E3 2015 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate Hands On

When news leaked earlier in the year that the next entry in the popular Assassin’s Creed series would take place in Victorian era London, part of me was excited and another part sad. After going hands on at E3 my fears and hopes are still there.

The demo that I was able to play had me taking control of the section that Ubisoft demoed when they debuted the game, which meant I knew exactly what I had to do, but it also meant I knew exactly what I had to do. After a nice cutscene where Jacob details his plans to take back control of London, we head out to where the local gang boss is located in an attempt to remove her from the position and start our accent to power.

Thanks to Unity, you can still free run down and the other controls are the same, the one thing that has changed though is the new rope line, which you can launch upwards to help you get to the top of buildings faster. It does not replace the speed that you could gain from those construction platforms that would launch you into the air, but it means you no longer need to spend ages finding the perfect path to get you to the roof.

The rope line can also be used to cross gaps between buildings that would normal require either going down and back up, or attempting to locate a way around. It is important to note that your rope line is not infinite, it won’t make it across every gap you find, but it will help in most places. Once you have it in place though, you won’t get pulled across the gap, just like using it to ascend, you will actually need to move yourself along.

Once I had gotten to the area I needed to get to, Jacob put away his top hat, which I question where it goes and the hood went up. The first thing I noticed was the guards on patrol, it was at this point the awesome dev from Ubisoft pointed out that the guards in Syndicate are not like they were in older AC games, they will chase after you, they will fight but more importantly, they will be on the alert in their areas. It was suggested to me, for where I entered it would be good use throw a poison dart into the fire pit that the enemies were using to stay warm.

Sadly I was too early and only got one of the three, but it was enough to send that one guard into a wild frenzy, attacking his fellow gang members, but I thought I could do more, not content with just letting that one guard attack for me, I used another dart on a guard who was standing back, it did not go at all to plan. The guard first went for another guard, but then spotted me and came rushing after me, in fact he was able to climb the building with relative ease and that resulted in me having to break out the fists for a beat down.

This had me worried as I kept wanting to reach for a sword, but these are more civilised times than we have had in the past and people did not walk around the streets of London with swords hanging from their sides, so instead Jacob must rely on his brass knuckles and concealed weapons. After learning the new counter system I was able to defeat this enemy and then took the remaining ones down around and procceded to venture further into the gangs territory to draw out my target.

After a few more fights and a cutscene, I ended up at perhaps the coolest new feature of the game, Carriages, yes it is now almost GTA, I was able to kick a driver out of a seat and take the horse and carriage and chase down my target, this resulted in other members of the gang chasing me down, in order to try and stop me. But the cool part was, I had help in the form of the Bobbies, the local police were actually helping me, because as far as they could see I was being attacked by a gang and trying to flee.

During the chase, I learnt that I could climb to the roof of the carriage to help dispatch those that were trying to run me off the road and while up there, the horse will follow the directional line that is on the ground. But this is not fool proof, if your carriage gets to damaged it will break and send you flying, requiring you to collect another one. Which almost happened to me, thankfully I was able to shoot my attacker, giving me a chance to get away.

The demo ended with a large scale fight breaking out, which you will have seen in the trailer and while I won, I felt as though I did not do all that much, but this comes back to the AI they have put into the game as not only are the enemies smarter, your crew is also smarter. My thoughts as I chatted with the dev after my play through was that, while the game has improved in areas, it still feels like more of the same, which is something I told him, but of course, this was just a piece of the puzzle and things could be different in the full game.