Assassin's Creed: 10 Reasons Why Syndicate Is The Most Underrated Ever
9. It's A Romp
Prior to Syndicate, the last Assassin's Creed entry saw Unity's Arno Dorian moping around a washed-out grey Saint-Denis mourning for his lost love in the Dead Kings DLC. After Syndicate, the next installment was the grim, serious and extraordinarily dull Michael Fassbender movie. Wait a minute, isn't this series supposed to be fun?
Thank God, then, for Syndicate remembering that Assassin's Creed is at its best when it remembers not to take itself too seriously.
Narratively, Syndicate is a rollicking adventure romp, which owes a debt to its setting in the era of the penny dreadful and the foundations of modern pulp and genre fiction.
Eschewing the franchise's tendency toward years-long blood feuds, Syndicate is instead a pacy, punchy story of gang warfare and treasure hunting across just a short period in 1868. Rather than a protagonist weighed down by a dour, moody quest for vengeance, Syndicate's heroes actually seem to enjoy being part of a secret world-saving cult.
That's not to say that there aren't any real stakes or hissably nasty villains. It's just that the heroes are eager to swing into action rather than in the midst of an angsty existential crisis.
This fun-focused approach also makes Syndicate's larger-than-life characters fit seamlessly with the plethora of enjoyable cameos from broadly drawn caricatures of the Victorian era's major real-life figures. It's not hard to buy roguish charmer and bit of rough Jacob Frye managing to pal about with the game's idea of both Karl Marx and Queen Victoria in a way that friendships between Arno Dorian and the Marquis de Sade or Ratonhnhaké:ton and George Washington never wholly convinced.