Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Preview – Horse and Cart

I have always been a fan of the Assassin’s Creed games. I maintain that, while it has faults, the first title was revolutionary (and a good game), even if it doesn’t hold up well – and the only bad game in the series was Revelations, which I am sure you had all repressed until I mentioned it (sorry). So when I got a hands-on demo with Syndicate at E3, I was excited. London was one of the locations I always wanted them to visit, and after Unity being a solid start on the new generation, I was hopeful this would be good.

The most important thing to mention here is that, yes, it is more Assassin’s Creed. Visually it is very similar to Unity; the controls are almost exactly the same; combat remains mostly unchanged, and it’s still a typical Ubisoft game with a large open world, towers to climb, and presumably tons to collect.

But one of the additions this time around that totally changes the way I played the game (and not exactly for the better) was the addition of a grappling hook that can be used in a couple of different ways. When standing at the bottom of a building, a quick tap of the L1 button will launch your grapple high into the air attaching to the roof, and then you character automatically climbs to the top. This totally removed the need for any real vertical climbing, which (for me at least) was one of the highlights of Unity.

The grappling hook can also be used to create a line between buildings that you shimmy across. Again, this does make things slightly easier, but at the same time removes another thing that I really liked about Assassin’s Creed, which is that crossing a street from the rooftops was often a challenge in itself, whereas now a quick tap of L1 will solve that problem in a instant.

So while the parkour and climbing aspect has effectively been nerfed to hell for no real reason, the combat has actually seen some improvements. Again I will stress I only played for a short time, so this could be totally different in the final game, but in my session I don’t recall seeing a single sword. All the combat was hand to hand, with the exception of my occasional use of the pistol, throwing knives, and poison darts. Combat remains very similar to the standard format, but the hand to hand stuff makes it feel significantly different, punches are thrown with some weight and certain environment specific moves, such as ramming an enemies head into a wall, are disgustingly satisfying.

For my demo each area of London had been liberated apart from one, so I needed to go kill ten guys in the slums that would then start a gang war. Dispatching the guys in the slums was simple enough using a range of techniques from air assassinations to outright combat and ranged weapons. At one point I fired a dart that would poison enemies and make then fight their allies right into a fire, which then affected all three foes stood around it.

After clearing up these guys we chased after some seemingly important character in a horse and cart. The handling wasn’t great, but from my limited horse riding knowledge, directing a horse at pace isn’t the easiest of things anyway. At one point I tired to jump from my cart to a enemy cart (which would have allowed me to throw him off and take his cart) but I failed and ended up in another mass brawl which the police. After making it to the next location a gang war started, where my cronies battled against members of a rival gang. The brawl was frantic, with punches being thrown in every direction – it was certainly a well executed moment, but lacked a bit of a wow factor.

Defeating the rival gang liberated the area and ended the demo. I must say that the way London was represented was fantastic. I was actually walked through the demo by World Director Jonathan Dumont, who explained that he and his team had visited London on numerous occasions to make sure that everything was representative of our capital city. And it all felt very London-like, it’s difficult to describe but if you saw it without knowing it was London, I would wager that anyone who knows the city reasonably well would be able to identify it, even when the plethora of English flags that were added for the E3 demo have been removed.

I’m fairly sure I said the same thing about Unity last year, but nothing here is truly revolutionary. This is still, at its core, the same game we were playing back with Assassins Creed II, but obviously with many improvements. The grapple mechanic really turned me off, but the combat felt better than ever, and being in London made it a lot more interesting for me. Hopefully more time with Syndicate will allow the irritating aspects to grow on me, but right now I feel like it’s the story and characters, not the new gameplay mechanics that will make this worth playing.