Origins kicks ass, but Syndicate flops

CHENNAI: A fter the freshness and the excitement of Altair and the Ezio Trilogy, a lot of AC fans were finding the recent few games very stale. The feels of relatively modern time periods, with Syndicate being set in the Victorian era and all, did not at all feel in sync with the series.

We want to throw sand to distract the enemy, hide in between crowds of civilians, and do jump-stealth kills, how the real Assassins did in Europe! We don’t want to shoot guns in AC, we have Call of Duty for that! AC is supposed to teach us the real History.

The wounds of Syndicate particularly sting me — it felt like a wannabe Dishonored, instead of a nice historical adventure. Although the environment/graphics were great, Syndicate was like playing through a tunnel — the leap-of-faiths were very dissatisfying, and the gameplay too linear.

But the new instalment of Assassins Creed is finally out! In Assassins Creed Origins, it feels like the developers finally used the eagle vision that they’d given their own game protagonist to decide that this redemption was needed. They wanted to ‘go back to the roots’, like most franchises are doing right now, but only — roots in AC is Ancient Egypt!

AC Origins feels like it does fulfil the expectations, and then some. The open-world exploration is as good as it ever was. The combat now is more up close and detailed — giving it a very RPGy feel. The climbing is now more diversified — we can now slide down buildings and all. The looting is very satisfying too, it feels like a ‘look, there’s also this’ at the end of a very difficult mission or at the top of a building. But I do still miss the detailed storyline outside of the Animus — it made the game more complex, you know, like there was a larger purpose to this whole Assassin routine...

Apparently, the production of Origins began after Black Flag released (popularly known as last good game in the series). Maybe they released Syndicate, just so that all of us would have low expectations and then be very happy when they hit us with the awesomeness of Origins.