Are you enjoying this game?

I haven't played it either, but am curious and the quick look was fairly encouraging. Assassin's Creed II is the only one of these games I've ever played, but it was quite good. Would going from that to Syndicate be a good move?

Where's the "I am waiting for PC version" choice?" Because I am waiting for PC version.

It's an AC game, it does AC things. At this point I've just accepted that I'll have this completely adequate game every year to keep me mildly entertained for a while. I'm not seeing how or why this is getting such praise when everyone hated AC3 though. It does nothing especially new or different from the other games in the franchise, in fact I'd say this is probably one of the "safest" games they've made. If you're into the games for the story then this one totally ditches the present day stuff and the past stuff is very "meh" with a TON of convenient story-telling.

@edgaras1103: That would be the "I haven't gotten it yet, but plan to!" That said, that's not entirely correct is it? I don't know, you just made it :P.

Its ok. Its the usual janky parkour with a missmatch of open world fillers and collectibles.

I plan to get it on sale later down the road and have fun then but no need to play it now.

This is actually a pretty good video on Syndicate. It's level headed and informative without taking a nosedive into typical internet hyperbole. After having played and finished Unity and seen a fair amount of Syndicate it all sounds about right.

I have this habit of planning on getting the new AC game, but then by the time I actually feel like it or have enough money, a new one is already out.

As much as I loved Black Flag, I've realized that it was so much more of a pirate game than an Assassin's Creed game, and that I'm just not as into the standard formula of the series like I once was. Syndicate looks very pretty, though. I don't think I'll play it unless it was a spontaneous pick up from a sale, and by the time that happened, 3 more AC games will have been released.

I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since the first one but I'm very interested in Syndicate because it takes place in London. I really want to explore London in games and it's disappointing that there are almost no options for that, so I'll probably end up buying this new one on sale sometime.

@edgaras1103: Not only am I waiting for the PC version, but I'm waiting on reports if it runs any better than the shit show Unity was. The fact that it isn't a simultaneous release is a good sign.

I'm really in the mood for a new Assassin's Creed game and if it's any good on PC, I'll probably get it.

After forcing myself to play around 50 hours of Unity, I feel confident claiming that it's not only the worst game of the current console generation, but one of the worst AAA productions of all time.

With that being said, I'm having an absolute blast with Syndicate.

It's mechanically tighter than the series has ever been, the mission design is actually solid, combat is a massive improvement, the Fryes are both likeable leads.

It's simply one of those sequels that rights nearly every wrong of its predecessor.

I've only played the first game and this game looks alright from the quicklook, but I'm not sure if I should just hop in it or play through the other ones.

All the recent AC:Syndicate coverage has sort of left me wanting for some Assassin's action. However I may just fire up Black Flag since that was "free" on XBL Gold a while back and I've not given it a go yet.

My short impressions of the game so far.

1). Story feels more cohesive this time around and both main characters (as you can play as either one except for a few specific missions) have a distinct personality.
2). Movement feels better as you cant do anymore those sudden leaps to your death (although the movement still isnt as smooth as it is supposed to be as the character still has difficulty navigating narrow doorways and certain types of ledges).
3) Thames is one of the main hightlights of the game for me. First I thought that it is just for scenery but it is actually a playable zone where you can jump from barge to barge as they travel along the Thames.
4) After a long series of playing male characters I can finally play a major Assassins Creed game with a female character which is a nice change in perspective.

And then some annoying stuff:

1) The game still relies on quantity when it comes to the collection type quests. At first I thought that they had learned when the first zone had only about 20 chests to collect but in the latest zone that i cleared there were 65 chests to collect. Ubisoft still hasnt learned that they should make getting those chests into mini puzzles and reduce the quantity of them. That would make the whole experience more enjoyable.
2) Enemies are still too easy after you upgrade your skills. You could just not upgrade your skills as a way of retaining some difficulty but I do want to use the new abilities. Ubisoft should really add difficulty levels in these games.
3) Getting money for stuff is still too easy. I have reached a point in the game where I am running out of things to buy unless new stuff appears later on which it hopefully will since i am in sequence 5 atm.
4) I really wish that we would have more areas than just one city. It seems that Ubisoft somehow really likes in simulating one city in a game which is fine but I would like to experience some other parts of England at this time period.

Though I still wish there would be sailing in this game.

Guys who are playing this game I have one of the most important question . Does it have ambient/exploration/free roam music?

Gotta give the game some credit and say that it reportedly is much better than I'd predicted. Although for me AC ended when they introduced projectile weapons. It kinda defeated the thrill of having to get up close and personal and trivialized the whole experience. On top of that around the time of Revelations they started to borrow too heavily from Batman and to me the game lost all of its uniqueness and I was simply fed up with what they had to offer.

@edgaras1103: Sporadic, not all the time. Mostly its just quiet and some subtle violins when you start a fight.

Real talk, I haven't played a single Assassin's Creed game, but I'm kind of interested in Syndicate. I've enjoyed what I've seen of the banter between the twins, the setting is right up my alley, and the climbing hook/city traversal seems fun.

But for some reason there's a whoppin' $40(!) difference between this game and Black Flag at my local store. And now I don't know if I can justify paying $40 extra for this one.

@49th: Not sure if you've played it, or even want to considering how many said it sucked, but I personally thought (as linear as the game can be), The Order: 1886 brought a really great older London atmosphere. I played that game recently, coincidentally just before I watched some footage of this game again, which made me remember this is somewhat similar in that regard, so it's one thing that brought my interest up for this game.

@ntm: I just finished 1886 and after that I can use me some more Dickensian action adventure. But I can't pick this up until the wife is done marking for the semester. After basically buying launch day for everyone of the series, the combination of ac revelation ,ac3, and unity had me gun shy to the point where I wasn't even going to look at this game until a week after reviews were out. I'm glad it's got some positive buzz.

On a side not was it just me or did 1886 have pretty much zero plot resolution, I feel like I just bought 1886: ground zeroes. Glad I got it for 20 $

@edgaras1103: Yes, and it's quite pretty.

Uhh there's a 40 dollar difference because this game came out two days ago, where Black Flag came out two years ago.

Yeah, I get that, but everything I've heard about this series is that the changes are very incremental, which makes me wonder if I shouldn't pick up Black Flag instead, as my first Assassin's Creed. Like, would that be a good idea, or has Black Flag aged poorly? Because the more I read about it, the more it sounds like Black Flag is one of the best, while Syndicate is "just okay". Is either a good choice for a newcomer to the series?

@xymox: It's only 2 years old. I started the series with AC II 4 years after it came out and I think it held its own. From what I understand AC IV would be an even better starting point since the whole Animus (modern day) arc is already after closure.

OHHH my bad, I should of been able to interpret that.

Honestly you should win out with whichever game you chose, though I want to preface that Black Flag is really different from any other game in the series. It's an amazing game, but it's different then what you are seeing in Syndicate because of the strong emphasis on ship combat. Even when you are on land the cities are not really comparable to the size and scale of London in Syndicate.

@garris: I got 1886 for $49.99, and honestly, I was happy I bought it at that. I actually liked the game, which was yet another game like Ryse, which I also surprisingly liked, and only bought on the One early to have more games to play. Both have glaring flaws, but I still enjoyed them and hope they have sequels. As for 1886's ending, yeah, it did basically end in such a way as you describe, but for me, it didn't bother me, especially considering the length of the game being twice as long, so I just expected to not only finish it much earlier, but end worse than it did, when all it was, was really an ending on a note that made me think they have plans for a sequel, and they did, so I hope that comes. I suppose the feeling of 'oh, that's where it ends' does come to mind, but the feeling of disappointment wasn't there, since I expected worse, and expectation goes a long way. If you play it expecting it to end with a handful of questions resolved, that's not going to happen, but if you go in fully knowing that you're going to get an end where you will expect a sequel, and have answers probably told there, then it may be okay. For me, it wasn't the end and how it didn't wrap things up I took away from it, it was being surprised at how much I enjoyed playing everything before it. Unfortunately, it has little replay value (not even a trophy to finish on hard, which I didn't check until I was a little more than half way through). The game lasts eight hours, and I expected four. 1886 has great aspects to me, superb aspects, but I don't know if I would consider it a great game overall, but a good one, perhaps near great. While I enjoyed it all, the game certainly does get more interesting, at least to me, once you're on the aircraft, and after Perceval dies.

@ntm:

Yes I quite enjoyed the game, I like the setting and the characters, and the overall premise.i enjoyed the feeling of the guns and using them. The stealth sections were in offensive enough not to spoil anything.

The disappointment came more from seeing a glimpse of a cool overall story. And then it's over.

Which I should have expected

Given its a new IP and bound to be sequelized but that disappointment was still there and felt more profound because there was the barest of resolutions to anything that had happened.

Anyway I'm excited to play this assassins creed especially after how disappointing unity was I didn't even manage to finish it.

@xymox: Black Flag is the stand out game in the franchise that's like 50% AC 50% some other game (which is much of the reason it's so highly regarded). It's still a great game, but if it's your first AC you should know it's a poor representation of the franchise. Syndicate is probably one of the better AC games, but if you're just looking for a good game Black Flag would be the better choice (unless you hate pirates).

@xymox said:

Get Black Flag. It's only a couple of years old, it hasn't aged at all.

If you like it you can always get Syndicate somewhere down the line, with the added bonus that you won't have to pay full price.

A friend of mine is really enjoying it but I think I've left the series behind years ago.

It's pretty much comfort food at this point. I skipped Unity, so I think I'm a little less fatigued with the series than I might otherwise be.

The characters are generally likable, although I really wish they actually played more differently than they do. Up until the very end of the skill tree they're pretty much the same. I'm choosing to play mostly as Evie only since I think her design is cooler. Jacob is what you would get if you took the Watch Dogs Dude and put him in Industrial England - he's UbiSoft "iconic," which means he was focused grouped to death and has no unique personality whatsoever.

The climbing has mostly improved in the sense that I have yet to accidentally leap off something to my death, and the grappling hook is a godsend. That said, things like small ledges and doors seem to give the characters inordinate amounts of trouble.

I think the biggest problem right now is the feature bloat. There are just too many systems and too many menus to go through and none of it is that interesting. There's about a billion weapons and armor bits, but they all fall under the same three of four categories of stuff with slightly different stats. Plus you have a gang upgrade system, two separate characters to upgrade, etc. It's just a much of muchness for the sake of being a muchness. What this series really needs is a featureal enema - flush out all the crap that's accumulated over the years and just start fresh.

They've mostly done away with the modern day plot, which is good, but I can't say I'm really into the plot they have for the time period either. Where I am in the game right now the plot has sort of boiled down to "evil Templar industrialist" without a lot beyond that. I think part of the problem is that I just don't find Industrial Revolution England to be that interesting of a setting. Assassins Creed is better when it picks an era that people might not know much about, both story wise (since there are more gaps to insert the characters into), and gameplay wise (since the setting is just more interesting in general). For the next game I'd prefer that they go back in time rather than forward.

Do I dunno. It's alright. I'm enjoying it enough to enjoy my purchase, but I'm also bummed because I can see the potential the series would have if UbiSoft were to actually put more than two seconds of thought into each iteration.

EDIT: Oh, and FUCK those missions where you have to arrest Templars. That's what has replaced eavesdropping as the "worst designed mission type ever created."

I have zero interest in playing. It's super sad too because I loved the first three console games of the series. But it was annualising the series that has really killed it for me. These game are too big and sprawling for me to go and play the same thing every year, I liked Black Flag (which I only got because it was free with my Xbox), but after that I was like "Nah Brah, I'm good for another four or five years before I look at one of these again.

Sadly I really thing Ubisoft are trying to drive themselves into the ground right now. It's like they know something we don't and their trying to bleed all of their franchises dry before it's too late.

This is definitely one of the "good" AC games, and after about four hours I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but I don't think there's enough here to reinvigorate the franchise. Like Black Flag, this is a good game marred by the typical AC nonsense--spotty controls, bad camera, glitches, poor mission design, overabundance of collectibles--that has existed since the first game. Having played through most of the games, the evolution of the series in terms of mechanics has always been about minimizing frustrations of existing systems rather than introducing any real innovation in traversal, stealth and combat, and Syndicate continues that tradition by making the combat very basic and by giving you the grappling hook to make climbing super easy.

Talking about the bounty hunts I assume ? :P And ye, they are awful =(

i tried black flag cause everyone told me it was a good game but between the crappy controls the boring boat parts and the games stupid real life plot i couldn't get past the fourth or fifth mission

@darkvare: The real life plot was the one that was the 'least' stupid!

Weirdly, it doesn't seem that bad. I mean, the fucker let me play the prologue and THEN decided to tell me it was 17 percent done installing so my opinion is subject to change.

Well, I was on the fence, but the video that @humanity posted in the thread convinced me to hold off for a sale. Looks pretty good but if it's just a buttoned up Unity with a better story, I can wait until it's not 60 dollars.

I've been itching for a good Assassin's Creed but as much as I want to play Syndicate something is telling me wait until Black Friday or even later because this game is going to be dirt cheap by then. I don't know what it is about those games but they depreciate in value very quickly.

I wrote up a big bit about the anti-AC circlejerk, but I know the anti-anti-circlejerk is nearly as bad so I'll omit that and just talk about the game.

I've played ~16 hours so far since release, and I'm enjoying every bit of it so far.

Pros:

• Rope-gun: Perfect addition to the open-world parkour. Doesn't make it nearly as fast as an Infamous or Prototype, but helps speed things along just enough.
• The Bounty Hunts that others don't like- having to plan out an exit path once you nab your target is a nice change of pace from the usual "kill the target and get out ASAP" missions.
• Carriage driving is a lot more enjoyable than I expected it would be. Controls are nice and tight but arcadey- if you were looking for Horse Carriage Simulator 2015 you've come to the wrong place.
• Lots of collectibles- it's an AC game, there are going to be collectibles to give you something to do in the open world. You don't have to engage with them if you don't want to.
• No Companion App- nothing you have to do on your phone in order to accomplish things in the core game.
• No Multiplayer - while some love the competitive multiplayer (I didn't mind the Co-op of Unity, when it worked), everything about this game is Single-Player focused. As someone with one multiplayer trophy away from Platinum in Black Flag, this pleases me very much.
• Optional Objectives- so far, they've been tough (occasionally VERY tough) but fair. When I've butted against them, it's usually because I'm trying to cut corners or missing something fairly obvious.
• The twins: Yes, Evie is great. But there's more to her than "She's a woman, and that's a 'Great Thing'." And there's more to Jacob than "Hurr durr I'm a man and Imma stab things wot with my pokey sticks". I play the twins like their personalities suggest- if I'm kicking in the door and slaughtering everyone in sight, I play Jacob. If I'm slipping in and trying to make my way through as quietly and precisely as I can, I play Evie.
• Violence and "Near-Death"- Near-Death is a new mechanic, where you can get an enemy to an inch of their life and set up "Multi-kills", which are usually pretty over the top and gruesome. There are different "Multi-kills" for different quantities of enemies Near-Death (most I've gotten is a 5-chain I think, maybe 4) and different weapons, and they take some finesse to set up. The payoff is some of the most brutal and satisfying finishers.
• The Thames. Open-world Frogger. Every time I have cause to run out along the boats it's pretty awesome.
• First name trophy name I've laughed out loud to in awhile.

Cons:

• Parkour is still a bit unpredictable- it's gotten a lot better, but there'll still be occasions where I'm trying to run up a set of stairs and Jacob/Evie decide the most prudent course of action is to jump up on to a light fixture along the stairway.
• Evading enemies on a carriage- I've yet to evade anyone pursuing me in a carriage. Seems the only way to resolve things at the point I am in the story is to get off the carriage and just start shooting everyone chasing me, and then hop back in and resume driving. There's probably something I'm missing at this point though.
• Crafting/Inventory UI could be better. Switching characters ties into this issue, as switching dumps you out of the pause screen and you have to go back in. I've crafted multiple items that I'm not able to equip yet due to my level.

Those are my thoughts so far. I'm liking it more than Unity, and possibly more than Black Flag as it feels like more of an AC game than Black Flag was. We'll see how that hold up as the hours tick by.

@xymox: just buy black flag. The only thing new about the new one is a shitty grappling hook. If unity wasn't such a piece of shit this years ac wouldn't have reviewed as well as it did.

Apart from cool boat stuff Black Flag has possibly the worst missions in the entire franchise. Constant tailing. The story is also pretty bad even by AC standards.

@Karthas: The carriage combat is sorta half the reason why the bounty hunter mission suck though :P Also, you can do quick-shots while driving, but it feels like an even worse version of the car combat in Watch Dogs. I guess I can see some enjoyment in the "challenge" of the extraction, but it's AC, everything is fairly simple and most of the time it's just you walking super slow trying to find a carriage.

Honestly, I'm totally vice versa (as I said in my original post), but I recognize I'm in the minority. The ship stuff was an extreme bore for me and I couldn't wait for it to be over with, but I thought they took all the aspects of the past AC's for on foot and made them either adequate, or great, with nothing poorly done, though I think Black Flag's combat was too simple, and less fun than what they brought in the Ezio trio. I enjoyed running around areas on foot. The only thing about the ship I liked was that it's a cooler way to get around than running out of the map, into a loading screen, and into another area. That said, I'd more often than not just use it as a fast travel. I also thought the story was more interesting than AC3, and I liked Edward.

@ntm: I liked running around as usual, although the sync points lacked their usual scale, but all the missions boiled down to following someone around while they peered over their shoulder every couple of minutes. Those couple of missions where you had to keep within eyesight of a tailing target while entering restricted areas were the worst. THE WORST!

EDIT: That said I think Edward Kenway was a breath of fresh air. I never liked Ezio and Kenway was a great change of pace. Someone that didn't give a damn about the creed or about templars - he just wanted to make some money and be a pirate. The supporting cast was also pretty good with memorable personas - I actually read up on some of the historical figures used in this game on my own time because I found them quite interesting. So yah, it's a pretty good AC game, but I still say the missions themselves were pretty goddamn bad.

@humanity: But see, that's the thing I found 'adequate', because they brought that into three if I remember correctly (where it wasn't in the previous games before it), and I absolutely hated it in three. The missions where you'd have to stay inside the circle as you listen in, three was awful with those, but going into four, while I wouldn't call those parts amazing by any stretch, I was totally fine with them, so pleasantly surprised.

@ntm: Strangely enough I played AC3 directly after Black Flag, I even wrote a blog about it, and yah AC4 seemed to take a lot of mechanics from AC3 and just made them fun.

Unity was my last AC and I would say I liked it moreso than any AC except 1 and 4. It was back to the basics of assassinating people and navigating through the city. Syndicate looks like AC2 to AC1 with an overload of meaningless systems with level design that'd rarely ask of you to do anything with them. Everything people were saying about how Syndicate has these elaborate "Hitman"-esque missions must have forgotten Unity was the one that brought this to the franchise, if it were not so buggy and thoroughly mediocre story-wise (as EVERY AC has been). And even so, those missions weren't particularly fun. It's like Deus Ex "there's a dozen of ways to sneak in! Either go in through a vent or on ladder", which never truly felt open and interesting enough as a Hitman game was.

Even saying that I liked Unity, I am absolutely done with the franchise. I can't bring myself to play another one of these. Every single one of these games squandered any potential in the gameplay, story, and setting the franchise might have had. It needs a total overhaul like what Unity was trying to do for AC. Yep, because MGSV.