Assassin’s Creed, don’t forget your playful and whimsical past.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is special to me, in the sense I don’t usually sit through whole games I’m not especially enjoying just for more opportunities to watch storms and gales, orange leaves whipped up by horse footfall, and flashes of illumination from distant lightning. It is a game that transforms weather from the subject of idle small talk to excited big talk. When I remember the game, I will remember galloping on horseback toward destinations that part of me wishes didn’t exist, so I could keep on galloping forever.

These moments of beautiful, sombre realism made the whole game worth it for me, but they come at a cost I didn’t realise until I decided to make the most of my Ubisoft+ Month and play Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. I’m not made of fifteen quids, after all. I’ve played about five hours now, and while sometimes struck by how many great improvements the series has had over the years, there’s something Syndicate has that Shadows doesn’t: charm. A goofy charisma that I feel was present in Odyssey, but that Shadows trades out for ambitions toward a gravitas that just never came together for me.

The main enemy gang, The Blighters, have a heightened, comic book swagger to them, alongside an unashamed gameyness in their big red coats (there’s also a combo meter on the UI. I completely forgot about this). Grey morality and complex motivations and realistic characters all have their merits in certain contexts, but they don’t half suck the fun out of shanking a comically evil prick. Syndicate’s first target is an industrious scotch egg of a man named Rupert Ferris, who we’re introduced to through a scene of him bursting into a factory and shouting about how an injured child is cutting into his bottom line. Just deliciously stupid levels of hateable.

He’s got less in common with the morally conflicted daimyos and bloodthirsty but steadfast warlords of Shadows and more with a Hitman villain. In Shadows, When Naoe wanted to stab a man, I just sort of went along with it because Naoe’s anguish is admittedly very convincing. Here, I wanted to stab Ferris, and I have fun doing it. Enemies are purposely placed in easy stabbing locations, from which they’ll go on long, evil rants that you’re intended to cut off by cutting off their ears from behind. There’s very little of Shadows’ grim sense of duty, just a big ol’ knife party starring a couple of boisterous troublemakers.

And the set pieces! Smashing into horse drawn carts in street escapes. Jumping across train carriages to put out fires. The grappling hook! Naoe’s hook is undoubtedly more fitting to the period, but I feel Ubisoft trod too lightly around accuracy at the expense of silly joy. Why would you abandon something as fun and freeing as Syndicate’s ziplines? You’re already leaning into pop culture Shinobi to the point where any grasping on to realism is basically moot, why not go full hog?

I also didn’t realise how much I missed the classic AC experience of bickering with a man with a hole in his throat post-assassination. Yes, it makes zero sense, and can only be explained away with the Animus sorcery these games have been trying to distance themselves from. But it’s so unique and weird and identifiably Assassin’s Creed. Swapping out a calling card, even one written in a stupid font, for a history lecture feels like a poor trade.

“Bless ‘er! She’s gone scatterbrained”, passers-by remark as Evie slinks by conspicuously. Thing is, the inescapable truth of this series is that every protagonist it can muster will always be comically conspicuous. It’s a series about conspiracy theories and nigh-on superheroes performing ridiculous feats of mythical athleticism. Assassin’s Creed is, perhaps, the most commercially successful series to ever address its ludonibbly discobiscuits, via the Animus, as such as intrinsic part of its fiction. But the more it tries to shed it’s fundamental silliness, the more the cracks start to show. This isn’t a series I either seek or expect serious storytelling from. It’s goofy historical sci-fi where the fondest memories I have from it are headbutting the pope or playing pirates. Go scatterbrained again, I say.