Assassin's Creed: 10 Reasons Why Syndicate Is The Most Underrated Ever

By now experienced gamers are well familiar with Ubisoft's favourite climb up all the tall things to reveal the map and then free-run across the rooftops gameplay mechanic. Syndicate doesn't radically overhaul that concept, but like much else of what makes it great, it just does it in a zippier, smoother fashion.

In Syndicate the buildings are taller and the cityscape larger than ever before, but fortunately the game equips you to handle this with a nifty "rope launcher" courtesy of real-life inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

This wrist-mounted grapple gun allows you to go soaring to the top of Big Ben's tower or the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in no time at all. Meanwhile, just as Assassin's Creed: Revelations' hook blade was designed to make traversing sixteenth-century Constantinople quick and easy (before being dropped from the games that followed), the rope launcher gives you a similar ability to fly across the streets of London on ziplines.

It's immensely satisfying to zoom around from the tops of towers and chimneys, smoothly jumping from the zipline and into an air assassination.

And, yes, zipping around the city like this will cause inevitable comparisons with playing Batman in the Arkham games. But, given how enjoyable flying up Gotham's skyscrapers was there, that is not an unwelcome comparison. Indeed, if a developer takes this as a cue to make a Gotham By Gaslight game then that would be pretty great as well.