The new Jack the Ripper DLC for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was bad, like really bad. It has bugs, it is short with little new to offer and it just isn’t that interesting. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the Jack the Ripper DLC but I had much higher hopes than this. The truly baffling part is how the DLC couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. At first it was a rage induced murder boner which I was alright with. Then it became a mystery deal with the actual main characters of the game; a little less interesting but it was still something and it made sense. After that it just became some weird mash up of the two swinging loosely between Jack the Ripper and the Evie. If it could have picked one or other I would have been fine but when the game keeps changing the speed constantly it kind of turned me off. To be fair a lot of that may have been the loading times which are ridiculous. We are only using a small portion of the map yet I think I spent almost as much time in loading screens as I did actually playing the main story. I didn’t even bother with most of the new side missions because they are the exact side missions as before… just with prostitutes instead of children.
For a short DLC it really has some major issues; I couldn’t even use a carriage because every time I tried the game would lag so much I would risk the game crashing… which it did twice. The controls were also kind of crap for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. I take some of the blame on myself because the trigger button on my controller is broken (Damn you Borderlands!) which caused me to keep running while I was trying to sneak multiple times. That doesn’t answer for all the issues I was having though; most of which stem from the one of the two or three new features. All of the new features are based around fear; so instead of actually eliminating the enemy they will just run away… not very far mind you, I caught multiple enemies caught in a corner or in a wall. While this works for Jack who just tears everyone in half it doesn’t really work well for Evie. If an assassin is supposed to stealth kill enemies then one good does it do to try and scare them all away and cause a huge unneeded uproar? Also, when did the Brotherhood start to emphasize not killing their enemies?
I was so annoyed listening to how she couldn’t kill any of the Rippers men, even though they use the same fear tactics, I almost stopped playing. I get it, they wanted to set up a kind of yin and yang thing with Jack and Evie. Which uses her powers for good and so on. It just didn’t have much of an impact; it just made Evie a chore to play as and Jack the one redeeming quality. I wouldn’t even call Jack an assassin, something I feel no shame in spoiling since the game does that itself in the first 10 minutes. Jacks main focus seems to be simply to kill anything that moves be it friend or foe, something that makes up multiple parts of the game. That was more fun though because it let me just cut loose and go crazy.
The premise is what really through me off though and spoilers I suppose not that it will really matter since the DLC drops the entire plot in front of you at the very beginning like a rotting fish. Jack is pissed because his mom was killed… before he even joined the brotherhood… yet he blames Jacob for letting her die. The confusing part is how after you trace the spot where his mother was killed they mention how he was supposed to run to Jacob for help. Later though Jack himself says Jacob didn’t free him from the insane asylum until years later, which doesn’t make much sense to me. Not that it matters, the entire story is so loosely based off the actual Jack the Ripper it would look like a toddler wearing the pants of the worlds fattest man. Besides the name and a couple of key locations the entire thing could take place on the moon in the distant future in the middle of the robot apocalypse. I know most people won’t care but I do, they could have just completely made up an entirely original story that may have been interesting; instead they ruined the actual story and the DLC story by trying to force both in.
