The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Odyssey

 

Context

When Assassin's Creed Odyssey originally came out, having played all AC games from the start up until Unity, I was so disgusted by Unity that I signed out of buying any further games in the series. For me, Unity was a heap of a game, although it had some positives, these were outweighed by the rife bugs, broken stealth and poor cohesion of the story with all the game activities.

Odyssey's release and subsequent review came after me being intrigued by the series again since Origins, and the positive reviews for Odyssey sucked me back into the series again.

It was actually quite a while before I played Odyssey, because I went back and played Syndicate (review here) and Origins (game review here and DLC review here) first so I could keep to playing the games in order.

I loved Origins, to the extent that I felt it was tied for greatest game in the series with Assassin's Creed 2, so I had very high hopes for Odyssey.

The Setting

Odyssey continues the theme of Origins in going much further back in history to tell the story. Origins was set during the time of Julius Caeser in Ancient Egypt, so just before the count of years switches from BC to AD. Odyssey goes back even further, to Ancient Greece circa 431-422 BCE.

As might be expected, the landscape of Greece is much different to Egypt. Odyssey presents us with a larger map than Origins. However, a fair portion of the map is devoted to the sea. Yes, that's right, sea-faring returns to Assassin's Creed with Odyssey.

Ancient Greece is a world of islands and large land masses lush with vegetation and pockmarked with traversable mountain ranges. It's a much different environment to Origins, where you had to jump on horseback to go between major settlements, whereas in Odyssey you can largely get around by foot. One thing I really liked in Origins was that I rarely fast travelled, and preferred to get on horseback, set my horse off to autopilot to where I wanted to go, and then switching to Senu (the eagle) to watch the landscape go past from on high. In Odyssey, if somewhere isn't close enough to go by foot you'll probably just fast travel. For some reason, putting your horse in auto-pilot seems to send you on very convoluted routes to your destination. I do somewhat miss the appeal of the long distance horse-riding in Origins, but Odyssey replaces it with having much more to do quite close together. Islands tend to contain several places of interest in smaller areas to Origins and even the large land masses are more densely packed then the deserts of Egypt.

The Protagonist

You can choose between one of the siblings of Kassandra (female) and Alexios (male) to be your character. The choice is almost completely cosmetic, with the majority of NPC speech referring to you in neutral terms as the Misthios (Mercenary) rather than by gender. You can sow your oats in this game, but Greece is a very bisexual culture it seems, because whether you are male or female doesn't really seem to impact who your character can enjoy him or herself with. Without spoilers, the character you pick does determine the gender of one of your main enemies as well, but that person's identity is by the same nickname rather than their real name, so that doesn't really have any impact either.

There's no direct difference between choosing Kassandra or Alexios

There's only two things I think that might influence the player's choice of which character to pick.

To start off with Kassandra is the canon character. Ubisoft went through this period of developing stories for female characters, only for executives to overrule having a female lead because "it wouldn't sell." In fact this happened with Origins as well, where originally you were supposed to play Bayek's wife, Aya, as the main character. In the end, you mostly play as Bayek in such a well written story and character I couldn't imagine it being any different. With Odyssey, however, the "game not selling" was solved by allowing the player to pick either gender.

The second consideration is the voice acting. Both voice actors do a good job of voicing their character as the main protagonist. However, the other sibling does feature in the game, and Alexios's voice actor does a spectactularly appalling job of voice acting in the alternative role, to the point that it is ridiculous and atmosphere breaking.

When it first release, my original play through Odyssey was with Kassandra, and Alexios's voice acting was so bad I really had to think very hard about playing my new run through with Alexios. I was very concerned his voice acting would leave me irritated after a while, and there is no option to change characters part way through the game. In the end, I did decide to play as Alexios second time around, and I'm pleased to say it's been absolutely fine and not really much different to playing Kassandra with regards to the voice acting.

The Gameplay

As might be expected, Odyssey has its gameplay routes in Origins and anyone who has played one will recognise the other.

The basics are very very similar to Origins. The general principles of the parkour, stealth movement, eagle vision, scouting with your eagle, collectibles, location-specific tasks, inventory and loot system and experience and levelling are all there and feeling familiar. However, Odyssey does refine and develop on quite a lot of the game playing aspects to Origins, so much so, that I'll split the gameplay part of this review into sub sections.

Combat

The basics of being spotted by enemies and then entering into a combat "mode" are the same, as are most of your choices of weapons and armor. However, Odyssey does change and add quite a few new features to combat.

The most obvious difference in Odyssey is that your character has no choice of a shield. If you are not holding a two-handed weapon than your character has their spear in their other hand. This means you can no longer hold a block-stance against enemy attacks. To be fair, blocking wasn't great in Origins because many attacks were unblockable anyway, and I found dodging to be more consistent.

In Odyssey, you cannot block, and instead you'll be relying on dodging or parrying. Parrying did technically feature in Origins, but in Odyssey it is much more effective and you'll be using parrying and dodging together. If you parry certain attacks at the right time you'll gain an advantage. Similarly, if you dodge attacks at the right time you gain another advantage. Rather than just standing there with your shield up, you'll be poised to watch your enemy attacks and react accordingly. In Origins, it was easy to nerf the combat system with a combination of strong attacks and dodging. In Odyssey, combat works the best the way it was intended.

No shields for your player in Odyssey, but parrying is extremely effective.

After the lack of a shield, the next thing you may notice will be that archery is managed differently. In Origins you had 4 different types of bow that would be effectively long-range, spread-shot, high-power or standard. In Odyssey, these variations don't exist as bow types and all bows fundamentally behave the same. The special abilities of bows now largely fit alongside other weapons, such as increasing damage with certain types of attack, being on fire, increasing critical damage and things like that.

The additional bow features that were in Origins now take the form of Abilities you can invest in as part of a skill tree in Odyssey. There's a feature for spread-shot, there's a feature for long-range, as well as the rest of the one out of three skill trees that is entirely devoted to archery-related skills.

Expanding on the skill system, there are three basic damage types and skill trees:

• Hunter: For archery-related skills. Hunter damage relates to your use of bows.
  
• Warrior: For melee-related skills. Warrior damage related to your use of melee weapons.
  
• Assassin: For stealth-related skills. Assassin damage relates to your use of your spear, which is Odyssey's alternative to the hidden-blade in all the previous AC games.
  

The skills available are wide-ranging, and can tremendously benefit your chosen type of gameplay. Melee combat is pretty much unavoidable, so any player will need to invest here, but for the Hunter and Assassin trees, you can probably invest in these trees only so much as it suits your gameplay. In true Assassin's Creed style, I still very much favour stealth gameplay and hardly bother with archery, and I have invested accordingly.

Specific to open-combat, as well as the more generic upgrades to improve your damage or armor rating, you can also opt for abilities to poison or set fire to your enemies, as well as "borrow" attacks from the Assassin tree to augment your openly-offensive capabilities.

Stealth

If you've done any reading into Assassin's Creed Odyssey, particularly opinions of other players on Steam, Reddit and the like, you've probably heard a lot of players say that stealth has been rendered pointless or useless in Odyssey. This is absolutely not true, but what is true is that stealth no longer rules absolutely supreme like it did in previous games.

Origins gave us some introduction into the end of stealth attacks being universal one-hit kills, but it came up so rarely that it really wasn't much of an issue.

On Odyssey, if you don't invest in and play your stealth abilities properly, it will indeed end up feeling like stealth is useless. What stealth has become is a much more deliberate choice as to whether you want this to be part of your gameplay or not. Instead of just defaulting to being an unstoppable attack from the start of the game, stealth is now more of a non-open-combat high-damage attack that you can invest in to maximise your effectiveness.

Firstly, you need to invest in your stealth skills. The most absolutely critical skill is the Critical Stealth attack, which will triple your stealth damage when fully invested in. Secondly, for a modest investment you can open up a second loadout in your inventory. All weapons and armor can feature perks that increase either your warrior, stealth or hunter damage. Start focussing on building a stealth loadout, where you prioritise increasing stealth damage over everything else, including armor.

Regular stealth attacks generate adrenaline, that you use when activiting special skills. Critical stealth attacks use adrenaline points. If you get down to zero adrenaline, your character will auto refill back up to one point, enabling you to make another critical stealth attack.

Stealth is no longer a guaranteed kill, but it is still extremely effective if you develop your character.

Now, instead of just being able to stealth around an enemy encampment stabbing everything in the back unseen, you've got to keep a watch out on how strong your enemy is. Through careful use of the regular and critical stealth attacks you'll be able to stealth kill 95% of your enemies. For half of the remaining baddies, you'll be able to follow up the stealth attack with the regular attack that borrows from the Assassin tree. This will still quickly kill your enemy but make a lot more noise, which is why you have to isolate your enemy to do it. For the remaining enemies, you'll need to leave them until last you can launch a surprise attack on them and then finish them off in open combat.

Stealth is a very different affair in Odyssey, but with the right investment, I actually like it even more than in the previous games.

Equipment and Loot

We've covered some of the changes in equipment and loot earlier. Essentially it's the same system as in Origins, but more refined and effective.

Much more directly applicable in Odyssey are the item perks. Many weapons and armor pieces feature direct buffs to specific damage types as well as lower buffs across all damage types, armor rating, fire and poison damage and protection and improvements to your skills. These perks are now significant enough that you might find that piece of armor you have which is now 10 levels below your current character level is still better than the rare armor piece you have at your current level. Being able to upgrade good weapons and armors at blacksmiths in the game is much more useful in Odyssey then it was on Origins.

Odyssey also features a personalised perk system as well called Engravings. You unlock engravings by completing certain tasks or milestones in the game, such as killing a certain number of a type of enemy or finding a weapon with the effect for the first time. You can pay blacksmiths to add the engravings to your weapon or armor and therefore add the additional perk.

To be honest, I found the engraving system forgettable. The problem is that you are unlocking higher-power engravings all the time, but once you add one to your item, it is permanent. Therefore I feel like I am forever in a state of not wanting to engrave my item because I'll want to apply a more powerful one later on.

One of my favourite new mini-features of Origins was the tomb locations. I really enjoyed snooping around in these dark cobwebbed places trying to find all the treasures. Origins' tombs were relatively few and far between, but generally pleasantly in-depth. Odyssey expands on the tombs and now there are many more of them. However, the downside is that Odyssey's tombs tend to be much shorter, to the extent that it feels like 3 or 4 of Odyssey's tombs could have made up one Origins tomb. On the plus side, more skill points, and at least the tombs are there to be explored and not something that didn't make it into Odyssey!

Tombs in Odyssey are smaller than Origins, but there are a lot more of them.

Seafaring

Although there are clear similarities to the sea-faring aspects to Black Flag and Rogue, it is a much smaller part of the overall gameplay then either of those. Elements you'll find familiar are the basics of naval warfare, ship boarding, obtaining resources and sailing from island to island. However, all of these things in Odyssey have been streamlined in Odyssey, in my opinion to great benefit. Sea battles, ship boarding and resource gathering were all great fun in Black Flag and Rogue, until you had to do it for the 100th time. In Odyssey, sea battles are simpler affairs, with fewer weapons to choose from, ship boarding much more streamlined, with a quick jump on board, work through the enemies on board, a quick raid of treasure chests and then back to your own ship again. Also, there's nothing particularly special about gathering resources via sea-faring in Odyssey, it's just an opportunity to get more of stuff you can get elsewhere, so there's no obligation to go about pirating in Odyssey just so you can build up your ship or anything else.

Seafaring again returns to the series, but in a very streamlined form.

Odyssey also dispenses with the tedious collectibles and generic strips of lands that bogged down Black Flag. Sea-faring is important in Odyssey, but almost always you'll be on sea either for a specific mission, or to get to another island.

Story and Quest System

This is probably the main area on Odyssey where the many refinements made in Odyssey actually leave the game worse off than Origins.

One of the first things you'll notice about the quest system, especially if you have the DLCs, is that upon getting past the introduction and into the proper part of the game, you'll get about 50 quests appear in your quest log. With Origins it was not particularly difficult to keep a sense of order in your quest log and take a measured approach to moving through individual quest lines and stories rather than just racking them up. It meant you could keep some cohesion between the very first conversation you have with an NPC that kicks off a quest, until you finish up that mini storyline and move onto the next one.

In Odyssey, as well as the spawning of a silly number of quests as soon as you start, Ubisoft have fallen heavily back into one of their old practices of adding "filler" into the game content. The different types of quest you can get are:

• Main story or one-off side story quests.
• NPC quests that only become available based on previous decision, which start off with unique NPC conversation but then turn into a generic filler quest.
• NPC quests that are only available for a limited period of time that are exclusively generic filler quests.
• Mission board quests that are one-off and contain some unique NPC conversation.
• Mission board quests that are non-timed and generic filler.
• Mission board quests that are timed and generic filler.
• Ship mission board quests that are the same as the above mission board quests.
• Timed and non-timed quests that are filler, but give a unique resource as a completion reward.

The game tells you nothing about all of this, and I remember on my first play through being utterly confused as to what was unique content versus filler. Should I be taking on these timed missions while I have a chance or risk losing the chance to see some game content? Should I just take on every single quest I can? The game leaves you to work out that filler quests even exist.

I hate this type of generic content, it is devoid of any unique experience and completely detracts from the enjoyment of the game in my opinion.

Quests, quests and more quests, it's too much! Look how small that scroll-bar is!

As far as the unique content of the game goes, the writing is reasonably good. Many characters are recurring and generate enough interest for you to care about what happens to them. Sokrates was of particular interest to me, Ubisoft does a good job of taking what could be a very dry philoshoper character and turning him into someone really interesting. Sokrates is very thought provoking, but is he actually quite annoying? In true Sokrates fashion, the answer is yes and no!

In relation to the writing, however, there is a theme in Odyssey that is ramped up way more than any of its predecessors, which is the presence of mythological and "special" creatures. Although there is an element of this with Origins, particularly in one of the DLCs, it's left ambiguous as to how much in reality these elements are and how much is interpretation of Bayek's perceptions. However, in Odyssey they have outright placed mythological creatures in the "real" game world under the guise of them being related to artifacts of the precursors, and the other "special" creatures, which are supposedly naturally occuring prime specimens of regular animals in the game, have no explanation given. In my opinion, the premise for these creature is paper thin, and a big step too far away from reality for the series, which is meant to be grounded in the real world, albeit one with the precursor race and everything to do with them (credit to TheCascador on Reddit for highlighting these points).

Overall Summary

Assassin's Creed Odyssey has a lot going for it. Rather than just doing what they've done countless times before, Ubisoft has taken the time to refine many parts of the gameplay and add many new featurettes. Ancient Greece as a setting is beautiful and the graphics are excellent, as is the combat and the ability to take part on much bigger battles than seen in any previous games.

And yet, there is something about Odyssey that is noticeably lacking when compared to Origins. I absolutely fell in love with Ancient Egypt and Bayek, the story of the game and the setting. Yet with Odyssey, despite the fact that on the surface it should be just as captivating, it does fall short of generating the captivation and excitement of Origins.

Personally, I think the severe bloat in filler quests and content takes a huge shine off Odyssey. Also, I felt that although the story writing does have a lot of highlights, actually the main quest line feels simultaneously a little ridiculous and unexciting. There are some genuinely great moments in Odyssey, but it seems to somewhat get lost in the rest of the game.

As regards to the final score, I feel it's obvious that Odyssey doesn't deserve "best in the series" marks like it's predecessor Origins does. Really, my chosen score would be 3.5, but as I don't do halves, do I mark Odyssey up to 4 or down to 3?

In the end, I felt it would be too harsh to give Odyssey a score of 3, which would put it on par with AC3 and Liberation and a comparison to Syndicate probably feels fairer. I know Syndicate is not a favourite for a lot of people, but I really enjoyed it. However, it is not nearly as wide-ranging in terms of ambition as Odyssey, so for me this balances out.

The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Origins DLCs

Assassin's Creed Origins is such a large game compared to its predecessors that I decided to separate my review of the DLCs to the main game. You can read the main game review here: The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Origins.

Discovery  Tour

The Discovery Tour is not really a game, it is more like a virtual museum and it looks like it is designed to be consumed as a completely standalone experience to the main game. Why do I say that? Well to being with, the controls are exactly the same as the main game, but it acts like you have no idea how to move around.

You also have the option to wander around Egypt without combat and without missions, but if you've played the game, I'm not sure what appeal that has, because you would have seen everything already, so this is another reason why I think this DLC is designed for people who likely have not played the main game, and maybe are not even familiar with Assassin's Creed in general.

The best feature of the Discovery Tour are the virtual museum tours. There are hundres of "exhibits" clustered together in topics. For example, learning about Ancient Egyptian temples and their place at the centre of Egyptian life is around 20 exhibits, but a quick tour on Beer and Bread is 3 or 4 exhibits. You can opt to embark on one of these tours and the game will plot a sequential path for you to walk you through the tour. For each exhibit, you get an "in game" view of what the narrator is describing, which can be anything from people baking bread, preparing the dead, fields of crops or essentially anything to do with Ancient Egyptian life. Once the camera has moved to the subject, you'll get a museum-style narration of the scene depicted and often you can also view a photograph or diagram of the the subject from real life as well. When viewing a mummified corpse in a tomb, for example, you have the option of seeing a photograph of a real museum piece of a mummy whilst listening to the narration.

The virtual museum tours provide you a narrated journey along a set path of sights.

Going through the tour is probably somewhat of a challenge for people who have completed the main game, because although fascinating, it is a slow affair to go through all the exhibits one by one and pay attention. I do like the fact that there are some trophy/achievements tied to viewing one of the complete tour sets, because this is what pulled me in to even looking at the tour in the first place, and I'm sure it will be the same for many players.

My recommendation would be to not just try and push through the tour in its entirety, but instead break it down into sections. It is genuinely fascinating and it also does a lot of credit to Ubisoft's accurate portrayal of Ancient Egypt, but there's no getting past the fact that for a gamer, it feels like you are restricted to going through it at quite a slow pace.

Overall, I think the Discovery Tour is a great idea, but any player should consider the experience as being the same as visiting a real musuem. Unless you are being dragged along by your parents, you wouldn't go to a museum if you weren't specifically interested in going. In the same vein, don't go on the Discovery Tour if you are not interested, because you won't get anything out of it. However, if the game has whet your appetite for finding out more about Ancient Egypt, the Discovery Tour is a great way of learning more.

 

The Hidden Ones

This DLC is basically an extension of the main story. With a Hidden Ones bureau established in the Sinai region of Egypt, the local Assassins and Assassin leader run into series problems with the local Order. Two Hidden Ones killed in a recent battle triggers a request for help to Bayek, to which he responds by travelling to the region, heading to thelocal bureau, and then going from there.

In terms of size and content, The Hidden Ones is similar to other DLCs such as Jack the Ripper for Syndicate, with three additional land regions to unlock and one additional sea region, and a typical density of locations to work through. The main missions don't beat around the bush, and before you know it you are saying "oh boy, here I go killin' again" as you start hunting down the local Order leaders. There's a bunch of additional side missions as well, some of which are somewhat related to the main mission and some compeltely separate. One of the more intriguing side missions begins with you just assisting an elderly gentleman who is trying to put his recently dead wife to rest in a tomb, but is afraid of the haunting noises coming out of the crypt. The resolution to this side mission leaves you questioning what you just saw and treads the well balanced fine line in Origins of mysticism versus the basic reality of real life.

This DLC also serves as a convenient crutch for those who ended up missing out on a lot of rare resources needed for gear upgrades. If you make even half an effort to grab the chests that Senu can mark out for you, you'll find an abundance of these materaisl that will like let you upgrade you gear several times just within this DLC.

The Philakes mechanic is present in this DLC, although now they are called Shadows of the Scarab and hunting them down culminates in a side mission that caps off a story and NPC character arc started in the main game. The mission itself is reasonably interesting in terms of closing off that story, but otherwise it's a simple continuation of the Philakes mechanic with superficial changes.

Even the red Shadow of the Scarab icon on the map looks like a Philakes icon

Perhaps my review so far seems underwhelming, please don't let that put you off if you are considering buying and playing this DLC. Whilst The Hidden Ones doesn't really contain anything new in terms of gameplay mechanics, it is still a very effective continuation of the Origins plot. The main missions are of similar ilk to the main game and there are more forts for you to clear out, including two very large complexes. Basically, although not amazing in itself, if you love the main Origins game as I do, you'll love playing through this DLC just as much. It's not spectacular new content, but it is a continuation of the main game that is just as good.

 

The Curse of the Pharaohs

Definitely in terms of land area, but also arguably in terms of content, The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC is the largest of any Assassin's Creed DLC released to date. There are nine additional regions to explore and the main missions will explicitly take you through seven to eight of the nine. This DLC also expands your ability to upgrade your fixed gear, such as the hidden blade and body armor, by way of a new resource that is unique to the DLC. There are additional side missions of course, but also some other brand new mechanics and concepts that we will cover in due course.

Like the Hidden Ones DLC, the story of this DLC takes place some years after the main game. Bayek learns of another ancient artifact in Thebes and sets off to find it so that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Upon arriving in Thebes he very quickly finds out that there is a curse ravaging the land. No sooner than Bayek steps on shore, a Cursed Pharaoh manifests next to the dockside and starts attacking bystanders. Bayek being who he is, immediately steps in to battle the apparition, so that hey may save the innocent people being attacked.

After the dust settles, Bayek learns that this is not an isolated incident and that the people say a curse grips the land. Suspicious that the supposed curse and his search for the artifact is linked, Bayek expects that finding the source of the curse will help his own search as well as free the local people, and so off he sets.

The Hidden Ones DLC, whilst being perfectly decent fun, is really just a continuation of the main game mechanics with only a few tweaks here and there. The Pharaohs DLC, however, brings with it some new innovations.

The Philakes mechanic is completely gone now, and basically replaced with the Cursed Pharaohs. As you move through Thebes and associated areas, Cursed Pharaohs will randomly spawn conveniently somewhat close to Bayek, and our hero can choose to break off his current activity to attack and defeat the Cursed One if he so chooses. The Cursed Pharaohs are a whole new type of enemy in Origins and bring with them the need to develop new tactics to take them on. One of the few criticisms I have of the main Origins game is that with the right setup, which includes the Instant Charging heavy attack, you can reduce combat for all but the most power enemies to a few heavy attacks and some dodges. Some of the Pharaohs, however, will completely overpower this approach and make mincemeat out of you if you don't adapt. Whilst these battles are mainly optional, there are a few that are obligatory to the main story, so you are better off taking on the challenge head on and developing new tactics with these enemies. If you do start taking out some of the Cursed Pharaohs, you'll be rewarded with the new rare resource you need to upgrade your gear further.

You'll need to develop new tactics to defeat the Cursed Pharaohs

As well as the Cursed Pharaohs, there are also a couple of other new non-human enemy types you come across. However, whilst the design of these characters is nice to behold, you can battle and defeat the vast majority of these enemies the same as regular human enemies. One specific enemy type, which I guess you class as an animal-type, are easy to defeat in their regular version, but there are some oversized and overpowered variants that will also present you a challenge.

There's also some major innovation with some of the location types. It would be a spoiler to go into the specific details of how this manifests itself, but suffice to say you will be exploring new locations that are not only nothing like anywhere you've explored before in Origins, but also unique to each other within the DLC.

No spoilers other than this picture, there are new locations unlike anything before in Origins

I always tend to enjoy AC stories that revolve around the Apples of Eden and other similar artifacts and the Curse of the Pharaohs is no exception. The AC series tends to stay rooted in reality, with the only fantasy elements being associated with the precursors and precursor artifacts. It has to be said that The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC does extend that right up to the limit. Bayek remains philosophical about all he sees and experiences, it doesn't seem that all of it can be associated with the artifact, but to be honest, the epilogue to the DLC essentially makes the case that these fantasy elements are "real" rather than imagined. This departure from being grounded in reality will not be to everyone's liking, but as a sneak peek ahead, it only gets worse in Odyssey anyway, so like it or not, you better get used to it.

Overall, The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC is one of the best yet. In the battle for overall best DLC of any Assassin's Creed game, I probably agree that Pharaohs doesn't quite have the appeal of the grim style and Lovecraft-esque undertones that the Jack the Ripper DLC has. However, this DLC is much larger and less formulaic in terms of the new content that it brings, so in the end I probably like the Pharaoh's DLC more.

But whichever one you like more, The Pharaohs DLC is definitely up there as one of the best, and totally worth a modest investment to play after completing the main game.

The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Origins

 

Context

I divested myself out of buying any further Assassin's Creed games after Unity. Eventually I was pulled back in by the further games all being released to positive reviews and intriguing gameplay footage of the revamped Origins and Odyssey. I re-entered the series where I left off and played Syndicate, wondering what I was letting myself in for.

Well, as you will know if you have read my review of Syndicate (thank you) it was a very rewarding experience. Syndicate is probably the closest the gameplay has felt to being as enjoyable as the heights of the series, the Ezio trilogy. Syndicate had classic Assassin's Creed gameplay in the stealth, parkour and mission structure. I had epic fun stealthing my way through enemy strongholds and taking out guards one by one, until the target is left on his on her own then "surprise, you're dead!"

However, I knew even before I played Syndicate that the series saw a massive revamp with Origins and Odyssey, and really this is why I re-entered the series. Syndicate could have been a turd like Unity and I still would have played Origins. Luckily Syndicate was great, but I knew it would bear little relation on how much I like Origins.

And so I'd been looking to this moment since buying back into the series. With Odyssey being released, the vast majority of online reviews and discussions was about that, so I felt like I was entering the world of Origins only knowing as much about the game as if it was just released.

The Setting

Origins is set in Ancient Egypt at the end of the Ptolomaic period, "the longest and final dynasty in ancient Egyptian history" according to Wikipedia. I must admit, out of all Assassin's Creed backdrops, this one for Origins is probably the one I had the least interest in so far. I'll hold my hands up and say that some of this is probably down to it not being a "western world" location. I hold a more natural intrigue with locations like Rome, Paris, London and colonial America because it just has more familiarity. Even the location of Constantinople in Revelations stood out for me as being less appealing than Rome, and I loved Revelations.

Origins has an incredibly detailed and accurate portayal of Ancient Egypt

An additional part of it is likely due to the time in history the game is set. 45-40 BC is over a thousands years earlier then the next oldest setting, which was actually in the very first Assassin's Creed game, set in the late 12th century.

But also, anything following London was going to be a hard act to follow, considering I live a train ride away and for me, London in Syndicate felt very familiar and close to my heart.

I am very pleased to say that the setting in Origins is portrayed excellently. In terms of land area, Origins is by far the largest map of any Assassin's Creed game so far. I suppose it is not dissimilar to Black Flag and Rogue in how major towns and settlements are spread far apart, but it's quite different sailing from one location to another over blank sea that all looks the same, than travelling between towns in Ancient Egypt, across sand dunes, through small settlements and alongside the Nile, with the pyramids an ever-present backdrop.

A huge addition to the basic Ancient Egypt setting is that the location discovery system in Origins works differently. Syncing with a viewpoint will show you up some locations nearby, but it's not going to flag up the cave in the desert mountains. You'll only find the remote locations by either travelling close by, or being led there by some missions.

Part of the charm of Ancient Egypt in Origins is that you are truly rewarded for exploration.

But aside from the gameplay, Ubisoft have to be applauded for the amount of effort that has gone into portraying Ancient Egypt as realistically as possible. There is a "Discovery Tour" mode that lets you explore Egypt without combat and missions. You can choose to go on "museum tours" of some locations, where the game will lead you on a path and you get a tour-style narrative of the interesting highlights of what you are looking at. Did you know that temples in Ancient Egypt were more than just religious centres, but also operated as financial centres and food banks, as well as places of politics? I didn't, until I went on the tour last time I played Origins.

Ubisoft's depiction of Ancient Egypt has been described as one of the most authentic recreations of Ancient Egypt ever made. It is, of course, not 100% accurate, this is an Assassin's Creed game after all, which is all about using history as a backdrop from making a game. However, there is such attention to detail in so many things that are accurate, there can be no denying that you'll come away from playing this game knowing more than when you started.

This image is from a Guardian article about the accuracy of Ubisoft's portayal of Ancient Egypt

If you want to read more about the work done on recreating Ancient Egypt, I highly recommend this Guardian article: Assassin's Creed Origins: how Ubisoft painstakingly recreated ancient Egypt.

The Protagonist

You are deliberately introduced to Bayek without any previous knowledge about who he is, being launched straight into a fight and then having to work your way through a set of ruins. As you play the early missions, you'll find out more about his past and what drives him, understanding that he has spent some time away from the world and has only recently returned. Bayek starts off as feeling like quite a dry and soulless character, but as you play through the main missions, you start to understand that he has an impressive righteousness about him. It's impressive because he isn't a goody two-shoes (like the naïve Connor) but instead essentially tries to reconcile being true and just, whilst recognising that he is out murdering people himself, even if he thinks it is for a good reason. There is recognition that he is on a dark path that he has to be careful he doesn't get lost on. Also, he seems to truly relish his job and his title as protector of the people.

Bayek of Siwa, Medjay and protector of the people

In Origins, a Medjay (pronounced med-ji) is depicted as a servant of a pharoah, tasked with keeping law and order. A Medjay is somewhat like a policeman, but keeping people to the general law of order and justice as well as specific laws like don't steal, don't kill, etc..

Bayek is a Medjay, but one of the last, and somewhat of a relic of a past era. However, he remains as true to his calling as he always has, and this serves as a great backdrop mechanic for the game. Assassin's Creed has always seen you helping out random people with their problems. For Bayek, it's actually part of his job, and he loves doing it.

The Gameplay

In my previous reviews, I tend to be brief about how the current game is similar to previous installments of the series, and focus at length on the differences. Because Origins is so different to its precursors, this is my lengthiest review yet. As a result, I'll further break down my usual section of "Gameplay" into sub sections.

Gameplay Basics

The very first gameplay action in Origins is a fight. Having played through all the previous games in sequence, and literally finishing Syndicate the day before I started Origins, the opening minutes of Origins are a very abrupt message from Ubisoft, "Playing this game is completely different from all previous games." In fact, I remember from the first time I played Origins, I was so confused by the new controls that I died twice in the very opening fight, despite how the game handholds you. Luckily, second time around, I didn't have so much trouble.

However, before we go into depth about the combat, be aware that even the basic controls are all very different.

• In the default control scheme, there's no parkour button, your character always runs. Ascending and descending works the same as in previous games though.
• Combat buttons are now all mapped to the top controller buttons: Defend, light attack, heavy attack, aim and shoot are all up there.
• There is an alternate control scheme, which looks like it is designed to help players of the previous games feel more at home, but even this scheme is not exactly the same as the previous games, and my recommendation would be to adjust to the new controls.
• Another useful hint about the controls for those, like me, who use a Dualshock when playing on the PC. The game has an option to show Dualshock control buttons on screen rather than the usual X-Box buttons. I only realised this when going through the control options on the different control scheme.
  
• Eagle vision is now mapping to a long press up on the directional pad and sends out a pulse that highlights interactable static objects. It no longer does anything with enemies.
  
• There are now long press buttons, where you have to hold the button down to perform an action. Actually this works brilliantly and is probably long overdue. Example: to pick up a body you have to long press Y or Triangle. To assassinate you quick press the same button. Now, if you are hiding in brush next to a body and try to assassinate, your character won't pick up the body instead.
• The menu system is now all cursor driven. You move a cursor around the various menus with your controller rather than directly move between menu items.

As well as the above, the other most significant gameplay change is that you now have a pet eagle, Senu, you can directly control. A quick press up on the directional pad puts you in control of Senu and you use her for a multitide of purposes.

• Senu is how you tag enemies, which you can do in a range up to 100 metres.
• Senu will indicate major points of interest for you to triangulate and mark, such as location captains, key collectibles, underground entrances and signal beacons. You can then directly tag these like you can locations on your map, to mark them when running around in the game world.
  
• Senu will also highlight key resources. Guard convoys or animals that are high in resources can be seen and tagged, to be hunted down by Bayek.

The iconic eagle of the AC series is now a controllable companion.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of Senu is that you can use him in combination with putting Bayek's horse/camel on autopilot. When Bayek is on his steed, you can command it to follow the main road in front of it, but also command it to go to the location you have tagged. If your next target is more than a few hundred metres away, you can set Bayek off and then control Senu. Bayek and steed will make their way on land whilst you scout ahead with Senu. It's a great way of seeing the scenery go by as you move between locations, but also tremendously useful to be opportunistic about gathering resources. If you see an animal pack or convoy just off where you are going to travel anyway, it's a very short detour to take the enemies out, grab the resources, and then be on your way.

Fast travel via sync points and major locations exists in Origins, but I use it very little because it's so much fun (and useful) to travel on horseback everywhere, even if you have to travel km. It's a great way of seeing the sights and I love it!

Combat

Okay, back to the combat. As I said, it is very apparent from the opening minutes of gameplay that combat is very different to all previous AC games. To be honest, even in the best of the prior games, open combat was largely a process of waiting to be attacked and then countering. In the earlier games a counter would be an insta-kill, in the later games it might "only" serve to let you strip off half of your enemy's health, but still it was a safe way of chewing through your opponents. In Origins, that tactic is not going to work for you. Countering is there as a combat mechanic, but many opponents can attack you with non-blockable moves.

So you're going to be forced to work with new tactics, which is a good thing. However, I have found that I have discovered a new tactic which is quite effective as still rendering most combat to a basic process: Dodge and strong attack. You can hold down the strong attack button to build up a charge, with a fully charged strong attack able to stagger opponents with shields, and knock down opponents without one or staggered. Most combat can be managed by dodging away, building up a charged strong attack, then closing back in to unleash it, piling in quick attacks whilst they are incapacitated. Combine this with a Gold weapon ability of having instantly charged strong attack, and you can punch your way through even the big bruising guards with shields and massive battle axes fairly easily. This tactic even generally works with the bosses you have to take on in open combat (which isn't that many).

XP and Levelling

In relation to combat, the levelling system in Origins is the most extensive and RPG-like of any AC game. Syndicate had a levelling system of one to ten (eleven with the Ripper DLC) but as long as you didn't start the game and instantly go into the hardest London districts, the levelling system was more about how well your allies would fight then having much of an impact upon your character. In Origins, if you try and take on an enemy more than 2 levels above you then you can basically prepare to have your arse handed to you. Again, this is generally manageable by not venturing into the harder areas too soon, but the game will throw the occasional curveball at you with one garrison in an area being much higher then the rest, or if a Philakes (pronounced fill-ah-keez) finds you and you don't check their level before taking them on.

A red skull icon. The enemy will one or two hit kill you and you'll likely tickle him back.

 

The Philakes are a band of very tough mercenaries that start hunting you down once you kill one of their buddies fairly early on in the game. If one gets within 100m of you then the game alerts you with the sound of a blaring horn, telling you to watch out. However, the nearest Philakes does also tend to show up on your map, even in an unexplored area. In the end, the Philakes are made out to be this massive threat but easily manageable with even the most basic common sense approach. If you get one on their own, you can even cheese killing one a few levels above you by stealth attacking them, running away so they become docile again, and then repeating. I easily managed one Philakes near a bridge that you could run over and under by stabbing the guy, running under the bridge and then climbing on top. The dumb guy just wondered around the underneath of the bridge until he came off high alert, then I air assassinated him again. It took me 7 stealth attacks, and he hit me once which nearly wiped me out, but other than that it was easy.

Stealth

Stealth is a wonderfully full-strength affair in Origins. With Egypt being such a vast open space, there is plenty of farmland crops, reeds and brush for you to creep around in. Double assassinations are absent, but there is a skill that enables you to make a second ranged stealth kill after an initial regular kill, which is tremendously useful. The forgiveness of enemies spotting you has been reduced as well. Although you do have a chance to evade if spotted by an unexpected enemy, it is quite a small window. However, enemies generally tend to be quite spaced out in Origins with only small clusters grouped together. As long as you don't really mess up your stealth, triggering one guard usually only ends up in a small isolated fight and then you can clean up the bodies and go back to being stealthy again. However, if you do alert multiple enemies at once and you are in an enemy stronghold, there is a high risk that one of them will try to run off and light the warning beacon, which will bring reinforcements to the area.

Another additional feature with stealth is that although you can disable the enemy beacons (which act the same as alarm bells in previous games), in Origins you actually set a trap, which will blow up the first enemy that tries to send a signal. It's quite delicious to alarm your mark so that they run off to light the beacon, only to blow themselves up in the process.

Instead of disabling enemy alarms, now you booby trap them.

 

One last minor change with stealth is that it is not a 100% automatic insta-kill any more. If you pay any attention to upgrading your hidden blade then it's still an insta-kill 99% of the time, but uber-healthed enemies such as the Philakes and the very strongest fort bosses will only lose a portion of their health, a Philakes may not even lose half!

So, although the combat system is full revamped, stealth is as strong as the best of the previous games. Origins brings us high alert areas that are much larger than previous games, with some forts and compounds over 200m long and wide. It's a joy to stealth and assassinate your way through these areas.

Parkour

With the parkour, there is not a lot to say. Basically this is a good thing, because the more I have talked about the parkour in previous games, the more it's been about the bad points. In Origins, parkour just works. However, because Egypt is such a vast open space, you won't be climbing up buildings all that much. As well as the usual buildings with handholds, there is terrain that you'll need to climb over as well. It seems that Bayek can climb up any rough natural surface like rocks and cliff faces at will, no specific handholds are needed. For some this will be a dilution of the parkour system, but you'll spend minimal time actually doing this in Origins so it doesn't really make any difference.

Equipment and Loot

Having covered the usual suspect of the parkour, combat and stealth, the other major aspect of Origins' gameplay is the loot and equipment system. Origins expands the object system so much it is unrecognisable from previous games. There are 4 different types of bow, around 7 different types of melee weapon and shields. All of these have levels which provide different damage ratings and they also all have additional tributes.

• Blue weapons are the lowest level, and have one additional attribute over basic damage, like reducing your melee or range damage. This basic attribute is the same across all weapons in the same class.
  
• Purple "rare" weapons will be a bit stronger then the same level blue weapon and have two attributes. The first attribute is fixed to the weapon class the same as blue weapons, but the second attribute can be from a pool of possible abilities.
  
• Gold "legendary" weapons will be stronger again and have three attributes, but the third attribute will be from a unique set that doesn't apply to first and second tributes. Examples of the third attributes are "on fire" e.g. flaming arrows, gain health on kill, instantaneous charge for strong attacks, and there are more.

Generally you find weapons around your character level, which of course means that as you level up, your old weapons become obsolete. This would limit the usefulness of the gold weapons, which obviously are the rarest kind, but you can pay a blacksmith to upgrade your favourite weapons to your current level. It's fairly pricey to upgrade, but as long as you restrict yourself to upgrading your absolute favourite weapons, it's easily affordable.

The class RPG system of coloured rarity loot makes it way into Assassin's Creed

To be honest, the loot system does feel somewhat superficial. Most of the time when you come across new weapons you'll just be looking at how much damage it does. If you find a gold weapon you really like and that tailors your combat, you'll just upgrade this every 3 or 4 levels, which limits the impact of finding new loot.

You can also upgrade your fixed "equipment" which consists of things like your hidden blade, quiver, consumables bag and the like. To upgrade these you need resources like different types of leather and metal. You can find these resources in various places, such as regular lootable objects (in small amounts), convoys and hunting wildlife. It strikes me as being similar as the resource and upgrade system in Far Cry 3, except in Far Cry 3 it was just stuff you could get from hunting. The last upgrades for each piece of fixed equipment predictably requires you to find rare resources, which does add a sense of satisfaction to finding these. You don't need to get all of them, just a lot of them, which means you don't need to specifically hunt them down but when you find one (or a few), it will quite often be the missing ingredient that lets you upgrade a piece of gear to the next level. Finding the rare resources is probably the most satisfying part of the loot system in Origins.

Overall

Origins is a drastically new direction for the Assassin's Creed series and its not difficult to see why a lot of fans of the series from day one struggle to like the revamped system of Origins quite as much. For me, however, having got utterly fed up with how Ubisoft dragged the series down churning out release upon release, I agree that much staleness had set in. Although I tremendously enjoyed Syndicate as a huge improvement in the series over many of the previous installments, I think the new direction is a huge improvement to the series. It was the reviews and videos of the revamped gameplay that pulled me back into the series after the absolute rot of Unity, and having finally played Origins through, I absolutely loved it

The DLCs

As with previous installments, I will review the DLCs of Origins. However, as Origins is so much larger than previous games in the series. I decided to review them separately, as I did with the larger Black Flag DLC, Freedom Cry.

Summary

Origins is brilliant. The revamped gameplay is a huge success with a new sense of fun to the gameplay, and very very few new problems introduced as by-products. The story of Bayek is excellent, as is Bayek himself as a character we come to love. Ancient Egypt as a setting is very accurate and great to run around in, even travelling between major towns and settlements is fun using Senu as a scout.

The only criticism I can suggest feels quite unfair, which is that perhaps the game is almost too big. All regions in the game have their own interesting facets to them whether it is a bunch of new side missions, or new terrain, or an arena you can enter. There are a huge amount of side missions and very few of them feel like background noise.

It's ironic, but having accused Ubisoft of fleshing out previous AC games with contentless filler, and having absolutely not done that with Origins, it feels like there is too much good stuff to do in Origins, to the extent that you can get serious bogged down between main missions when you have to travel to a new part of the map, there's just so much to do, you either feel like it's a long time to play the next main mission, or you are missing out on all this stuff if you let them pass by and it will be a lot to catch up on later.

Origins is a tremendous success. It's definitely 5 out of 5 score-wise and completely up for debate as to whether this tops AC2 and Brotherhood for the title of Best Game of the Series. I actually think Origins is better, if only for its more modern gameplay style, and that I believe that if you go back to play AC2 after Origins, you'll struggle with the limitations of the much older game.

The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Syndicate + DLC

Context

When I first played and completed Unity about a year after it was released, I was absolutely disgusted by it. I was already getting frustrated with the long standing issues in the series that remained unaddressed whilst Ubisoft churned out the annual releases and took the approach of "good enough to get people's cash." So Unity was the straw that broke the camel's back for me and I wasn't giving Ubisoft any more of my money for anything that had "Assassin's Creed" written on it.

Then Syndicate was released and got favourable reviews. I ignored them, Unity got reviews which, in my opinion, horrifically glossed over the game's shortcomings, so I wasn't taking reviewers' words for it. Maybe it was me that was the problem and I just didn't like what the series had become, because reviewers like it and there were positive reviews from players, but even if that was the case, I didn't think I was going to like the next in the series of the same basic type of game. It wasn't easy, because the setting of Syndicate was a huge draw for me, living around 20 miles away from London myself, but I stood fast because I was fed up investing in the series.

I've been there, as lots of people have I'm sure, but this is a train ride away for me.

Syndicate's release came and went, then Origins came out.

And the word was that Origins was a major revamp of the series, that Ubisoft recognised the level of staleness that had crept in and had opted to revisit every aspect of the game and reconsider the basic gameplay from the ground up. Origins wasn't just the next release on the same game engine as Unity and Syndicate and was an all new experience.

And I didn't buy Origins either, because I had opted out of continuing to invest in the series.

And then Odyssey was released, and the reviews of Odyssey were hugely positive. Not only that, but watching the gameplay in reviews and other online videos, I could see how different the series had become, and I quite liked what I saw. I actually felt like I wanted to play Assassin's Creed again.

But I thought that if I was going to opt back into the series, I should re-enter where I left. Maybe it would be painful because I knew Syndicate used the same game engine and gameplay structure as Unity, but at least I had the completely revamped Origins and Odyssey to look forward to.

So that's the story of how I got sucked back into the series. Was it a wise decision?

The Setting

Even though I didn't buy Syndicate when it was first released, I have admitted that there was some temptation to give Assassin's Creed one more go despite my disgust with Unity, and that was due to the setting. Syndicate is set in London at the end of the Industrial Revolution. With 100 years of sea superiority leading to the world's largest ever empire being allowed to operate largely unchallenged, the industrial revolution cemented Britain's position as the leading commercial nation globally. The centre of all this is London and in the introduction of the game we hear the words "Whosoever controls London, controls the world."

So what a narrative for someone who is not only a Brit, but lives close to London himself.

The main characters we control are the twins Evie Frye and Jacob Frye. Right away during our initial introduction to them, they exude more warmth than Arno ever did. Evie is the more serious and scholarly twin whilst Jacob is more cavalier, humerous/sarcastic and in your face. Obviously they don't always see eye to eye, so they manage these differences of opinions with the kind of digs and sly little jokes one might expect from brother and sister. Their relationship with each other is very much a driver for how they both operate.

Evie and Jacob Frye, our twin protagonists. Can anyone say sibling rivalry?

The depiction of London in Syndicate is very different from Paris in the previous game. Even though I think you can probably find a lot of parallels between the two cities in real life, Unity seemed to focus more heavily on the residential areas of Paris, with half the city dedicated to slums and working class homes, and the other half for the rich and aristocrats. The depiction of London in Syndicate is more focussed on London as the centre of global politics, commerce and industry. Whilst there are parts of the map that are residential, and we get treated to the sight of rows of terraced housing where each dwelling would be shared by 3 to 7 families, most of the time you'll be around train stations, industrial areas, docks on the Thames, or buildings associated with politics or the aristocracy.

As a Brit that lives close to our capital, I can joyfully report that London feels "right" in the game, and it's wonderful to feel such a familiarity with the game world that you are running around in, even if it's 150ish years before my time.

The Gameplay

From the very first minutes of playing Syndicate, there is the relief that even though the game is clearly using the same engine and same basic structure as Unity, it is clearly not the same game. Everything feels better right from the start. Movement of your character is sharp and responsive, the sluggishness of controls is gone, if you want your player to do some action, they'll just do it, no longer do you feel like you are fighting with the controls.

Stealth is back to 100%. The ridiculous omissions of Unity are resolved. Whistling to attract guards is back, the cover mechanic now works properly, bodies can be moved and hidden, slow refined movements possible again. It is an absolute joy, because not only have Unity's problems been resolved, but stealth in general is back exactly where it should be along with the best games in the series. Once again you can infiltrate a location by watching the guards and then systematically taking them out one by one, which is exactly what I want to do in an Assassin's Creed game.

Stealth in Syndicate is a huge return to form after the dialobical mechanics in Unity.

And choirs and angels are singing, because the parkour is also finally fixed. Having hit the low point in Rogue and then having some things fixed whilst other things nerfed in Unity, the parkour in Syndicate is as predictable and responsive as it was when playing Ezio. They even fixed the problem with your character jumping up on things when running down on the ground. Neither Jacob or Evie will go to jump over any obstacle unless you tell them to, but they will automatically move over low fences. In other words, they'll jump over things in order to continue running forward, but they won't jump on top of anything unless you tell them to.

However, the problem with the depiction of London is that, for the most part, the buildings are quite far apart. In Paris most areas were very densely populated and so you could run from rooftop to rooftop without much issue, but here in London, you'll be lucky that there is any string of buildings you can run across that will be going in the direction you want them to. The game has resolved this issue by giving you a new movement mechanic, which is the grappling hook. The grappling hook lets you move from the edge or peak of one building to another edge or peak up to about 60m away. When you are close to a place you can use the hook, a marker will appear that shows where you will hook over to if you press the command at that time. Moving via grappling hook can be much quicker than traversing by foot once you get the hang of it, so whilst the purity of running from rooftop to rooftop is gone in Syndicate, you can move around London whilst high up quite fast! Apparently the grappling hook is not to everyone's tastes, but I really like it.

Unique feature to Syndicate: the grappling hook. You'll be using this a lot.

Combat has some changes over Unity, some are definite improvement but some are just different, so it will be down to the player whether they like it or not.

One definite improvement is that you can dodge incoming gunfire again. One of the biggest annoyances in Unity was that if you got surrounded by enemies, you could die in seconds from gunshot because there was no way you could avoid it, which is realistic perhaps, but not good gameplay for my tastes. In Syndicate, not only can you dodge incoming gunfire but if you buy the right skill, you can even counter with a gunshot back to the person trying to shoot you.

Other changes to the combat in Unity make it faster and more responsive, but at the expense of fluidity of movement. Other than the gunfire and sluggishness of controls, the combat in Unity was quite good and rewarded good timing when countering. Syndicate is a lot more forgiving on timing, but the fluidity of movement from Unity is gone and when levelled up, you'll see your character moving unnaturally fast to get a string of blows on an enemy.

Finally, there is a "guard" system in Syndicate where enemies can block attacks and, if you keep trying to hit them normally, will counterattack you. There is a "break guard" mechanism you can use, but this feels hit and miss to use. It's much easier to wait for the enemy to attack you and counter, which is a bit of a well-worn trope in Assassin's Creed games. The return to "counter then attack" will cause many players to think Syndicate's combat is a step back from Unity. As I tend to favour stealth over combat where possible, it's not really an issue for me.

Another major new feature of the gameplay are the twins themselves. The character upgrade system is now a skill tree for you to unlock with three branches, one for stealth, one for combat, and one for other things. The game rewards you for sticking faithfully to the depiction of the twins' strengths. Evie is characterised as favouring stealth and silent kills, and Jacob as favouring open combat. Whilst you are still going through unlocking various skills, you could turn this on its head, but the best skills of stealth and combat are reserved for each twin. Evie has a stealth ability that only she can unlock, where she can effectively hide in plain sight and is massively useful when infiltrating locations. Evie also has a skill that doubles the amount of throwing knives she can carry, which isn't needed as such but does give the player more free reign to start taking out enemies left, right and centre completely silently without having to be restricted to slowly creeping around the place.

It's clear which direction the AC series is going with skill trees: More and more depth.

Jacob's best reserved skills are around the amount of damage he can give and receive during open combat and his ability driving horse-drawn carriages. Therefore, if you stay true to the depiction of the characters, you'll be using Jacob when you are expecting a fight or are going to start racing around the streets, and you'll favour Evie when you want to sneak around undetected.

And we just mentioned horse-drawn carriages! Syndicate has cars! Well, okay, they are not actually cars, they are horse drawn carriages, but essentially how these things drive, they've been made to behave like cars for the most part. You can accelerate and brake, turn left and right, sideswipe other vehicles to take them out, hijack carriages being driven by other folks, they're basically cars. Probably the main way they are not like cars is that cars don't get scared and run off on their own if fighting breaks out next to them, so watch out or you might get run over by your own carriage. It can't be said that the physics of these carriages is terrifically accurate, because you'll be bashing into things, other carriages, side-swiping enemies... There's a lot of collisions that should kill your poor horse in an instant but luckily, they are as hardy as the carriages themselves unless you aim to shoot them specifically, then they become a way to quickly take out a pursuing carriage.

So what about the side missions? Unity had a lot of side missions, but they felt very fragmented and isolated from each other as well as the main story. Syndicate solves this by focussing the side missions onto a handful of side characters in the game. For the main historical characters:

• You'll join Charles Dickens' ghost hunting club where, as an educated writer and man of science, he looks to debunk the fiction apart from the genuine supernatural.
• You'll partner with Charles Darwin on fighting some of the immoral practices going on in the city and help him further his research.
  
• And you'll work with Karl Marx as he attempts to give the exploited working classes a voice by banding them together into unions to fight for better rights.

On top of these story-driven side missions, there are also the usual sub-game side missions, which are also affiliated to characters you'll partner with: Freeing child labour for the leader of the street urchins, bare-knuckle fighting and carriage racing for your bookie friend, bringing in the police's most wanted for your undercover cop friend. They all tie in to the main story by way of friendship with the main character, as opposed to the random strangers Arno would help out and then never see again.

Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens both have a fascinating set of side missions.

I mentioned earlier that the very first minutes of playing Syndicate gave a lot of joy, because it is just so much nicer to play then Unity was. However, I had similar feelings with the setting in the opening couple of hours of Black Flag, only to have all this drowned out in the end by the ridiculous amount of tedious repetition in the game. Syndicate doesn't do that, it remains a fun game to play throughout, whether you are focussing on the main missions, side missions or collectibles.

Summary

Despite my huge cynicism brought on by Unity, I must report that Syndicate is a hugely successful return to what I liked in the Assassin's Creed series in Ezio's days. Things are have been broken have been fixed, most importantly including the parkour, which is now as good as it was when playing Ezio. Shortcuts seen in previous games where generic locations or soulless collectibles were used to flesh out the hours are dispensed with, now everything you do in the game has some meaning. Perhaps the chest collectibles could still be considered soulless, but then chests have been a mainstay of the entire series and even here, collecting the chests is way more fun then it was in Unity, with Unity's turgid "hunt for the open door or window" approach eliminated in Syndicate.

In retrospect, it's really a shame that Unity caused me to chuck the towel in. If I'd given the series one last benefit of the doubt then it would have rewarded me earlier with a game that is a huge return to form and a great amount of fun.

DLC: The Darwin and Dickens Conspiracy

 

This DLC consists of two mini-stories, of which the second one is split into two missions, so three missions in total. The first story/mission, Darwin's Orchid, sees you tracing down the source of mysterious flowers giving off hallucinegenic fumes. This one is quite fun as it presents some new gameplay not seen in the game before, but it's only a 10 minute-ish mission so it's over fast. The second story is about a friend of Dickens coming to London to check out his fiancée from his pre-arranged marriage. The missions are okay I guess, but story aside, the first is pretty much a repeat of a main game mission and the second, whilst bringing something new I guess, is pretty humdrum.

I got this DLC as part of a season pass, and I can't see that you can buy it separately. I wouldn't pay money to buy these missions specifically but they are okay as part of a larger pack.

DLC: The Last Maharaja

This DLC is a sequence of 10 missions that see you working with the titular last Maharaja, Duleep Singh. These missions have quite a variety to them, and bring back some gameplay mechanics to Syndicate. Early on the DLC you'll start using the murder mystery mechanic from Unity, where you go to locations, talk to people and discover clues. It's quite fun for the short time you are doing it, although there are no actual puzzles to solve, you just go through the motions. Mission 4 "The Golden Path", is one of the lengthier missions, and combines a rewarding systematic approach to infiltrating a location with some action sequences in the second half.

A later mission see you doing what most male Londoners will have done at some point in their lives, stagger around London pubs half drunk with your best mate who you only just met ("I love you mate, it's not the drink talking, it's me!").

Then towards the end of the DLC, you'll tackle a couple of missions that see you playing both twins to achieve the objective, with a kind of tag team approach to getting the job done. Honestly, this works out very well and it brings up the question as to why there are no missions in the main game that both twins embark upon, aside from one close to the every end of the game.

So the DLC is actually quite good. Clearly some thought has gone into bringing some originality to the new set of missions and it means this DLC is definitely worth the value given the price it is up for sale today, which is around 2-3 pounds/euros/dollars. That's apparently a 60% discount but I'm not clear if this is a "perpetual discount" or a genuine one. I'm not sure I'd pay "full price" for it, presumably around ten pounds/euros/dollars, and feel satisfied.

Reasonably good fun, some wacky bugs. Worth a discounted purchase.

This review of the DLC does have to come with a warning, The Last Maharaja does come with some pretty interesting bugs. Most of them are fairly benign, like seeing the Maharaja moonwalk into the side of your train hideout carriage, but there are some more serious ones.

After completing one mission, I had to force quit the game and restart because Jacob was just standing there and wouldn't move. If you brought up the pause menu, it only brought up the basic pause screen for a cutscene, but with no option to skip, so all I could do was force quit the game. Luckily no progress was lost.

The far more serious bug, however, threatened my entire savegame for the entire game, not just the DLC. In the mission "The Good Send-Off", when you are the first part of the mission on the boat, it's possible to dive off the front of the boat only to end up in the water "in the boat" or rather, inside the bounds of the boat rather than next to it. This happened to me, and I naturally went to restart checkpoint, and this started an endless reload loop. When looking this up on the Internet, I found that this seriously game breaking bug has been around since the DLC was first released in 2016, and is still not patched.

If this happens to you, the solution that work for me was posted by DahsWaLLker on the Ubisoft Forum thread: Assassin's Creed Syndicate Darwin mission endless loop, which is as follows:

It took a few tries though, here's exactly what I did in case it can help someone:
1. Load into the game. Wait out the white loading screen.
2. Once it gets to the black screen and the loading icon starts rotating press windows key.
3. After exactly 40* seconds I popped back into the game and pressed ESC as soon as possible and it opened the pause menu.
4. Quit the memory.
* YMMV - too soon looped, too late looped but said your ally died

So this is a pretty serious bug to remain unpatched since 2016, but then in all seriousness, it's not unlike Ubisoft to just give up on fixing serious game issues and just pretend they don't exist any more.

The bugs are a shame, because the only other even slightly negative thing to say about the DLC is that it's available to play right before the main game mission where you get introduced to the Maharaja, so you can end up going on a full blown adventure with him and then be introduced to him during the next main game mission.

Despite the avoidable negatives, the DLC is  great fun, even the most serious bugs can be worked-around (thankfully, it's not nice fearing for your entire savegame), and its currently good value!

DLC: Jack the Ripper

This DLC is the largest of Syndicate, and also the most famous not just for Syndicate but for the whole series, with some players saying it is the best DLC of all the AC games. I very much looked forwards to playing this one.

Story-wise, there's not a lot that needs to be said without resorting to spoilers. 20 years after the events of the main game, Jack the Ripper is at large and you work in parallel to the police in trying to bring him down.

The scope of the DLC is equivalent to the previously largest DLC to date, the Freedom Cry DLC in Black Flag. There's a "new" mini-version of the main game map to pursue, which is actually two boroughs of London we saw in the main game, but 20 years later there are obviously a lot of changes. There's also 3 mission-specific side areas which have a few additional collectibles as well. The skill upgrades are also a also mini-version of the main game, with seven additional skills to unlock.

A major new mechanic in the DLC is the fear system, where you can terrify enemies so that they do all sort of rash things, most simply running away, but terrify them enough and they may shoot their allies in panic.

The yellow smoke depicts the fear effect. Every baddy gets a fear indicator over their heads.

The other biggest new and creepy feature of the DLC is that on occasion, you actually play as the Ripper himself. You are obliged to carry out the Ripper's goals whilst at the same time feeling that you are in fear for his quarry, but obviously knowing that the game won't proceed unless you do it, you carry out his macabre plans and wonder what will happen to his victims. This element of the DLC is probably the most powerful in terms of developing the main story.

The investigation system that featured heavily in Unity and was only lightly used in Syndicate and the other DLCs returns here as well. With the Ripper being extremely elusive, you revisit crime scenes in an effort to find any clue as to the motives and location of the Ripper. There's no real decision making to be done here, it's just a case of stitching the clues together, but it still works very well as part of the overall set of main missions.

Side missions are completely revamped and new. Anything similar to the borough-specific side missions in the main game has new twists to it, and there are some all new side missions. The kidnapping side mission is now related to dealing with and shaming customers of the brothels who treat the women like dirt. You have to lead the culprits squirming through crowds of people in the back alleys so that everyone can see who he is and he can feel shame for his actions. The mission seeing you bringing suspects back for police questioning is also different. The suspects are now coming voluntarily, but that is because with all the hysteria about the Ripper, being seen as a suspect is tantamount to a death sentence by public lynching, so you have to bundle these people into your carriage and then drive them back to the police station raising as little attention as possible.

There's around 6 or so additional side mission types that become available as you progress through the main story, so it's a significant source of additional content and gameplay in the DLC.

As far as the main story and missions go, I'd say the writing is quite good. It starts off especially strong in the opening sequences, but for me it did feel like it boiled down into some routine as the story went on. There's one main development that I guess is meant to feel like a twist, but really the game telegraphs this the whole time. Also, despite the Rippers apparently amazing abilities to remain elusive, in the end tracking him down feels rather routine.

The Ripper DLC is definitely one of the most memorable in the series

Overall, the Jack the Ripper is pretty good. It's obvious a lot of thought has gone into it throughout, with a lot of original ideas and mechanics and very little in the way of empty filler. It's definitely one of the best DLCs but then it's also one of the largest alongside Freedom Cry, so you'd expect more from it. But if you are a person who is generally thoughtful about spending additional money on DLCs or Season Passes, then Jack the Ripper is definitely worth it for Syndicate.

Review Score

I admit that I may well be biased due to my real-life proximity to the setting of the game, but for me, playing Syndicate is a return to the great fun I had when playing the Assassin's Creed 2 trilogy. I wouldn't say the game reaches the absolute heights that series did, but I consider Syndicate to definitely be the best Assassin's Creed game since Revelations, so it gets a score of 4 accordingly.