Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is—wait for it—an Assassin’s Creedgame, with all that that implies. It’s a really good game, mind you, my favorite since Assassin’s Creed II took us to Renaissance Italy way back in 2009. We’re in Victorian London this time, in 1868. As with most games in the series, Syndicate shifts between the present and the past to follow the convoluted and conspiratorial struggle between the Assassins and the Templars, who are fighting over … something, that’s for sure. You climb famous buildings, use your magic Eagle Vision to identify targets in a crowd, and kill them.
In keeping with series tradition, the historical setting mixes painstakingly accurate architectural renderings of things like Big Ben and Westminster Abbey with entertainingly campy and counterfactual cameos from figures like Darwin and Dickens. One series of side quests is dubbed, simply, “Karl Marx’s Memories.” There’s an Edwin Drood joke. A late-game mission is titled “Driving Mrs. Disraeli.”
Honoring another Assassin’s Creed convention, those missions are wildly uneven, with exhilarating set pieces like a clamber across London’s Tower Bridge juxtaposed with unimaginative pixel-hunting, during segments in which the player is asked to do little more than make sure the avatar hits its marks.
