were often prohibitively difficult also, if not to the extent of being nigh-impossible than at least to a greater degree of frustrated reloading, and - increasingly - remained concealed until the very small segment of the mission to which they pertained, which meant that players could often miss these stipulations entirely. Syndicate makes these a little more visible than they have been in the past, as the instructions to any given section of a mission are clearly displayed in the top corner, but the fact that they continue to persist either indicates that Ubisoft believes that their presence is beneficial to the game - a sort of achievement-based set of bonus objectives - or they don't consider them detrimental to one of Assassin's Creeds greatest strengths: the versatility it offers to its players to approach each scenario in whatever way and with whichever tools they wish. I think back to the very first Assassin's Creed game and how there was little obvious structure behind each of its signature assassinations: they simply involved watching the target until the player found a moment of vulnerability in which to strike. As rough and repetitive as that first game was, there was a purity in how it let the players decide how and when best to eliminate their targets, in much the same way that earlier Hitman games did. Full synchronization bonuses are frequently anathema to this freedom, this player agency, and their continued existence irks me to no end.
Syndicate, while introducing some important new tools to the Assassin Order's belt such as its zipline gun and Alexander Graham Bell-designed stun grenades (what?), has also opted out of many of the prior important innovations that the series has introduced. While no-one is going to miss Assassin's Creed: Revelations's tower defense missions, I do find myself regretting the lack of ship combat - like the English navy wasn't supremely well-regarded during this era - and having subordinate assassins sent out on international missions for additional resources or employed as a trump card for removing groups of enemies while on the job. Black Flag rendered the assassin missions almost unbearable with its inflated waiting times, so I can understand why that aspect was excised, but the hoodlums that the Frye twins can recruit in Syndicate are a far cry from the quiet and deadly professionals that always had Ezio's back in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and beyond. Nor am I enamored with the game's returning to Assassin's Creed 1-style territory-capture missions which play out identically every time: the child worker liberation missions in which you have to systematically remove every guard while rescuing the minors, for example, or the bounty hunt missions which, without exception, involve dragging a marked criminal to a wagon and driving to an arbitrary rendezvous point while being beset with enemies. The game has just five of these mission types, each of which are repeated many times apiece.
And then we come back to those aforementioned obnoxious microtransactions. I can't speak to how present they were in Unity, but they're almost overwhelming here. Uplay has expanded to become Ubisoft Club, greatly increasing the number of purchasable in-game items and points-awarding achievements that comprise its commerce, both of which sit in their respective in-game menus telling you to sign in and get involved today in-between those locked by story or side-activity progress. In addition, certain collectibles have corresponding maps that can be bought from any vendor in the city, with the exception of two important sets - one that will open the way to a mysterious vault with some presumed fantastic treasure within, while the other gives you more information of import to the lore-hungry player on the scheming of the present-day Templars regarding the precursor artifact du jour - the maps for which can only be purchased with "Helix" credits. These Helix credits can also buy "time-savers", which essentially fast-forward parts of playing the game that some players might find inessential for whatever reason, and additional gear. The downside? They're the game's microtransaction currency. Some of them can be earned in-game, though it's not quite explicit how or where they can be procured, but you can always - and are encouraged - to buy them directly with real money. Microtransactions in a full-priced retail game is a poor enough showing on its own (and its increasing ubiquity in other AAA games hardly excuses its ugliness here) but the worse part is, once again, the fact that this purchasable in-game currency is actually shown to be Abstergo's doing, rather than Ubisoft's. Abstergo is presented time and time again to be lead by morally-deficient fascists who seek to control, rather than oblige, the people to whom they offer their services, yet Ubisoft wants to ensure that the line between Abstergo and themselves might well not exist. It's a curious bit of self-deprecation, but one that doesn't really excuse player-scalping measures like this.
Before I sign off I do want to say that Assassin's Creed Syndicate is a perfectly fine game, for all my "treading water" kvetching about it and the franchise as a whole. I'd happily give it the same three stars in a hypothetical review that I gave Black Flag, but I'd be hard-pressed to go over that. I can't help but feel that every time we get one of these "Assassin's Creed is back!" responses from a new AC game - often by reviewers whose task it is to review every Assassin's Creed game, and are especially thankful when it isn't a broken mess that year - it's because it has immediately followed a particularly terrible one and has done nothing more substantial than some course-correction. That was certainly the case with Black Flag, who got the easy task of following up Assassin's Creed III in a way that didn't want to make people claw their eyes out, and it appears to be case also with Syndicate and its burying of nightmare fuel memories of the literally faceless French nobles of AC: Unity. One of these days I'm going to stop being hoodwinked by all the approbations that follow an Assassin's Creed game that is merely satisfactory instead of the raging garbage fire that was its predecessor.
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