Review: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: Jack The Ripper

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was, for many, a steady return to form for the Ubisoft franchise. After the disastrous launch of this generation with Assassin’s Creed Unity, fast forward a year and the community is divided right down the middle.

Luckily it went uphill, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was a winner for the most part. With the game set in Victorian London, the possibilities were to pick and choose where the DLC would end up. So Ubisoft announced we would be dealing with infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper, the one who got away.

Set 20 years after the main story of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Evie Frye returns to London from India after her twin sibling Jacob has gone missing, and a mysterious killer called Jack the Ripper is terrorizing Whitechapel, a borough of London.

The Evie we played, and the Evie that returned are vastly different women. The younger Evie has a penchant for killing and has no qualms about doing so when needed. The older, wiser, and far more dangerous Evie prefers non-lethal combat and how she holds herself so many years later.

The entire DLC will take roughly 8-10 hours to complete and consists of roughly ten missions within the city of London and Whitechapel. These locales are where the famous murders took place, so it makes sense this is where we would be during the spree. The usual collectibles are strewn over the environment and add a way to kill time.

As with most of the DLC Ubisoft puts out for Assassin’s Creed, the content itself provides a new venue to experiment with formula; this time, Evie returns from India with fear bombs and spikes that provide a new way of non-lethal takedowns and exciting mechanics that allow Evie a different angle than killing and moving on to the next objective.

New missions arrived, too; I particularly loved being able to walk the streets of London and publicly humiliate men who would hurt prostitutes and have NPCs laugh at them as you strong-armed these hurtful men to get what was owed to them.

With this content, we get to alternate between Evie and Jack, but Jack is far more unhinged and brutal and unlike anything the series has offered us thus far.

Returning to the series, we can once more have Evie hire “courtesans” to distract guards from sneaking past them in situations where it’s needed to get in and out without being seen—a welcome return of an older feature that has been gone for a while now.

Ubisoft has done well to represent these prostitutes as more than just sex workers, providing them with respect and class. These workers go hand-in-hand with the tale of Jack the Ripper, and I am happy to see that their importance wasn’t lost in all this chaos this serial killer brought upon London.

The new content brought into Syndicate works well individually, but I found the lead-up to the reveal and right up to the end to be rather lacklustre and, to be honest, boring. When you’ve played Assassin’s Creed yearly since 2009 and have had the pleasure of playing ACII’s DLC or Brotherhood’s Da Vinci DLC – which was quickly my favourite – you have a certain standard of living up to. The DLC is not wrong; there is a ton of content, and it’s a solid reason to jump back into the game if you have already finished the story. There isn’t a satisfying story in the DLC to tie back into the bigger world Ubisoft has been trying to build