Assassins Creed Syndicate

Very little of what we cover for Assassin's Creed Syndicate is the main story. The pages here are side work: seven murder cases, a run of factory raids, three errands that start on the train, one long list of gear and a page of PC fixes. Set the fixes aside and what ties the rest together is that each is a job with a condition in front of it and a payment behind it. Someone hands it over, or the game sets a rule, and something comes back when the rule is met.

This guide is arranged that way: who gives Jacob and Evie the work, what has to be proved before it pays, and what the payment is worth once it reaches the equipment menu.

Seven cases handed over by Henry Raymond and Artie

The Dreadful Crimes are the largest strand and the one with the clearest commission. In five of the seven cases we cover, the author Henry Raymond and a boy called Artie are waiting at a fixed spot and the case begins when you reach them: the entrance of a large hotel in the City of London, Abbot's Cocoa factory in Southwark, outside The White Hare in Whitechapel, an open industrial yard in the southeast of the City, and the Solicitor's building. A Simple Matter of Murder opens the same way in North Whitechapel, with Henry Raymond and a companion that page names as Doyle rather than Artie, and Doyle is also the one who congratulates you at the close of the Conflicted Courtship. Next Stop: Murder! is the odd one out. The pair is nowhere to be found and the case starts with a worker on the Thames bank shouting for help.

The cases share one vocabulary rather than one fixed order. Clues are read with Eagle Vision, suspects are questioned about what the clues turned up, investigation zones open as either produces something new, and the case closes when you accuse a single person. Usually a set of clues brings the suspects out, but the pages show it running the other way too: The Fiend of Fleet Street opens by questioning Abberline, and his mention of missing people is what opens the flower shop, the bakery and the leather shop, while in Death Stalks the Colonel it is the conversation with the shopkeeper Curtis that unlocks five clues. The accusation is not always free. In A Simple Matter of Murder the first accusation has to be a wrong one, because pointing at Dooley is what unlocks the larger zone with the footprints in it, and the real killer, Coulton, only turns up after three more rounds of clues.

The money runs from £1,000 to £2,500 a case, and across the seven it adds up to £13,000 and 6,500 XP at the maximum. Two of the case pages also put a cape on the reward line: A Simple Matter of Murder lists the Country Cloak and The Fiend of Fleet Street the Hunter's Mantle. The equipment page files the Country Cloak under the Dreadful Crimes along with the Engraved Knuckles at level 6 and the Dove Cane-Sword at level 10, but has the Hunter's Mantle down as a Sequence 4 unlock instead, so the two pages disagree on where that cape comes from. Two further cases, Conjuring Up A Killing and Locked in to Die, are named on the Next Stop: Murder! page and have no page of their own here, so the series runs longer than the seven walked through above.

The solutions are the reason to read the pages rather than guess. In the Conflicted Courtship the trail leads to a man called Baxter, who turns out to be a second personality of Dr. Alton. In the Twice Dead Professor the casket in the family vault turns out to be empty and the man you accuse, Professor Silas, wanted to eat Byng's brain. In The Most Hated Man in London the victim was poisoned, punctured, shot and crushed at once, and the accusation rests on working out which wound landed first, which is the puncture. Death Stalks the Colonel is the one built on bullet trajectories, with three shots to account for and a spent revolver round in an empty barrel at the depot that clears one suspect, while The Fiend of Fleet Street follows a missing detective through a flower shop, a bakery, a butcher, a leather shop and a barber called Feeney Sodd before a blood trail settles it. Next Stop: Murder! moves the whole investigation onto train 616, carriage by carriage.

Factories cleared for the Children's Aid Society

The Child Liberation memories, the Children's Aid Society jobs, are the strand with nobody named in front of them, and the job is the same each time: get into a factory, free the children held there, and assassinate the Foreman who runs it. The condition is the alarm. Full synchronisation, and with it the maximum reward, only arrives when both objectives are finished without one being raised, which is why our child liberation guide picks Evie for these missions without much argument.

The route it gives is top down. Each factory has a roof entrance, sometimes with a single scout on it, the top level is usually held by several guards to be cleared quietly, and the main floor is where most of the enemies stand, often close to the alarm bells. A body thrown down alerts the guards on the ground level and the alarm follows, so leave the bodies where they fall. An alerted guard shows a bell in his hand and runs for the nearest alarm, and he can still be stopped on the way. The two tools the page leans on are the building itself, with its heavy barrels and Nitro and TNT crates, and the hallucinogenic dart, which draws a guard away from a bell or turns the nearest enemy loose on the Foreman when the floor around him is too crowded to approach. The children glow green in Eagle Vision, are usually crouched under the eye of one or two guards, and walk themselves out once freed. The Foreman's death sends every witness running, so the people around him need no clearing beforehand, and where the hazards do not reach him, a whistle from behind a crate brings him over.

Three errands from Agnes on the train

The Train Hideout missions are the strand with a named commissioner on the train itself. All three of them start by talking to Agnes in the hideout, they unlock during Sequence 3, and they are about the Rooks against the Blighters. Each carries a challenge of its own, and read together the three tell one story about a man called Nigel. Our train hideout missions guide walks the three in order.

In the first, Agnes says she is being followed. You tail the stalker across the rooftops with a fifteen second limit whenever he leaves your sight, hear him tell some gang members in a shelter that she runs with a train gang and that they mean to snipe her, and then take the rooftop snipers from above, five of them in the order the page gives, before helping the Rooks clear the station, quietly if you want to avoid the reinforcements that arrive by train. By the second mission the same stalker has joined Agnes's gang, been arrested for the murder of a Blighter and is sitting in a police wagon on the Strand. The job is to steal the evidence, his hat among it, from a courtyard with six policemen in it, three posted at the entrances and three on patrol, then carry a body through the graveyard to a haystack and talk the Chief of Police into letting him go. The third hands Jacob a jammed Gatling gun outside Whitechapel station: load it until the gauge fills, hold your ground through the waves and the snipers that arrive after them, save the explosive crates for the big groups, and once the train moves shoot the couplings until five cars are gone.

Where a page picks one of the two leads, it is Evie three times out of four. Two of the three train missions are hers alone, and the Children's Aid Society page picks her for the factories because the alarm rule rewards staying unseen; only the Gatling gun goes to Jacob.

Where the payout goes: the equipment ladder

The Dreadful Crimes pay in pounds, experience and, on two of the seven, a named cape, and the equipment unlock guide is where the pounds and the named gear end up. It lists 131 pieces across seven groups, each with a level from 1 to 10 and the route that unlocks it, and outfit colours aside, every piece can be upgraded.

The routes are the useful part, because read as a ledger they say what each kind of work pays in kit. Story work pays the most: the biggest group is handed over by main-story memories, sequence by sequence, from the Leather Belt in Sequence 1 to the Cloak of Victory in Sequence 9, though nine of those handovers are a crafting plan rather than the finished piece. Loyalty with five associates pays nineteen pieces, and the ladder is uneven: Robert Topping and Frederick Abberline pay one piece at every loyalty level, Henry Green skips level 3, Clara O'Dea pays at levels 1, 2 and 5, and Ned Wynert only at 4 and 5, where the level 5 reward is the crafting plan for The Mars rather than the pistol itself.

Borough work pays six pieces. Taking Whitechapel, The Thames, City of London, The Strand and Westminster each hands one over, and winning the Whitechapel gang war unlocks the Mayan Cane-Sword, though only as a craft for £1,250 and 60 Metal rather than as a gift. The Dreadful Crimes pay their three. Twenty pieces are paid for nothing done in London at all, ten as Uplay rewards and ten through promo codes, which is why more than half of the 31 entries at level 3 are one or the other, and ten more only ask to be picked up from a chest, at Waterloo Station, Cannon Street Station, the Westminster Abbey rooftop, the Tower of London courtyard, Lambeth Cemetery and a bank vault among them.

What is left is where the pounds go. Shop pieces are bought outright, from £2,500 at level 2 to £10,000 for the Ancient Kukri at level 7, so the £13,000 the seven Dreadful Crimes pay at their maximum buys that kukri with change. Crafting takes pounds plus a material, Metal or Leather on the single-ingredient plans, with Silk or Chemical as the second ingredient where a plan asks for two. The Reinforced Gauntlet plan at level 3 is £2,500 and 100 Metal, the Iron Kukri and the Sassy Assassin Belt at level 4 are £2,000 with 80 of their material, and the three level 10 plans, The Mars, the Legendary Assassin Belt and the Aegis Cloak, are £10,000 with 150 of one material and 100 of another.

The list also files gear under strands we have no page for yet: the Charles Dickens memories pay a cane-sword and the Spring-Heeled Jack Belt, Queen Victoria's memories the Royal Cloak, the two WWI Time Anomaly entries a cane-sword and a belt, the beer bottle collection a belt of its own, and the Royal Letters the Emerald Isle Cape, once £6,000 has also changed hands for it.

When the PC port gets in the way

The one page here that is not a job is our errors, crashes and performance fixes page. It opens by saying this port is in far better shape than Unity's, then lists eight problems with a workaround for each: the 'Game has stopped Working' crash (Windows 7 compatibility mode, run as admin, and the redist installers in the game directory), a crash to desktop every thirty seconds (windowed mode until a patch lands), the game refusing to boot from Steam through Uplay, buggy or invisible textures on Nvidia cards (turn off MFAA), a desktop and in-game resolution mismatch that causes black screens and stutter (borderless windowed), skipping the intro videos by renaming five .bk2 files, invisible menus (disable 3D Vision), and general performance, where the advice is to lower the settings first, then update the drivers, keep a laptop on its dedicated GPU and mains power, and run one GPU if SLI or Crossfire is fighting the game.

A sensible order, then. Take the Dreadful Crimes as they come, since they are the only strand whose pages put a number on the reward and the accusation is given outright. Do the factories with Evie and keep the alarm silent. Run Agnes's three errands for the Nigel story as much as for the sync. Then open the equipment list and decide which associate's loyalty, which borough and which chest is worth the trip for the piece at the top of its column.