Assassin's Creed Syndicate Trailer Tours London's Iconic Landmarks

A new trailer for Assassin's Creed: Syndicate has gone live featuring a look around London and a spotlight on some of the iconic landmarks and tourist-trap locations that the city has become renown for. The trailer is a lot more subdued than other trailers but it's also well worth a look.

GamesHQMedia grabbed the latest trailer for Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and you can check it out below.

The camerawork is the real star of the show in the trailer. It's very paced, oftentimes slow and methodically strict in how it captures the various times of day in the English city. There's a slow dolly into the rustic pub where you can make out the woodwork around the frame, and the bronze lining glowing dimly from the splash of light pouring out of the towering, old street lamps.

We get a look at the day and night cycles in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, highlighting a park that soaks in the midday sun on an almost cloudless afternoon; there's also a shot of the cobblestone streets as the sun rises and bathes the pavement with an almost orange glow, as the light battles to shine through the overcast that looms atop the industrial city.

Despite the faults that we can usually find with ease in just about every new Assassin's Creed release, there are also times where the company shows that they can at least pay a great amount of attention to the detail that makes a city thrive. They can visually bring to life many ancient and historical landmarks with the exact sort of personality that makes these locations stand out as the perfect way to help tourists identify with a land that is foreign to them, but familiar in a sense.

One of the big issues with open-world titles isn't just so much that they need to capture the nuances of the location, it's also that they need to make players feel as if those locations live and breathe and have something to offer outside of simply using the rooftops as a gateway for traveling and the streets as a pathway for carriage chases. Many open-world games suffer from having a lack of things to do, but hopefully Ubisoft will have a varied selection of mission types to keep the action flowing and players engaged.

In my own personal opinion, the only two games that actually seemed to have the city work as a very integral part of the game's interaction were Saints Row 2 and the first Godfather game. There were a lot of buildings to enter in both titles and a lot of different activities to partake in that made the games feel as if the cities were more than just fanciful backdrops with forgettable names.

In the case of Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, hopefully the steam-powered ferries and coal-driven locomotives aren't just there for show but can be interacted with at times to keep them feeling as if players are grounded in a world that consists more of just background objects.

Whether or not the gameplay will match the quality of art that the environment artists poured into the game remains to be seen, but at least London was done a good bit of justice by the dedicated folks at Ubisoft.