Ok, onto Syndicate.
Syndicate is basically the companion game to Unity, from what I've gathered. This time the MD is some dude playing an Abstergo animus video game(yep, you're a dude playing a video game about a dude playing a video game about the Victorian Era. Roll Eyes when the meta stops being cute) and the assasins hack the game console and tell you to explore the REAL history to go find something. Also, Shawn and Rebecca from AC3 are doing some stuff in London and I don't really care because it has almost nothing to do with anything and it's a cutscene that plays every so often.
The main game is set in England in 1868 and the Templars control London, and by extension, the British Empire, and therefore, much of the world. The Assasins, OTOH, control diddly and apparently have been afraid to set foot in London for decades(except for the token dude who just sits there and watches them do stuff and writes letters asking for reinforcements). That it until junior assassins' Jacob and Evie Fry decide to go to London themselves(without orders, just because) to take down the Templars. Also, Jacob wants to form a gang to help them retake the city, just because. Also, despite owning the police, the industry, the government and really, most of the city that matters, they also have their own gang, which makes up most of the baddies you fight.
It ends up being a lot like the a return of the older AC games where you go to a district, do things to damage the rival gangs' control and extend your own control, such as a number of activities until the other gang leader challenges you to a fight for control of the district and when you win you take control of it. There's also missions that run parallel to this where you take out a notable member of the Templars in London and who controls some portion of the city and you do this more or less until the end. Also, there's an ISU artifact somewhere in London(it's under Buckingham Palace, because of course it is) and your main base in a train that trawls around the city on a loop(which I guess was a think in the 1860's but in modern london the only trains that run through the middle of the city are the underground ones).
There's no much plot to speak of here, honestly and the game doesn't do much to innovate. For the first and only time in the series, there's a Dual Protagonist in the form of Jacob and Evie Frye, who in the open world can be switched back and forth between more or less whenever you want. They play more or less the same, except in a few differences. Jacob is more of a bruiser while Evie fights with more finesse and is sneakier. This really only shows up in the skill trees for the two(because the series now has Skill points and RPG elements, albeit in a limited fashion) where Evies high level skills allow her to become invisible if she's not moving and crouched, whereas Jacob hits harder. Luckily, you can upgrade both of them because both characters get the XP you earn evenly(and not just the one you're currently playing).
In missions, OTOH, you're forced to play either Jacob or Evie depending on the mission. And while this doesn't sound bad in theory, Jacob gets the lions share by far compared to Evie, and even wore, the mission structure inevitable goes like this "Jacob fucks up the Templers a bit, which causes some unintended problems and then Evie has to do a mission or two to clean it up". Rinse and Repeat for the entire game. Apparently at one point Evie was going to have a more equal footing in the missions but Ubisoft decided to scale her down because of sexism(their own, not Victorian). It's weird, because the game goes out it's way to include a playable Female Assasin, a couple notable female Templars, and a large number of the enemy gang members are female, because the 19th century was apparently a lot more progressive then we imagined(THE ANIMUS DID IT!). However, the Ubisoft decides to sideline Evie as much as they can in the actual missions, which feels like it undercuts the point of having a playable female assasin.
Some of the missions are fairly good, notably the big setpiece missions where you're given a location and an objective(notably when trying to take down a Big Templar), a few side objectives to make things easier and generally given free reign to approach the objective anyway you want, not unlike a Hitman game. It's really cool and one of the few sparks of real creativity the game has, unfortunately. The rest of the game is less interesting. A lot of the missions feel rather rote and bland, and the side activities are unmemorable for the most part. The biggest new addition is some barehanded boxing in underground fight clubs for the lols and some cash but I honestly can't remember any of the others.
The plot originally had a far more interesting twist, apparently, where killing each Templar would have had unintended consequences. So killing the guy who controlled the hospitals would have caused outbreaks of sickness all over the city, killing the guy who controls the transport would have caused traffic jams and trains would be far less reliable, etc. It would no doubt have made the game harder as you went on and the map more complex, which I'm sure is why they dropped it in favor of Evie just fixing things with like one or two missions and then everything is fine.
Really, this entire game feels like it suffers from a lack of any real risk taking or something to say. There's a nominal storyline emphasis of how disturbing it is for the Templars to control London and the British Empire and also a big Chunk of 19th century capitalism and Imperialism, but there's no real teeth to any of this. You see very little outside of 19th century London, nothing you do seems to change anything, no discussion of what to do about this system of inequality once the Templars are killed, etc. Hell, Karl Fucking Marx is in the game and he's basically a quest giver. Charles Dickens(who also had things to say about London Poverty) is there for a string of ghost hunting missions, which are fun and amusing, but not really trying into the theme. I mean, really, Ubisoft, why do you even bother with the setting if you aren't gonna fucking bother saying anything? I get that Ubisoft doesn't want to look like they're endorsing Communism but maybe at least have them debate it with Marx a bit? Like have a brief conversion where Marx is summarizing his thoughts on the flaws of Capitalism and why Communism would fix this with having the Frye twins debate this with him for a couple minutes while on a road trip or something? If that's too EDGY, why even include him at all?
