Fun. If there’s a single word I took away from the two days we spent with the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate development team at Ubisoft Quebec, it was that. Fun.

Everything about Assassin’s Creed Syndicate feeds into that core idea of fun. Every discipline, from artists to musicians to programmers to designers, all focused on that keyword. From the ground up, the game is there to provide players with the tools, systems, and freedom to create their own fun. In conjunction, the game’s story, characters, and world seem to be leaning away from the serious, somber tones that may have weighed down prior games in favor of something more light-hearted and adventurous. This depiction of London is less Downton Abbey and more Guy Ritchie. And after the slip-up that was 2014’s Unity, Ubisoft’s pillar series could stand to use a bit of fun.

Back to the Drawing Board

Loading

The team kept mentioning specific moments in AC’s history as examples of the fun they’re striving for. In particular, Ezio’s trilogy and Black Flag, which are not only my favorite entries in the series, but generally the most well-regarded ones by fans in general. Yes, those games had their fair share of dark, powerful, and emotional moments, but as a whole, they exuded a sense of internal energy and fun. Ezio was a brash, lively young man who didn’t mind cracking a joke about the fact that yeah, sometimes the eternal struggle between the Assassins and the Templar can be a bit of a wet blanket, so why not have some fun with it?

Likewise, sailing the high seas in Black Flag provided such an incredible sense of freedom and exploration, and AC Syndicate aims to capture that same sensation with its various modes of transportation around London. Bombing through the streets on a carriage (which thankfully control much more arcade-y and much less like an actual carriage would), getting in a fist fight and tossing a fool off the top of a moving train, and zipping up to a rooftop using your new rope launcher all work in unison to allow the player to get from point A to point B in whichever manner they deem most fun. AC Syndicate is a game that sets out to give you a bevy of toys of play with, then steps out of the way and lets you create your own stories and anecdotes.

Werewolves of London

Loading

We’ll be doing a deeper dive into the characters of AC Syndicate later on in the month (man oh man am I excited to hang out with Charles Dickens in every single pub in London), but the short of it is that the sibling leads Jacob and Evie Frye seem to be a fantastic representation of the duality of the AC series. Jacob is cut from the same cloth as someone like Ezio or Edward Kenaway – he cares less about the archaic nonsense of the century-spanning feud, and more-or-less just wants to beat the living snot out of anyone who’s trying to do the city of London and its people wrong. The pen may be mightier than the sword (or is it hidden blade?), but to Jacob, a well-placed fist to the face trumps them all.

While playing as Jacob sounds great and all, it’s his sister Evie that really has me excited for AC Syndicate. She’s more in the mold of an assassin like Altair – she holds the creed as doctrine, and wants to do right by her father and the rest of the assassins that came before him. Lucky for all of us, she has the tools accomplish this with the finesse and expertise of the best of them. From the handful of story beats we’ve seen, the dynamic between Jacob and Evie is hilarious, entertaining, and rife with narrative potential.

As fans of the series are probably aware, Evie is the first playable female character in a core entry of the AC series (Aveline and Shao from Liberation and Chronicles predate Evie). It’s 2015, and I couldn’t be happier to have more and more games give players the freedom to hop into an avatar that more accurately represent them as a person. Hell, I can’t wait to play as Evie, because I’m just really excited to sneak up to a bunch of guards and toss a voltaic bomb at them, which pretty much causes a gigantic electrical explosion which I don’t understand but honestly don’t really care because giant electrical explosions look awesome, and are, you guessed it, fun.