DLC #159 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Jack The Ripper

The scope for content during the London Victorian Era is full of intriguing ideas, so it's a little bit disappointing that Assassin's Creed Syndicate only bought out a single piece of DLC content. 

The good news is, they probably picked the strongest and most befitting idea of them all, focusing on the iconic serial killer, Jack the Ripper.

The succession of murders, that took place in Whitechapel, England in 1888 ultimately ended up unresolved, and this level of mystery made these crimes notorious in English folklore. The ambiguity also lends perfectly for the developers to run with their own narratives, characters and conclusion to the tale.

The story begins with Jack the Ripper having already committed the murders of 5 prostitutes, true to the real life crimes the Ripper was allegedly guilty of. However, in an added twist to lay the foundations of the plot, it also seems that Jack the Ripper is responsible for the death of Jacob Frye. This leaves you to play through the DLC as Evie Frye, with the main motivation being to stop the Ripper and understand what exactly happened to Jacob - His case is treated as a mysterious disappearance, but it's made quite clear to the player that Jacob is possibly killed during a very early confrontation with the Ripper. As part of the story, you will also control the Ripper during certain segments, which is a nice touch, as the game retains the angle of playing from the perspective of 2 different characters in the absence of Jacob Frye.

The DLC retains much of the main games approach, though it does implement a few fresh ideas. There is now a Fear mechanic in place, whereby you can disperse groups of enemies by pulling off specific attacks which will cause them to flee in terror, rather than relying on killing everyone in sight. This comes with the addition of some toys, including fear spikes and fear bombs. It's a neat little tweak, and makes combat much easier than killing seemingly endless waves of enemies.

There are also new associates you'll meet throughout the 10 memory sequence, who will provide a range of new side activities to complete. These are all required to achieve every trophy in the list, so to see some fresh injection of ideas into this, rather than just rinse and repeats from the main game, is also a good touch.

The 7 trophies are easy to achieve, and do lean into the fear mechanic quite heavily. You should unlock all of these progressing towards 100% completion, including a final trophy for concluding the story and unveiling the mystery behind Jack the Ripper, but there is a bit of additional legwork required here;

Ripperologist - Achieve 100% synchronisation in Jack the Ripper.

 

The "Ripperologist" trophy, requires the player to complete all content within the Jack the Ripper DLC. This wasn't a requirement for the Platinum trophy, so this is a sudden change in expectations, and full completion will require the following;

Beating 10 main story memories, including all optional mission constraints, completing 21 Associate Activities, including all optional mission constraints and collecting a total of 98 collectible items, spread across Chests, Posters and Helix Glitches.

Everything you do within this DLC works towards this trophy. The Story is great and full of intrigue, and as long as you follow the logic of completing the optional missions constraints as you play through, this will minimise the necessity to replay any memories. With that considered, it's around a 6-7 hour experience.

You'll meet 3 new Associates throughout the plot too, which will unlock a host of new side activities to complete. Most of these are fresh experiences, and a couple of them are carried over from within the main game. These also come with optional mission constraints which need to be completed in order to reach 100% synchronisation, so it's important to make sure these are fulfilled in the same method as per the main story missions. These 21 additional activities, assuming no replay required, should be another 2-3 hours on top.

Finally, and it wouldn't be Assassin's Creed without some arbitrary collectibles, you'll need to jump around the city and find 98 collectibles. This is a fairly standard map-hopping exercise, but it is important to note that you will venture into 3 unique locations as part of the main plotline, where some of these collectibles are housed, so if you're missing any, they're probably there. You'll need to replay the relevant memory where you visit these areas if you missed any collectibles the first time round. As before, you'll be able to purchase treasure maps at £5,000 each, which will reveal the locations of all collectibles. Add another 1-2 hours for this.

All in all, it amounts to the thick end of around 10-12 hours, with all focus on this trophy to cap the DLC off. It's a very casual experience, but a decent amount of time to put into a single trophy, where you effectively unlock the rest along the way. Exactly what was needed after being punished by The Division Survival DLC.

Platinum #120 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 3/10

Continuing a tradition of games in a series that seems to be great at consistently producing fairly easy trophy lists, Assassin's Creed Syndicate makes a strong case for being one of the easiest Assassin's Creed Platinum trophies to date.

Set in good 'ole England, in the midst of the second industrial revolution at some time in the 1800's, and for the first time in any Assassin's Creed game I've played, you take control of two protagonists - Twins Jacob and Evie Frye - with the goal to prevent London being overtaken by Templar rule.

You flick between each of the two main characters, both with their own play-styles and motives. Jacob is an action-based brawler who wants to build a gang empire and takeover London, and Evie is a stealth-based spy who wants to unravel the mystery of Eden. It's a good change of pace to effectively play out the story from two different perspectives, and the way these stories feel different, but still closely linked to an overall main story arc is executed well.

As always in Assassin's Creed games, the supporting cast is full of well known characters befitting of the era in time. I especially enjoyed this particular one, as an Englishman watching the introductions of some very influential British figures come and go throughout the plot, with an excellent homage to the First World War added in for good measure.

Despite the split motives between both characters, the ultimate conclusion is to stop Crawford Starrick, a powerful figure who controls London via a massive criminal network. The plot takes a typical shape as you go through memories and sequences murdering your way through a host of other different people with criminal ties to Starrick. It's another great entry into the Asssassin's Creed series, with a proven formula that doesn't stray too far from it's predecessors.

The aforementioned change in perspective, where you now control two main protagonists is the biggest gameplay change, but there are some new mechanics that are also solid additions. Missions where you ultimately end up assassinating a key figure play out as big set pieces with multiple ways to kill your target, down to the discretion of the player, with the variety providing a very Hitman-esque feeling.

The large scale gang fights are a cool addition too, and London is excellently recreated in all of it's Victorian glory, with a host of key landmarks across London bought to life, and instantly recognisable to their real counterparts.

On the trophy list front, it's much more of the same, with the now extremely familiar formula for Assassin's Creeds games being closely replicated here yet again.

The 50 trophies apply a focus on progression throughout the main story, delving into a wide array of the open world side activities, conquering the map and gathering collectibles. It also happens to be the easiest Assassin's Creed game yet.

The "Shall We Dance?" trophy, awarded for completing Memory Sequence 9, concludes the main story of the game, with normal rules in full application. You'll be awarded a trophy upon completion of every memory leading up to the end of the game, as well as another trophy for achieving 100% synchronisation, which involves beating every mission and their relevant additional mission constraints.

By this point, I'm always consciously aware of this because it seems to be a standard requirement of every Assassin's Creed list to contain a trophy for 100% synchronisation of the Main Story. Completing the additional requirements as I go along is a great method of reducing needless replayability, and when I went back over the small handful of mission constraints I'd missed, they were incredibly easy to tick off and gave me absolutely no issues. In previous titles, there have always been a couple of additional tasks that have been somewhat challenging, but no such issue existed here, and I cruised through the story unfazed.

There's no inclination to play through the game on any specific difficulty level - In fact, I don't even think the option is ever presented - and the combat system is still incredibly easy to grasp. There are a few tweaks to the combat - Enemies will now adopt a defensive stance to attacks, and will require you to break their block by pressing X before you can unleash a flurry of attacks yourself, but the game's combat still ultimately comes down to button-mashing using whatever weapon of your choice, and chaining these attacks together to deal with multiple enemies at once.

Outside of the main story, the game offers up a ton of side content, but the trophy list is very selective in it's requirements on how much of this you actually need to fulfil towards completing the entire list.

The "Street Sweeping" trophy, awarded for Conquering all the boroughs in London, is as extensive as the requirement goes, and conquering a borough does require a fair amount of work. There are 7 London boroughs to conquer in total, and in order to conquer a borough, you'll need to complete a variety of different tasks which gradually remove Blighter control of that particular area. These include clearing all gang strongholds, completing all gang member bounties, hunting all templars and completing every child liberation mission. Once you've beaten all these activities, you'll unlock the gang war activity for that particular borough, and winning the gang war will finally move it into conquered status.

The gang wars are the best part of this trophy - Most of the other preliminary activities become tedious and boring once you realise they're copied and pasted across all 7 London boroughs, and this sort of content padding is something Assassin's Creed games are notorious for. Even though the boroughs scale in difficulty of enemy presented to the player, there never seemed to be any serious challenge in clearing any of them as you progress through the game. It just becomes a fairly standard tick-box exercise.

Collectibles are still fairly rife, but nowhere near as tedious as they have been in some previous Assassin's Creed titles. You can still purchase maps that will reveal the location of all collectibles necessary to achieve a corresponding trophy in the list, which naturally makes them easier to gather. Further to this, each of the London boroughs will give a breakdown of all collectibles that lie within that area, all sorted by type, so the game does everything it can to support you with maximum clarity on the collectibles you might need, and exactly where you can get them. 

I count a total of 6 collectible-related trophies here, with the overall collective amount of items to obtain sitting at 164. It's not exactly light work, but to add some context, Assassin's Creed Unity had you collecting 422 treasure chests and Cockades towards the Platinum trophy, so it's a very welcome change in direction to see a fairly drastic drop in these requirements. Collectibles in Assassin's Creed games have never really been an interesting exercise, and they're really no different here in Syndicate. Some of them offer up some cool backstory, such as consuming the 20 different brands of beer, all of which provide interesting commentary to them, but their primary reason to exist is to act as a time filler with little intrinsic reward apart from the trophies related to them.

The rest of the list is made up of lots of miscellaneous tasks, some of which will come naturally as you play through the game, and others less so. The list also harbours a handful of really annoying trophies. Who deemed it was necessary to include a trophy that involved destroying 5000 destructible objects with your carriage, where the strategy is to just literally blast around the city for hours carelessly running into anything and everything until you reached a total of 5000?? 

Kicking 50 enemies off trains, shooting 50 enemies before they shoot you and performing 50 multi-finishers will more than likely all require post-game work, as these situations just don't simply pop up that frequently in an organic nature as you go through the game. They are all but a minor inconvenience, but still add tedious legwork onto the end of the journey.

However, this is the easiest Assassin's Creed game I've ever played by virtue of the following;

The additional mission constraints to achieve 100% synchronisation are easy, it's nowhere near as heavy on collectibles as some previous Assassin's Creed games have been - plus you still get the visual guidance from the game through the option of purchasing maps that reveal their whereabouts - and even with the some of the more grindy miscellaneous trophies, you can still come in on under 35 hours for this Platinum if you're efficient and complete additional mission requirements for 100% sync as you go along to minimise replay time.

Once I was finished, I only had a 74% completion rate for everything the game had to offer, which is a good indication of the fact that there's alot of side content you don't need to go through if you're playing the game purely for the purpose of achieving the Platinum trophy. The average benchmark seems to be around 4/10 for an Assassin's Creed, but I do believe this comes in slightly lower for those reasons.

Notable Trophies -

Shall We Dance? - Complete Memory sequence 9
Street Sweeping - Conquer all the boroughs in London

Hardest Trophy -

Street Sweeping

Conquer all the boroughs in London

DLC#158 - Tom Clancy's The Division - Expansion II - Survival

The Division DLC experience has been some journey. It's been time-consuming, grindy, challenging and, in this case especially, brutal in it's conclusion.

The concept of Survival is good, something different, but ultimately very frustrating because it's intent on showing absolutely no mercy and kicking you all over the place.

You're sent into Manhattan in order to extract some Anti-Viral agents, when your helicopter crashes into the middle of map. It's extremely cold, you only have a hazmat suit on, and you've contracted Sepsis, which will kill you within a matter of 1 hour. No bargaining on that.

The goal is to survive, and ultimately escape, but the disease flowing through you takes hold and will eventually kill you if you don't manage to escape within the 1 hour time limit, so something's got to give - And that's if the various other perils within the game mode don't get to you first. These include large groups of NPC's that patrol Manhattan's streets, booby traps and even the plummeting weather conditions.

You start out in a Safehouse with just a pistol and the aim centres around crafting warmer clothes, better weapons and the other necessary tools required in order to extract and escape. The game has a steep learning curve as you go through the process of understanding the map, and the best methods for success. This leads to some brutal difficulty, especially early on when you're running around with flimsy clothing and weak weapons - All it takes is to run into a group of enemies or find yourself caught short in the cold and it could be all over. If you have medkits, you'll be able to revive yourself, unless you die to the cold, which is always an instant death. If you don't possess any medkits, and die through either NPC's or a booby trap, you'll bleed out within 5 minutes unless there's another player willing to revive you. It's a fairly unforgiving experience for the solo player, which is how I mostly played through this DLC, and I failed time and time again.

You can play with other players, and the map is shared, so you'll see them running around alongside you, but, at least from my own experience, you'll be going alone if you're just looking to jump in and play. If you're feeling extra sadistic, you can play against other players too, something I was almost certainly looking to avoid.

The list contains 5 trophies, with a couple of these awarded to whet the appetite, including one for your first successful extraction, as well as crafting the Virus Filter and Flare Gun, both critical extraction components. Achieving a Master Rank will potentially cause a few issues for some, as this requires 10,000 points from a successful extraction, but I got this without even trying for it, so cannot really testify to any challenges.

The completion of this set runs through one trophy;

For The Hoarder... - Successfully extract 100 items from the Survival Dark Zone.

The " For The Hoarder..." trophy, requires the player to successfully extract with 100 caches from the Dark Zone. Once you reach the Dark Zone area, you'll be able to find sealed caches containing weapons and equipment, which you can then open to reveal your prizes. They're effectively the loot element of this game mode, and are either dropped by enemy NPC's, or found in gear containers. You can only hold up to 6 of these caches per extraction, which means, in order to extract 100 of these, you'll need a minimum of 17 successful extractions. You'll spend alot of time working towards this trophy and I ended up extracting 18 times to reach 100, dying many times throughout the process along the way.

I found the best way to tackle this trophy was to identify a solid approach, and stick to it, which I broke down into 2 parts;

Stage 1 - Crafting the Virus Filter to enter the Dark Zone - This is the first mandatory step, but I also made sure I did the following before entering the Dark Zone;

• Gathered Fabric materials in order to craft more sustainable clothing to cope with the cold weather
• Gathered 2 Green Weapons Parts in order to build the Green M44 Marksman Rifle, which takes down enemies at this stage in a couple of shots.
• Gathered Fabric and Tools in order to craft the Virus Filter and reach the Dark Zone

Once I'd fulfilled these steps, I'd move into the next stage...

Stage 2 - Extracting from the Dark Zone, along with the following;

• Gathered Gold Weapons Parts and Division Tech in order to build the Gold M44 Marksman Rifle, which is much better suited to take down the now stronger enemies within the Dark Zone.
• Gathered Tools and Division Tech in order to craft the Flare Gun and Extract - if there are other players around, you may not need to do this, as you can always have the option of backing onto another players Extraction, but this isn't always guaranteed to happen before you die of infection.
• Collected at least 5 Loot Caches in order to fulfil the total towards the trophy requirement - The Hunter you fight at the Extraction Zone will always drop a Loot Cache, which is your 6th drop.

Settling on this method took some trial and error to reach, and there were many failed attempts along the way, some of which would come as agonisingly close as almost extracting, but either running out of time and succumbing to infection, or getting killed by NPC's near the end of the session. The Dark Zone is full of Purple and Yellow-graded enemies, and they will cause you problems in groups, which is probably the most noticeably unforgiving thing as a solo-player, and also why it's essential to craft the Gold M44 Marksman Rifle. It's a necessary equaliser to not always having the support of another player in gun fights. I know some people like crafting the turret, but I never did this personally, as my general tactic was to choose the path of least resistance, and this generally involved ignoring fighting.

Also, as soon as you call in an Extraction via shooting the Flare Gun, a Hunter will spawn in, which you'll have to beat before the chopper lands. They're powerful and if they down you, they'll execute you before you can revive, so this is a horrible knife-edge at the final step of any Survival Session. I came unstuck here multiple times, even during my latter parts of this trophy when I'd gained more experience. They're just tough foes that can get the better of you if you're not careful, which adds to the difficulty levels.

I did generally try to avoid conflict when I reached the Dark Zone. It's better to try and go about your business quietly, and only fight in situations of absolute necessity, if all you're attempting to do is achieve this trophy. It is discouraging to see so much time and effort go to waste when you die, and there were some times I'd play multiple Survival games in a row and come away empty handed every time, which is a big test of perseverance.

One thing I do need to shout out is how helpful other players are. If you get downed by enemy NPC's, and you don't have any medkits left, you'll get a 5 minute timer before you bleed out and your session ends. Your only hope at this point is if another player comes and revives you. This will cost them one of their own medkits, and if you die, they could scavenge all your loot off your corpse, so it was extremely refreshing to see alot of people choose the former option and help you up. This saved numerous sessions for me where I ended up getting extractions off after being on the brink of death, so this supportive environment is absolutely worth mentioning. It was my favourite part of a pretty rocky experience.

Once I'd gotten used to the game mode, and put in place a clearly defined plan of attack, I did start to find a much better flow. There were still some horrible endings to sessions where I'd get blown up by a bomb I didn't see around a corner, or not managing my time well enough to extract before death, or being sandwiched by groups of enemies coming at me from 2 different directions, but that's all part of the game. It's an aptly named piece of DLC that will always keep you on your toes, and the sense of relief upon achieving this final trophy was huge. I'm probably going to need to play something more casual next, that's for sure.

In terms of a time estimation, it's hard to gauge. 18 extractions totalling the full time limit of 1 hour in most instances would be around the 18 hour mark, but the number of failed extractions isn't accounted for anywhere. I would say I comfortably failed more than 18 times, but these wouldn't always amount to an hour lost each time, depending on at which stage of the run I died at.

However, one statistic that is tracked - I've ended up spending 9 days, 22 hours and 56 minutes beating the Division. That's 238 hours in total, the vast majority of this being on these 3 punishing DLC packs, which makes it one of the most time-consuming 100% games in my entire collection. It's definitely been a journey to remember.