As expected, Ubisoft had quite a strong presence at this year’s GamesCom. There were heavy hitters like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and Rainbow Six: Siege, sequels to age-old strategy series like Anno and Heroes of Might and Magic and even a few new IPs like For Honor and The Division to be seen at the show floor.
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At E3 2015 I’ve seen and played For Honor and The Division, as well as AC: Syndicate as Jacob. At GamesCom, AC: Syndicate had a new mission demoed, one where you get to play as the female protagonist – Evie Fry, Jacob’s sister. For Honor and The Division seemed to have had the same demoes as the ones we played at E3, so I decided to skip those.
Rooks cosplay at the AC: Syndicate booth
The Division had quite a line forming
Jason Vandenberghe, Creative Director of For Honor at the GamesCom booth
AC: Syndicate collector’s edition figurine on display
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate Evie Gameplay
After taking over a gang stronghold with Jacob at E3 and seeing all the new mechanics like using the brass knuckles, riding the carriages around town and fighting on top of a moving train, I was excited to see what playing the game as Evie was going to be like. I had a demo at Ubisoft’s press booth with one of the people working on the game walking me through the new features and helping me along the way. The demo was running on PS4’s and although it is a beta build I didn’t notice many (if any) bugs or glitches. It was a rather smooth experience.
The mission we got to play is a Black Box assassination that took place in the Tower of London. These AC assassination missions have always allowed multiple ways to finish them, and as I approached the starting point, a cutscene showed several assistance opportunities that would determine exactly how I’d be able to get to, and eliminate, the target.
I was allowed to record myself playing the game and Ubisoft released a gameplay trailer showing the same mission, so you can watch that for more details about the mission and backstory.
What I wanted to offer here are my impressions, now that I’ve seen the game at both E3 and GamesCom 2015. After AC: Unity, Ubisoft decided to shake things up with the franchise a little bit. They’ve identified the problems and took the good things as the basis for Syndicate. London looks like an exciting backdrop for our next Assassin’s Creed adventure. We are seeing new mechanics being introduced, like riding carriages or using trains to cover large distances more quickly. The rope launcher is the star of the new features for me, because it lets you move across rooftops much faster and get out of trouble in new and exciting ways. We also have, for the first time, two protagonists, each with their own story and some unique skills (Evie has a Chameleon skill that makes her much harder to detect and an AOE electric bomb that stuns and damages nearby opponents). I’ve also seen improvements in animations and game fluidity over Unity. The whistle is also making a comeback to replace the cherry bombs from Unity. What all of this sums up to is that Ubisoft listened to the AC fans and fixed the things they didn’t like, improved on others and brought back some of the fan favorites. On top of that, they decided to throw several new mechanics into the formula, to refresh the gameplay.
All of this combined makes for very familiar Assassin Creed stuff that feels a bit more fresh. Fans of the series will enjoy the new content and it might even pull some of those that were disappointed by the previous iterations back in.
I’d like to thank the kind staff at the Ubisoft booth for having us there and showing the game to us.
