The Frye twins are charming. But Jacob’s “punky gangster” story (liberate a borough, kill a target) clashes violently with Evie’s “serious lore-hunter” arc. The game forces you to play both, diluting any emotional throughline. One minute you’re a brutal prizefighter; the next, a stealth scholar. The tone whiplash is real.

And let us be assassins again. Not demigods. Not brawlers. Just a blade in the fog.

London 1868 is arguably the greatest AC city ever built. But you barely feel the era’s horror. Child labor, smog, Jack the Ripper’s shadow, the birth of surveillance capitalism (the Metropolitan Police). Instead, the game plays like Gangs of New York with a top hat. The terror of early automation and poverty is reduced to set dressing.

The rope launcher was cool. It was also an admission of failure. London’s streets were too wide for traditional parkour. Instead of redesigning the city’s flow, Ubisoft gave you a Batman grapple. It streamlined traversal but killed the rhythm of AC—the seamless verticality of climbing, leaping, and descending.

But Syndicate is not beyond saving. In fact, beneath its grimy, horse-drawn surface lies one of the most salvageable games in the series. Here’s how to do it—not with a sequel, but with a hypothetical Director’s Cut Remaster that fixes the original’s core wounds. Before surgery, we diagnose.

Syndicate introduced a brutal, arbitrary level system. You’d stab a gangster in the throat, but because he was Level 8 and you were Level 5, he’d shake it off and two-shot you. This wasn’t difficulty; it was a disguised time-wall. It broke the core fantasy of the assassin: a surgical killer, not a damage-sponge grinder.