Assassin's Creed Syndicate Hands-On Review: 9 Things We Learned

3. The Women Kick Ass

When Ubisoft announced that one of the protagonists in Syndicate would be a woman, many in the gaming community raised their eyebrow, thinking that the company was trying to make up for the gender-rep faux-pas surrounding Unity, when technical director James Therien said that adding a female protagonist would've "doubled" the workload on the game due to the way women dress, move and so on. Casting aside Ubisoft's past cock-ups, what I've seen of Syndicate so far does a great - even brave - job in depicting women. This is spearheaded by co-protagonist Evie, who's tough, spunky, and a good counterpoint to the childlike Jacob. The 'brave' part of gender representation in Syndicate is the fact that you can beat up women, and they can beat you up as well. Some may call that 'wrong', but I call it progressive. I can't deny that it felt a bit uncomfortable the first time I, playing as Jacob, punched a female gang member to death, but she'd have done the same to me (if I was in control of Evie at the time, would that have somehow made it better? Equality is the endgame, after all). But maybe such moments of discomfort and self-questioning are exactly what we need for the gaming medium to progress. Ok, perhaps Ubisoft overdid the female thug presence in Victorian London a little bit, with seemingly every other gang member being a woman, but better to do so than undercook it. Also, the majority of gang leaders in the city (four out of six) are women - with awesome names like Bloody Nora. So I tip my hat to Ubisoft. It took them a while to get here, but they've finally stepped up to play a progressive role in gender representation in video-games.