Assassin's Creed: Syndicate a return to form for Ubisoft's flagship gaming franchise

"Frye. Jacob Frye."

The writers for Assassin's Creed: Syndicate probably couldn't help themselves, really.

With the latest game in the long-running historical fiction series, Ubisoft finally gets its chance to make a James Bond joke amid the smoke and soot of London during the Industrial Revolution.

But there's far more at stake in what will be the series' 10th major instalment since 2007.

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Ubisoft's studios in Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto needed to redeem themselves going into Syndicate's launch. Last year's instalment, Assassin's Creed: Unity, took place in Revolutionary-era Paris and was supposed to be a love letter to the developer's French roots. What gamers got instead was a flat plot and an astounding number of game-breaking glitches.

Syndicate hopes to right the ship by taking the series back to its roots: taking down enemies while staying hidden in a crowd and scaling history's greatest monuments with parkour moves completely inappropriate to the era.

Engaging cast and characters

The overarching plot of the Creed series is, by now, a convoluted mess that thankfully remains on the sidelines.

Essentially, all human history revolves around a secret war between the good guy Assassins, who value individual freedom, over the bad guy Templars, who value order. The series spotlights Assassins throughout human history, uncovering how the factions' rivalry shaped, for example, the American and French revolutions.

Intermittent cut scenes set in the modern day reveal the Templars as a multinational corporation called Abstergo Industries and the Assassins as a small band of rebel hackers. This frame narrative has meandered for years thanks to changes in Ubisoft's creative direction, and only shows up in brief moments, instead giving centre stage to its Victorian hero and heroine, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye, in 1868.

Jacob and Evie take it upon themselves to free London from a capitalistic kingpin named Crawford Starrick by dismantling his gang operations, freeing the child labourers in his factories and assassinating his lieutenants in flamboyant manner.

Syndicate's leads have an on-screen rapport that makes an instant impression on the player: Evie, the calm and cerebral sibling, trades verbal jabs with Jacob, a charismatic Han Solo-type, in nearly every cut scene they appear in.

They're two halves of a whole, two equals working toward a common goal, even as their disparate personalities drive them to separate targets and objectives. They're a far more impressive duo than last year's lovers and/or rivals Arno and Elise.

Greater female, LGBT representation

The supporting cast of historical figures like Karl Marx, Alexander Graham Bell and Florence Nightingale pop in and out to give you missions throughout the game. Most of them are simply varying shades of "eccentric," but they quickly build friendships with Jacob and Evie and end up far more memorable than the majority of the last instalments' casts.

Ubisoft seems to have responded to criticisms that the series has had too few playable and prominent female characters. Evie's role is as prominent as Jacob's, and you can play the lion's share of the game as either character.

Non-player characters show surprising diversity as well, including the Fryes' ally, Indian immigrant Henry Green, and Ned Wynert, a transgender thief and informant.

Refined gameplay

For all of Jacob and Evie's playful banter, it's taken for granted why or how this generally jaunty duo can gleefully stab hundreds of gangsters and petty thieves to death in the streets, in front of crowds of screaming citizens.

We know even less about when they learned the Assassins' trademark ability to climb every vertical surface known to man, making London's rooftops their personal playground and scaling with little more than a window frame as a handhold.

But this is an Assassin's Creed video game, and like any mega-budget action movie these days, no one's here to learn about people's feelings: they want to see moustache-twirling bad guys get their comeuppance by getting stabbed in the carotid artery.

London, like any other Creed playground, is giant and dense, filled with missions to complete, thugs to beat up and collectibles to pick up for little reason other than they are there to be collected.

This time around, though, there's more variety to your objectives, and the missions gamers have played for years now (like tailing a spy while avoiding getting spotted yourself) reappear only occasionally.

The Fryes' best gadget might not impress Bond's head of research Q, but it's a godsend for longtime players: a rope launcher can be used Batman-like to propel yourself to the top of buildings, or form zip-lines to race across chasms faster than you can say Nik Wallenda.

Inventive assassination missions

Returning from its introduction in Unity, key assassination missions present multiple options on how to take down your target. In an early standout, you have to infiltrate the Lambeth Asylum to kill John Elliotson, a real-life physician and mesmerist, portrayed as a psychotic with a penchant for public vivisections.

You can simply walk into his class and shank him in the stomach. But if you want to embrace your comically absurd side you can dump a cadaver in a closet and lie on the gurney yourself, covered by a sheet until the perfect moment to turn the tables on the doctor.

Hand-to-hand combat in the Creed games has always felt sluggish in comparison to the best in the genre, but Ubisoft has tightened the mechanics so that punching, dodging and stabbing feel more responsive than before.

The feel is thanks in part to state-of-the-art motion capture technology that mimics the actors' original movements. Evie smashes her opponents' faces with Ronda Rousey-like intensity, while Jacob bobs and weaves with his knuckles and knives like a slinky made out of razor wire.

Return to form for Ubisoft

For gamers who have been following the series for years, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate's biggest surprise may be that it's better, not worse, than the games that came before it. The missions are more fun. The characters are more fully fleshed out. The glitches have been ironed out – for the most part.

What's left is one of Ubisoft's best games in years and proof that it's still fun to be a historical tourist armed to the teeth once in a while.