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

2. The Free-Running Isn't Actually That 'Free'

Don't panic, free-running isn't turning into a skill that's only unlockable as a paid micro-transaction (it's a few years before we reach that point yet). No, what I mean it not being free is that Syndicate seems to suffer from many of the same pitfalls as past Assassin's Creed games - if not worse due to the design of the city. Syndicate does a great job of capturing the unevenness of London architecture. A row of buildings in Whitechapel may be made up of several buildings of varying heights, meaning that long sprints across convenient flat rooftops are a rarity. Combine that with irrregular chimneys on tops of buildings, hanging signs in the streets, and the general higgledy-piggledy-ness of London, and you have yourself a pretty complex landscape to parkour about in. This would work fine if the free-running mechanics were adapted to the city, but unfortunately they're pretty much the same in Syndicate as in any previous Assassin's Creed game. This would create scenarios in which I'd find myself awkwardly perching on chimneys, apparently just too high to jump down onto a roof below, but also too far across from other things I could jump to. After a minute of pointless pointing in every direction in the hope of finding something to cling on to, I despondently had to climb back down the chimney - making me feel like a total amateur. Similar clumsy situations would happen in the back-alleys of London; if I tried to jump in a wall that wasn't at a perfect right angle to another wall, the mechanics would get confused about which I wanted to jump on, and ruin my parkour flow. Par for the course for the series, but it's a shame at this point that Ubi still haven't found a solution.