Assassin's Creed Syndicate
For: PS4, XboxOne, PC
From: Ubisoft
Rating: Four stars (out of five)
Last year's Unity was so colossally broken, it made me feel physically ill playing it, with the horrendous frame rate and juddering making me feel queasy.
If not, put this review down, and jump on Google, you will be amazed and horrified in equal measure.
Right, so it works. But is it any good?
Yeah, although it is a bit unusual.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate follows twin assassins Jacob and Evie Frye, about as rebellious as you'd expect from videogame protagonists, as they attempt to dethrone the Templar rule over 19th-century London.
Sounds familiar, right?
That would be because, except for the location, that's been the story of at least the previous three Assassin's Creed games.
Although it did lose its way towards the end, it really added to the entire experience.
In Syndicate, you can choose to swap between Jacob and Evie as you play the game. What that meant from my perspective was I played the entire time as Evie, except for when the game forced me to be Jacob.
I imagine that will be the same for most people, one way or another.
Evie is meant to be more stealth oriented, while Jacob is meant to let his fists do the talking, but in my experience they were more or less the same.
In a most curious decision, after (some say pointlessly) including co-op into Unity, a game with no basis for co-op, they then introduce a new game with two co-operative protagonists, and then make the game single-player only.
It's a bit confusing really.
Why not make each protagonist user controlled?
It would've made perfect sense.
Assassin's Creed is famous for its free-running system.
Back in 2007 it was revolutionary, if a little flawed.
Altair would scale buildings with ease, and equally with ease, jump in the wrong direction to his demise at the most inopportune time.
Fast-forward to 2015, and it's more or less the same story.
You'll be sneaking around as Evie, carefully positioning yourself to take out your target.
The only thing left to do is to climb up this wall ... oh, I've just leapt straight into my target and alerted every guard and policeman within a kilometre.
The system has an uncanny knack of doing the exact thing you don't want it to do.
I am not sure how you'd overcome it given how complex it needs to be, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
But despite all this, it's still fun.
Leaping across buildings is brilliant.
Scaling enormous towers never gets old.
Doing drifts with horse-drawn carriages is an unusual, but entertaining, addition.
The game itself looks good, the setting is very well realised, and the ''aw'right guvna?'' accents are mildly entertaining.
In my opinion it's a step forward for the series.
If Ubisoft is going to continue releasing annual editions, it needs to at least make some tangible improvements year on year to differentiate, and this year I feel it has.
So overall, story, utterly superfluous; combat, rewarding if a little repetitive; gameplay, fun but occasionally infuriating.
But is it fun?
Yes, and perhaps that is the most important thing of all.
Oh, and all the characters have faces this time around too, which definitely helps.
