Gadgetory

Assassin's Creed syndicate doesn't suck which is actually a huge relief to me because after how terrible unity was we really needed to see some changes for the better in this series and thankfully we got them and in fact this really kind of confirms a theory that I've been having with each game as they become released where every odd-numbered game they tend to make a lot of mistakes and have a lot of areas that need to be cleaned up and then they fix it in the following even-numbered one but then they just go back and forth back and forth as we saw with Assassin's Creed 3 and five unity but we saw good stuff in Assassin's Creed 2 Black Flag which is number four and now number six which is syndicate so the question is then what exactly was done in this one that made it better than what we saw in unity and a lot of it comes down to the fact that while a lot of the core game is very very familiar it's the same thing we've seen across every single game in the past except maybe black flag which deviated a little bit what changes they did make were huge strides in making the overall flow of the game a lot better the core that were all familiar with is definitely here free roaming through a city climbing towers to unlock side missions slowly conquering all of the town while also completing main story missions to get through the plot it's all stuff we've definitely done before but there's a lot of adjustments that just make it so much better first off there's the fact that they've completely overhauled the advancement system that we saw in unity one of the things that made unity a big problem was that it relied heavily on spending in-game money where you'd have to buy different pieces of equipment which would then level a character up problem was the amount of money that higher level stuff costed was ridiculous and pretty much required you to start investing in the game's helix credits which were microtransactions yay syndicate on the other hand focuses much more on a natural form of progression we've seen in other games whenever you complete different side missions complete story missions you're rewarded with XP and for every thousand XP you get a skill point spend so many skill points you level up which then lets you buy equipment you can use which is all much more affordable as a result the game's pacing is much much more player friendly where you can just take your time doing all the missions available for your current given level and through completing them you're definitely going to get enough money and experience to get all the upgrades you need to move on to the next set of missions another addition that seems kind of small at first but actually has a huge in on how the game is played is the grappling hook which makes traveling around the city a lot easier one of the things that became really annoying and monotonous about other older Assassin's Creed games is all the time you have to take to climb buildings or to survey the land or get to important parts of the mission now with the grappling hook you can quickly ascend any major towers or even find easier ways to cross from building to building at first it just seems like a handy new tool but it really does impact the overall flow of the game because you spend so much less time having to do the same exploration tasks over and over again but can instead focus on the missions you're playing through now one of the biggest changes of course is one of the things they heavily advertised about this game and that's that you have to separate main characters the twins jacob and evie frye now what's interesting about them is that while you share all experience and money and what you unlock so on so forth they actually have two separate independent skill trees they look the same for the most part with a couple unique talents here and there but you develop them for each character individually so if you want and as the game suggests you can Oh Jacob focus more on just upfront conflict and combat while having Evie focus on a pure stealthy approach now what's cool about this is well you could just invest in the same skills for both characters making them feel very similar early on that's boring instead if I specializing them you can make it so each one is suited for different missions there are story missions where you must use one or the other but for all the different side quests you can do for exploring the town it really does make a big impact who you choose to handle what situation now another big difference to unity is that there's a whole lot less you need to invest in with unity there was all kinds of different small parts of your outfit that you could choose from and by which led to you having to buy a lot of stuff with syndicate it's a lot more pared down it's really just your weapon your outfit a few other small pieces and the ability to upgrade your gangs as well as your secondary items as a result it's a lot easier to unlock everything in this game and basically makes microtransactions completely unnecessary they are still present in this game but you really only need to use them if you don't feel like playing through the whole thing if you take your time being completionist you can get through the whole thing and a lock of everything you need before you even close to finishing all the content so from a mechanic standpoint there have been a lot of upgrades in this game that just make the entire thing flow together a lot better that being said though the whole thing exactly amazing in particular the story it feels like at this point Ubisoft is just going through the motions with what happens in the story for this game there's not really any interesting twists or turns it's just a matter of your the assassins here's this big bat Templar guy you need to take down go ahead and do that and along the way you'll get a little bit more plot for the overarching story in present-day that's still somehow slowly moving along the whole thing is extremely familiar extremely cliche and honestly just a bit on the boring side thankfully one thing that does bounce it out is that Jake and Ameobi are actually fairly interesting characters and more importantly have some really good banter with one another which at least makes a lot of the cutscenes entertaining in small bursts now of course another problem is that this wouldn't be an assassin's Creed game without having its fair share of bugs and glitches at launch but thankfully they don't seem to be as common as they were in other games while playing through I encountered a time where a character completely disappeared during the cutscene even though I was talking to no one holding a dog there was another time where all fast travel points disappeared so I had to reload the game am I encountered one infinite loading screen but these were all isolated incidents and all the time that I spent blitzing through so it doesn't seem like they're happening often but enough to still be frustrating from time to time and hopefully we'll just get fixed after some patching ultimately in my opinion of this game is that it's good not great but also far from terrible like unity was they took the time to fix a lot of the problems we saw in that game but didn't really do anything radical enough to make it interesting like Black Flag it's enough to where if you are a fan of previous Assassin's Creed games and unity turned you off this is going to bring you back but if you've never liked any of the games except maybe Black Flag this probably isn't gonna do anything to change that opinion with that being said if you are interested in grabbing a copy of the game I do have a link posted down below in the description as always if you enjoyed this video and found it useful hit that thumbs up button to let me know as well as subscribers you don't miss out on any future content until next time guys I'm Kevin Kenson and I'll see you later