Assassins Creed: Syndicate

Assassin's Creed Syndicate has been out for nearly a full month on console, and Zoe really enjoyed the antics of twins Jacob and Evie Frye in the new Victorian England setting. Recently though the latest entry into Ubisoft's annual franchise finally...

New toys and strong characters freshen up the Creed formula, but only for a...

Assassin's Creed Syndicate's story is one of the best in the series with a complicated and compelling relationship between Jacob and Evie at its heart. The attention paid to make stealth more palatable and the different play styles of the twins make it...

The combat is a lot of fun, with the addition of several new toys (provided largely by Alexander Graham Bell, who is lovely and Scottish) and also combos and quick-keys to enable you to use your knives, guns, darts and bombs in combat without too much...

UBISOFTThe broken launch of previous entry Unity hit the reputation of this long running franchise and arguably ruined what should have been a triumphant return of the Assassins in their first proper "next-gen" only title.It was a shame because once the...

Here's the good news – Black Flag wasn't a fluke. At least part of Ubisoft still knows how to make an Assassin's Creed game that is both true to its era and entertaining to play. I knew we were on to something good when I was having fist fights atop a...

The big disappointment with Assassin's Creed Syndicate is not that it isn't a big, beautiful, high-value AAA video game with an interesting central story, refined mechanics and action-packed fighting. It is. The disappointment isn't down to the game...

With every release, the same issues that Ubisoft has been rolling over year over year seem to have compounded themselves to a point where the entire package winds up suffering. Sure, this isn’t the broken mess that Assassin’s Creed Unity was, but in some ways it’s more of a blemish than its predecessor. After all, this is a functional game that simply isn’t all that fun to play, which is far more damning than any technical glitch could ever be.

But hopefully Syndicate's legacy is its memorable cast of characters, its entertaining script and - most importantly - how it manages to recapture the series' sense of fun. Its success is a testament to the work of Ubisoft Quebec, which found itself in charge of its first Assassin's Creed game at a critical point for the series. Thankfully, in the game's leading duo, in its new London playground and in the greater sense of freedom that Syndicate brings, it delivers.

Ziplining through London is thrilling, and the game allows you to organically discover missions and leaves you open-ended solutions lets you to create a meaningful, personal experience within its world. Coupled with strong, loveable leads and a seemingly endless procession of ways to leave your (fictional) mark on London's history, Assassin's Creed Syndicate is a shining example of gameplay and storytelling.

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate is a captivating adventure game that rebounds happily from the disappointment that was last year's Unity. Syndicate makes great use of its setting, doesn't overwhelm the player with mindlessness and stands on its own as a great open world game, even if its core is slowly growing tired.

That's really Assassin's Creed Syndicate's biggest triumph: It pushes back against the collected cruft of eight years of releases and spinoffs, an imposing accumulation of mechanics and lore and expectations. Syndicate doesn't get everything right. It doesn't solve all of the series' problems, and at this point, I'm not sure if any one game could. However, it's the first step in a uniformly positive direction that the franchise has taken in years.