11. The Game Engine Feels Exactly The Same - But With Less Bugs
"Simply put: whatever decision-making mechanism is in charge of Ubi's dev 'method' is actively harming the quality of its games. From AI, to mission flow, to combat, the core pillars of these games are weathered at best and rotting at worst. Syndicate feels ancient, like Black Flag did, like Revelations did. I played it on a PS4, but it may as well have been a 360." - Steven Burns, Videogamer.com"In addition to a higher quality of design, Syndicate suffers much less from the bugs and glitches that plagued last year's Assassin's Creed." - Philip Kollar, Polygon"After Unity's troubled release, it's worth stating I encountered no noteworthy bugs or performance issues. - Daniel Krupa, IGN
For many people
this will be the deciding factor; does the actual act of playing the game feel any different in a worthwhile capacity? Is it simply enough for the core Assassin's Creed formula that's almost 10 years old now, to work in a responsive fashion? If the answer to that is "Yeah, I just want more of the same" you're in luck, whereas Videogamer's Steven Burns makes it abundantly clear that as soon as you start moving around the world in Syndicate, that sense of stagnation the series has had since Revelations is still very much present. It's also worth noting that although many sites including IGN and Polygon note glitches weren't present, Burns had "cutscenes with main characters talking to a fully-voiced invisible man (the model hadn't loaded in), NPCs sliding rigidly around the map, guards stuck in walls, jugglers juggling balls which were floating a good foot away from them, AI unable to walk in a straight line or down stairs without bumping a wall and resetting the pathfinding." That's some pretty polarising stuff - but considering the trainwreck that was Unity last year, I'll be very surprised if Ubisoft have managed to fix everything in just one year.