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

As a franchise that consistently reworks the same basic formula in different historical environments, any Assassin's Creed game will ultimately live or die on its period setting. And, in Victorian London, Syndicate has one of the absolute standout settings of any game in the series.

As the "modern" Assassin's Creed game, Syndicate has a really unique feel to its city setting entirely unlike the classic medieval and Renaissance episodes or the more recent ones set in the ancient world. Syndicate's London is a huge sprawling mass of gaslit streets, factory chimneys spewing smoke, and imposing civic architecture.

Here London feels like a real grimy, gritty, working city, grounded in impressive research to reconstruct the look and feel of the nineteenth century metropolis from countless photographic and illustrative records (in comparison, the ancient worlds of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla must be recreated largely speculatively given the lack of concrete historical sources).

The game's whole plot revolves around how intricately the different aspects of London work together like a complex clockwork mechanism which powers the world's most powerful empire. So it's to Syndicate's benefit that its version of the different London boroughs have strong identities of their own.

From the deprived and dirty slums of Whitechapel (returned to decades later in the Jack The Ripper DLC) to the shining lights and wide thoroughfares of The Strand and the political halls of power in Westminster, Syndicate brings London vividly to life and provides an urbab open world that few games can match.