Every year, the Assassin’s Creed series struggles with the idea of inheritance. Like its Templars and Assassins, who are locked in a never-ending struggle for relics, each game picks a side in the question of how strongly should it lean into its now-convoluted ancient lore and incorporate the still-underdeveloped present-day elements. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate chooses wisely, leaves out multiplayer entirely, and pushes a lot of that baggage into the background, largely freeing itself up to make the most of Victorian London and have fun with sneaking, climbing, and stabbing.

Sibling Rivalry

Syndicate smartly negotiates this internal conflict by dramatising it in the form of its twin playable characters, Evie and Jacob Frye. The former is a devout Assassin, intent on stopping the Templars by tracking down the remaining pieces of Eden. Her brother Jacob, however, is a pragmatist – a social reformer who rails against the Assassin’s burdensome legacy and wishes to help his city in more immediate ways, seemingly embodying my desire to move on from the tangled mysticism. They’re both extremely likeable, well-drawn protagonists, and the interaction between the two is laced with a lively sibling rivalry that brings levity to otherwise-earnest cutscenes. But their contrasting worldviews have the greatest positive impact on Syndicate’s structure, which is both engaging and meaningful.

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Watch the first 15 minutes of Assassin's Creed Syndicate above.

You can freely switch between Jacob and Evie at most points, with side missions and open-world activities open equally to both. Campaign missions, however, are different, with Jacob taking the lead in the majority of the core assassinations. This is frustrating, especially since Evie is pitched as the more stealthy of the pair. But I soon realised that Syndicate is just not that interested in exploring forgotten tombs in search of dusty relics; it wants to liberate the great city of London from its terrible oppressors. And to be blunt, Syndicate’s a much better experience for identifying more closely with the goals of Jacob.

“ Syndicate is just not that interested in exploring forgotten tombs in search of dusty relics

Despite being sidelined so often, Evie comes across as the more nuanced character, struggling with her sense of duty, where Jacob is a more straightforward bloke with clear goals. By the end of the 20-hour campaign, I felt like I’d probably spent more time with Evie due to prefering her in side missions, and I certainly knew her better. She sees the bigger picture, with her missions tackling problems Jacob can’t even comprehend. Evie also stars in my favourite assassination mission – a nighttime infiltration of the Tower of London. Loading

Watch our PS4/Xbox One Graphics Comparison above.

Given their differences, I was disappointed with how similar Jacob and Evie are to play. They each possess three high-level abilities designed around their supposed strengths of stealth and combat, respectively – Evie can effectively become invisible when stationary, for example, while Jacob has more deadly combos. But the rest of the abilities are identical. At first, I exaggerated the differences by investing all of Evie’s points into the stealth skill tree and Jacob’s into combat, thinking I could switch between the two depending on the situation. But since you can’t switch between characters within campaign missions, that’s not a viable approach. In one mission, I was playing as Jacob and it would’ve been really useful to unlock a specific door to make a quick escape, but because I’d only unlocked advanced lockpicking for Evie – who was unavailable – I had to take a longer, more hazardous route out of the building.

The Jewel in the Crown

Ah, London… in 1868, it was a bustling, heavily industrialised city, the heart of an unprecedented Empire. It feels like a different type of place to those Assassin’s Creed has visited in the past. The churches of Rome and Paris give way to London’s glistening train stations and infernal factories, its cathedrals to industry and progress. It’s not an exact replica – the map is nipped and tucked, bringing some landmarks closer together – but on the whole it feels like London, especially key areas like Trafalgar Square and the Palace of Westminster.

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Watch our comparison between in-game London and the real city above.

At first, I thought it was fairly ugly – a smear of brown and grey – but it slowly yields its charms. The slums are caked in mud and thousands of chimneys spew forth thick black smoke, but there’s a kind of beauty when you see it blot the sky at dusk. Similarly, walking around the foggy streets of central London by gaslight is wonderfully atmospheric. And after Unity's troubled release, it's worth stating I encountered no noteworthy bugs or performance issues.

“ It feels like you’re chipping away at the enemy, clawing back parts of the city.

It feels like you’re chipping away at the enemy, clawing back parts of the city. Similarly, you can stifle the enemy in other ways, like bribing the police or controlling the docks. Admittedly, these gang upgrades are simply purchased through a sterile menu, but they convey the notion of the 19th-century city as a complex organism.

The campaign missions achieve something similar, with each target occupying a slightly different sphere of influence, including the worlds of science, politics, and finance. Even though it positions the devious Crawford Starrick behind everything, it effectively conveys the idea of corruption and control being diffused across different systems.

A Side of Dickens

It all sounds rather serious, but Syndicate is also the silliest Assassin’s instalment in quite some time. It shows a real delight in ransacking its rich Victorian setting for fun stuff to do. There are so many amusing missions, from tracking down hallucinogenic orchids for Charles Darwin to retrieving the lapdog of Benjamin Disraeli’s wife in the Devil’s Acre, the most dangerous part of London. Early on, you can dress up Jacob as Sherlock Holmes, don Cthulhu-inspired tentacular brass knuckles, and hunt down occultists with Charles Dickens. What’s not to love about that sentence?

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The Charles Dickens side-missions are definitely my favourites. You accompany the great novelist to expose fraudsters, catch hypnotists, visit the most haunted house in London, and even have a supernatural encounter of your own. It’s Syndicate at its most consistently engaging, eccentric, and playful, which makes the terrible ending all the more baffling. What were they thinking? It’s entirely at odds with what the story has been about, mired in the dense, po-faced lore it spends the best part of 25 hours trying its best to forget about.

Assassin’s Bones

Inside the mostly entertaining and lively packaging, however, what you’re being asked to do feels very familiar. Missions almost always involve the traditional Assassin’s Creed staples of following, escorting, or killing people and/or stealing items, but Syndicate’s characters and situations do more than enough to stave off boredom. The most prominent new mechanic is the grapple-gun, and on the whole, it’s well implemented and fun to use. Its ratcheting mechanism prevents you from turning into Batman; it’s not possible to zip around London at high speed or glide, but it allows you get negotiate wider roads without coming down to street level, and reach London’s higher rooftops with ease. When you’re on the ground, carriages can be stolen at any time, and provide a helpful way to cover more ground since London’s a big place, around a third bigger than Unity’s take on Paris. They don’t feel particularly fast or exciting to drive, but they handle much better than I was expecting.

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Watch us go on a horse rampage in Assassin's Creed Syndicate above.

The latest iteration of Assassin’s Creed combat, on the other hand, looks fast-paced and attractive – the sword cane became a favourite, thanks to its delightfully brutal finishers – but got a touch repetitive by the time I was through. It would also be nice to have more non-lethal ways to subdue others, especially in a setting that introduces the police as a hostile but ultimately well-meaning obstacle that I didn’t feel good about having to kill. Technology dominates the era, but Alexander Graham-Bell – the era’s Da Vinci – doesn’t have much to offer your arsenal outside of an electrical grenade which is effective at incapacitating large groups of enemies but draws far too much attention. And if you’re wondering if this is the year when Assassin’s Creed finally fixes its long-standing problems with your character accidentally grabbing the wrong ledge or climbing the wrong wall, it sadly has not. But free-running as good here as it’s ever been.