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