Ubisoft showed a very pretty-looking trailer for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate yesterday at its E3 presentation, which is all well and good. But what about the actual gameplay? That looks nice, too!
Feast your eyes upon this short but very sweet Syndicate gameplay walkthrough:
I’m gonna be totally honest. I am not an Assassin’s Creed fanboy. I’ve often found myself wishing over the past few years that Ubisoft would either retire the franchise, or do like Rockstar and actually take it’s time between pumping out massive open-world games to make them actually feel unique, fresh, and fun every time. That’s in opposition to...whatever you’d call a game like last year’s unfortunate Assassin’s Creed Unity.
Syndicate, on the other hand, has gotten me legitimately excited. As the narrator in that video explains, they’ve retooled Assassin’s Creed long-stilted combat system to be more “brutal.” Brutality aside, wielding a cane sword also strikes me as historically appropriate, if not totally accurate necessarily. And there are plenty of other welcome little details like the cane sword in Syndicate’s new gameplay trailer that left me excited—the emphasis on trains, the dirt and grit of London. Spectacular graphics aside, the world actually looks grimy, which is how I imagine a city in the heat of the industrial revolution should look. This is the kind of periodization I’ve wanted to see in AC games for a while now.
Speaking of action-oriented historical periodization, there’s also carriage-jacking sequences. You even get to climb on top of the horse-and-buggy and start duking it out on the roof:
How can you not get behind this?!?!?!
There are also epic-looking fights on top of trains:
...beautiful scenery:
...and, of course, synchronization points:
I might just have to take a leap of faith and give this series another shot.
Contact the author at yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com.