When I think of Assassin’s Creed games, I always remember big cities, legal murders, climbing tall towers and maybe some shacks at sea. I rarely remember how these games end, because they often have forgettable or boring endings, sometimes with bad boss fights. Then Assassin’s Creed Syndicate stands out as an exception with its fantastic final mission and fight against the boss.
Oh, and if that weren’t obvious, spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate below.
I will not explain the whole plot of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, but here’s a quick rundown to get you inside. A bad Templar is controlling London and being an idiot. Twins Evie and Jacob Frye come to London, meet a stabbed companion, Henry Green, and work together to bring down the great evil Templar, Crawford Starrick. (He has an evil mustache and everything.)
Eventually, after many missions and side missions, you reach the end of the game. Starrick will attack and kill the Queen of England in his palace during a grand ball and the two twins and Green must sneak in, stop him and find an ancient Isu artifact buried under Buckingham Palace. (It is a Assassin’s Creed game, so this is legally required to be part of the final.)
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What makes this mission so wonderful is the way Syndicate uses both twins at the same time. For most of the game, the twins are separate characters that you switch whenever you want. But this final mission brings them together and creates a great final mission that uses them in different ways. Evie, wearing a loose dress, has to rely on social discretion to achieve plans that will reveal the location of the safe, which is located somewhere below the palace. Meanwhile, Jacob has to climb the palace, removing the imposter guards and freeing the kidnapped and tied up real royal guards.
Allowing you to play as twins at the same time is not just a great way to use Syndicate’s two main characters, but it also helps the entire final mission to look bigger and more exciting than any other mission in the game. You know the Queen, even. It’s a big deal.
Finally, after the astute Starrick takes the key to Isu’s hidden safe, Jacob and Evie go after him and a big final fight begins. But again, as the first part of the mission, this final fight alternates between the two twins. You attack Starrick as one, then you are pushed back, then the other twin dodges some magical walls of Isu light and attacks again. On paper, this may seem repetitive. But in practice, it looks more like you and your twin are working together. And that makes Starrick a more intimidating and interesting villain.
This is the biggest criticism I have to this end. Starrick was supposed to be the villain of the game, but he’s so far from what’s going on while you play that I really didn’t care about him or his goals. But the final mission works nonetheless, using the twins as tandem weapons. It might have been good for more of the game to have used them as partners like this, but holding on to the end makes the mission and final fight more exciting and compelling.
Although more recent Assassin’s Creed the games allowed players to choose between the main male and female characters, none of them did as well as Syndicate. By having both characters playable and fully realized as separate people, with their own goals and personalities, it allows the story to take advantage of them and allows Ubisoft to launch them on the final mission of creating the best ending of the series so far.
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