Assassin's Creed Syndicate

• 1. Introduction

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  Assassin's Creed Syndicate first reached the public under the name Assassin's Creed Victory, and not by Ubisoft's choice. On the 2nd of December 2014, the website Kotaku published details and screenshots from seven minutes of target gameplay footage that it had acquired. The article went up with very little information and announced several facts that proved false, so the site took heavy criticism. Ubisoft confirmed the news the same day. The company said it was disappointed that "internal assets, not intended for public consumption" had escaped, and promised to unveil the studio's work at a later date.

  The game behind that footage was the ninth major installment in a long-running series, an action-adventure set in Victorian London. Its story belongs to two siblings, and its fight is for a city rather than a single target. Who were these twins, and why did their London need taking back? What did a street gang have to do with a secret war fought over centuries? And why does a woman defending the capital from spies in 1916 turn up in a game set decades earlier?

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• 2. Twins and a City

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  In 1868, twins Jacob and Evie Frye leave Crawley and arrive in a London that the Templars already hold. Paul Amos plays Jacob and Victoria Atkin plays Evie. Both were raised as Assassins, yet they find the London Brotherhood all but wiped out, while the Church and the Monarchy lose their grip on power.

  Jacob is a hot-headed brawler who prefers to fight at close range. Evie leans on intelligence and wit, and she is strongest when she stays out of sight. She is also the first female playable character in a mainline Assassin's Creed game. Players switch between the two both during missions and outside them.

  The London they inhabit is bigger than any map the series had built before. It covers the greater area of Victorian London and is divided into seven boroughs. The old city guard is gone. In its place stands a Victorian police force that rarely attacks the player unless a crime happens right in front of it.

  The twins also meet real people from the era. Charles Dickens, played by Des McAleer, is one ally. Others include Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx and Florence Nightingale. Sergeant Frederick Abberline of the Metropolitan Police, known for his Jack the Ripper investigation, joins them, as does Queen Victoria. Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of the Sikh Empire, is another, and his own story later fills an entire expansion.

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• 3. Gang Warfare

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  At the start of the game, every district in London belongs to the Blighters, a street gang under Templar control. The Frye twins answer by founding their own crew, the Rooks. Side content is built around this contest, so the optional work feeds directly into the main story.

  The Rooks can be strengthened with upgrades to their weapons, their vehicles and their economic opportunities. A stronger gang fights better. It also earns passive revenue over time, so the player's money grows even between jobs.

  Each borough changes hands slowly. Liberation missions range from freeing child labourers to kidnapping or assassinating a high-profile Templar. When enough of them are done, the borough's fate is settled in a gang fight that takes it over for good.

  Other side missions send the player to help figures such as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Queen Victoria. Smaller activities pay in cash, among them fight clubs and carriage races. Collectibles include music boxes, and these hold the keys to a hidden treasure.

  Something familiar is missing from this version of the series. Unlike its predecessor, Syndicate has no multiplayer mode, and it carries no companion app, a feature first introduced in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

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• 4. Tools and Tactics

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  Brass knuckles, compact revolvers, cane-swords and the curved Nepalese kukri make up the main arsenal. These weapons suit the period better than the swords and long arms of earlier games. All of them can be upgraded. Jacob and Evie can also wear different outfits, with belts for Jacob and capes for Evie, and each piece changes their statistics.

  Progress follows a skill tree. For every 1,000 experience points earned, the player unlocks one skill point to spend on a new ability. The number of skills unlocked sets each twin's level, and the cap is 10. Enemies carry levels too, which decide how hard they are to beat in a fight. Stealth ignores that ladder, because every enemy can be assassinated quietly whatever their level.

  Combat was reworked from Assassin's Creed Unity. It now centres on chaining fast attacks and blocks. Stealth gained new gadgets and a kidnapping mechanic. The player seizes an enemy as a hostage and blends in beside them, staying unseen as long as no other enemy is close by. Assassination missions build on Unity's "Black Box" design with more ways to infiltrate and distract, plus "cinematic kills" that unlock once certain conditions are met.

  Getting around is new as well. A rope launcher lets the player rappel up a structure or stretch a zip-line between buildings. Carriages can be driven or simply ridden, and they host fights and parkour chases. A train serves as the player's base for the whole game. Reviewers would later praise the rope launcher and the carriages for very different reasons.

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• 5. The Hunt for the Shroud

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  The main story opens with Evie sneaking into a laboratory run by David Brewster and the Templar occultist Lucy Thorne. They are experimenting on an Apple of Eden. Evie kills Brewster, learns that the Templars want a second artifact somewhere in London, and escapes as the Apple explodes. In London, the fellow Assassin Henry Green tells the twins the Templars are led by Crawford Starrick, a powerful figure in the city's industry and its criminal underworld.

  The twins disagree about what comes first. Evie wants to find the artifact. Jacob persuades her to liberate the boroughs instead, and in the process they build the Rooks. Jacob then cuts down Starrick's allies one by one. They include Dr. John Elliotson, who oversaw an addictive tonic, and Philip Twopenny, the Governor of the Bank of England, who was secretly robbing it. They also include James Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who planned to kill Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

  Evie follows clues beneath Edward Kenway's mansion to the key to a vault at St Paul's Cathedral. Thorne steals it and flees to the Tower of London. Evie kills her there, and Thorne reveals that the Shroud is not in the vault. Henry suspects Buckingham Palace. Evie also has to repair damage from Jacob's killings, such as medicine shortages and currency inflation. Their quarrel over his recklessness and her inaction ends in an uneasy truce.

  At a ball in Buckingham Palace, Starrick reaches the vault first and takes the Shroud. With Henry's help, the twins kill him, make peace, and return the Shroud to the vault. Queen Victoria knights the twins and Henry.

  The framing story runs in 2015. The Initiate, contacted again by Bishop, relives the twins' memories while Rebecca Crane and Shaun Hastings infiltrate Abstergo's London facility. The Templars Isabelle Ardant and Álvaro Gramática are also hunting the Shroud. At the vault, a fight kills Ardant, and Violet da Costa escapes with the artifact. Hacking Ardant's computer, the Assassins learn the Templars plan to build a living Precursor. They also learn that Juno is manipulating Abstergo employees to sabotage the company.

  A "time anomaly" in the Animus then shifts the Initiate into the memories of Jacob's granddaughter, Lydia Frye. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, the Brotherhood moves Jacob and Evie to the countryside. Lydia's husband, also an Assassin, joins the British Army, and she is left to defend London from German spies. In 1916, at Winston Churchill's request, she destroys a German spy facility in Tower Bridge. She finds that Templars have infiltrated the spy network and hunts them down. Churchill promises to ensure women win the vote after the war.

  Lydia clears every Templar-infested area in London and flushes out their leader, a Sage who is the reincarnation of Juno's husband, Aita. Juno herself is the one causing the anomaly. After each objective she appears to tell the Initiate of her past and rise to power. Once the Sage is dead, she thanks the Initiate and suggests that she and the Assassins might work together in future.

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• 6. Stories After the Story

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  On the 15th of December 2015, Jack the Ripper arrived on consoles, with the Windows version following on the 22nd of December. It is set in 1888, twenty years after the main campaign. Evie investigates the murders of female Assassins who were working as prostitutes in the East End. The Ripper has rallied former Rooks to his side and has kidnapped Jacob, now head of the British Brotherhood, who has a personal connection to the killer.

  The Dreadful Crimes sets the twins beside Henry Raymond, a penny dreadful writer, and his follower, a young Arthur Conan Doyle. Together they chase a series of London murders. Queen Victoria summons the twins to Buckingham Palace over a guard's apparent murder. Doyle works out that Raymond is the culprit. Raymond posed as the dead guard to watch the Queen open the safe holding her Sceptre of the Dove, and he faked a bomb threat to cover his escape. The twins free Doyle and recover the Sceptre, then urge him to try writing detective fiction himself. This pack builds on Unity's murder investigation system. It was a PlayStation 4 exclusive until March 2016, reached Windows on the 11th of April, and is the only expansion left out of the season pass.

  The Last Maharaja, released on the 1st of March 2016 for all platforms, returns to Duleep Singh. Henry challenges the Maharaja over his commitment to the people of India. The twins recover letters Singh wrote to his mother, which the British Indies Company had intercepted. Singh asks them to retrieve Punjabi gold, and then proposes taking the Koh-i-Noor from the Tower of London. The diamond they recover is a replica. Henry reveals that the real stone never left India, because Jacob and Evie's father, Ethan, hid it after receiving it from Henry's father, Arbaaz Mir.

  The twins later shut down a company factory that was producing chemical weapons. They learn that Brinley Ellsworth, a childhood friend of Singh and a company representative, is a Templar behind the plots against him. When Ellsworth tries to murder Singh, Evie subdues him. Singh lets his old friend go, saying they would be no better than the company if they killed him.

  The smaller Darwin and Dickens Conspiracy pack, with three missions, went to players who pre-ordered. On the 19th of January 2016 it was folded into the Streets of London pack, which added outfits and gear.

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• 7. Built in Quebec

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  On the 2nd of July 2014, Ubisoft announced that Ubisoft Quebec would lead development of the next Assassin's Creed. The company called it "a major investment" in the studio. Syndicate became only the second major entry not made by Ubisoft Montreal, after 2014's Assassin's Creed Rogue. Quebec had already helped on the six earlier games, and it had made two downloadable add-ons, The Tyranny of King Washington for Assassin's Creed III and Freedom Cry for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

  Marc-Alexis Côté was creative director, after working on Brotherhood, Revelations, Assassin's Creed III and Freedom Cry. François Pelland returned as senior producer. Lydia Andrew, who had worked on Assassin's Creed III, Black Flag and Unity, directed the audio. The historian Jean-Vincent Roy served as a consultant, as he had on Assassin's Creed III. The game is also the first in the series to include a non-playable transgender character.

  Austin Wintory, an American composer, wrote the score. The game's lyrical songs are murder ballads, and he wrote them with Tripod, an Australian musical comedy band. The soundtrack came out on Amazon MP3 and iTunes on the 23rd of October 2015. Bear McCreary scored the Jack the Ripper expansion, and that album followed on the 1st of December 2015.

  The official reveal came on the 12th of May 2015. The next day, Ubisoft announced five different editions for Europe. Life-size toy replicas of Evie's Cane-sword and of Jacob's Gauntlet with Hidden blade were on sale at launch. The game was released on the 23rd of October 2015 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and on the 19th of November 2015 for Windows. Years later, on the 18th of November 2024, a patch let players run it at 60fps on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S.

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• 8. Sales and Verdict

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  Alexa Corriea of GameSpot called Syndicate "a triumphant return to form for the franchise", praising the fluid combat, the beauty of the map and the rope launcher. Daniel Krupa of IGN gave it 8.2 out of 10 for the city's design and lighthearted plot, though he found the combat repetitive. Brett Makedonski of Destructoid scored it 7.5 out of 10 and called carriage-driving "a pain". Christopher Livingston of PC Gamer gave 66 out of 100 and faulted the repetitive side missions. On Metacritic, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions drew "generally favorable" reviews, while the PC version drew "mixed or average" ones.

  The sales story is odd. Syndicate debuted at number one in the UK, according to Chart-Track. Yet its first week was the second worst of the franchise there, ahead of only Assassin's Creed Rogue. Ubisoft blamed the notorious bugs and glitches of Unity's launch in 2014. Syndicate's second week beat Unity's, and it finished as the ninth best-selling retail game of 2015 in the UK. It had sold over 4.12 million units by February 2016 and over 5.5 million by November 2017.

  Ubisoft judged those numbers lower than earlier entries and pointed to series fatigue among players, caused partly by Unity's disappointing release. It decided to end the annual release cycle.

  Awards were plentiful. The Game Awards 2015 nominated it for Best Action/Adventure. The Canadian Videogame Awards listed it in categories including Game of the Year, Best Writing and Best New Character for Jacob and Evie Frye. The Writers Guild of America nominations named Marc-Alexis Cote, Hugo Giard, Corey May and Jeffrey Yohalem. The British Academy Games Awards listed it for artistic achievement, audio and music. In April 2020, Game Informer ranked it the second best game in the series to date.

  The next main entry, Assassin's Creed Origins, arrived in October 2017, mostly set in Ptolemaic Egypt. It acted as a soft reboot, adding more role-playing mechanics and a new modern-day storyline.

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