When I think of Assassin’s Creed games, I often remember big cities, cool assassinations, climbing high towers and maybe some soaps. I rarely remember how these games end because they often have forgetful or boring endings, sometimes with bad boss fights. So Assassin’s Creed Syndicate stands out as an exception with its fantastic final mission and boss fight.
Oh, and if it was not obvious, there are spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate below.
I’m not going to explain the whole storyline of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, but here’s a quick summary to keep you informed. A bad Templar controls London and is a hole. Evie and Jacob Frye, twins, come to London, meet a fellow human being, Henry Green, and work together to take down the great bad Templar, Crawford Starrick. (He has an evil mustache and everything.)
Finally, after many missions and figures, you reach the end of the game. Starrick is going to attack and kill the Queen of England in her palace during a big ball and the two twins and Green must sneak in, stop him and find an ancient Isu artifact buried under Buckingham Palace. (This is a Assassin’s Creed game, so it is legally necessary to be part of the ending.)
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What makes this mission so wonderful is the way Syndicate use the two twins simultaneously. For most of the game, the twins are separate characters that you can swap whenever you want. But this last mission brings them together and creates one big, last mission that uses both in different ways. Evie, wearing a large dress, must rely on social stealth to achieve the plans that will reveal the location of the vault, which is located somewhere below the palace. Meanwhile, Jacob must climb around the palace, take out fraudsters and free the kidnapped and tied up real royal guards.
It’s not just a great way to play as both twins at the same time Syndicate’s two main characters, but it also helps that the whole final mission feels bigger and more exciting than any other mission in the game. You even meet the queen. This is a big problem.
Finally, after the clever Starrick gets the key to the hidden Isu vault, Jacob and Evie go after him and follow a big last boss fight. But again, like the first part of the mission, this last battle alternates between the two twins. You attack Starrick as one, then get hit back, then the other twins dodge some Isu-light magic walls and attack again. On paper, this may sound repetitive. But in practice, it feels more like you and your twins are working together. And that makes Starrick a more intimidating and interesting villain.
This is the biggest criticism I have with this ending. Starrick is supposed to be the big bad guy of the game, but he’s so far removed from what happens while you play, that I do not really care about him or his goals. But the final mission nevertheless works by using the twins as tandem weapons. Maybe it would have been nice for more of the game to use them as partners like this, but holding back until the end makes the final mission and fight more exciting and captivating.
While more recent Assassin’s Creed games made it possible for players to choose main characters between men and women, and no one pulls it off so well Syndicate. By making both characters playable and fully realized as separate people, with their own goals and personalities, it can make better use of the story and allow Ubisoft to throw them both into the final mission to the best ending in the series so far to create.
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