Assassin’s Creed has been a long-running series of watered-down, repetitive gameplay designed for a very large mass audience to increase profit margins. The newest addition, entitled Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, does nothing to deviate from the series’ infamy but add more problems, such as microtransactions and historical inaccuracies.

The game is set in Victorian era London, following an incredibly dull, lifeless mess of a character known as Jacob Frye and his equally dull and lifeless twin sister Evie Frye. Both have no personality, unless being cool is considered a character trait. Their mission, and essentially the entire plot of the game, is to kill the bad guys and stop them from getting magical artifacts. The storyline never gets any more complex than this.

The way the players are meant to kill these bad guys is by mashing their left mouse button. No other button press is required, nor is skill for that manner, because it’s almost impossible to die in this game. The health regenerates very quickly and the enemies happen to have a dumbed down AI system, to the point where some enemies won’t even attack the player. Blocking attacks is useless, as taking a hit is faster and more efficient than watching a long counter-attack animation. The game feels as if the player is a gym coach yelling at the Frye twins to swing their swords at the enemy, rather than actually playing as the Frye twins. The combat system is intentionally designed for the lowest common denominator — the casual gamer that doesn’t wish to put in any effort or face any challenge. As a result, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate becomes an exorbitant tutorial on the use of a mouse and completely falls out of the very definition of the word “game”.

Performance is a mess. The game has been tested on a computer with a GTX 780 and an i5-3570K overclocked to 4.2 GHz. Despite the power of this machine, the game’s framerate was constantly dipping below 60 frames per second. This would be understandable if the game’s graphical fidelity was on par with today’s standards; however, the game’s graphics are subpar to the point where the word subpar would be a major understatement. The game suffers from low-resolution textures and shadows. The cloth is rendered at a 30FPS cap and it has so few polygons that the corners of Evie Frye’s dress look triangular and unrealistic. The situation becomes even more pathetic when the occasional graphic glitch appears, usually consisting of object pop-in, floating NPCs or broken AI paths.

The game is filled with microtransactions. In order to craft certain items required to advance the plot of the game, the player is forced to undergo hours and hours of mind numbing scavenger hunts to find resources required for crafting. These scavenger hunts are boring on purpose, to force the player to pay for microtransactions which give the player these items. Exploring the game should be fun — the player should be rewarded to find a hidden chest filled with weapons. Instead, the developers designed for the system to be most efficiently monetized.

The list of differences between this Assassin’s Creed and the one released three years ago is a grappling hook and a female protagonist. The grappling hook serves no other purpose than to alleviate the pain of going through monotonous climbing sequences. The female protagonist, Evie Frye, is identical to Jacob Frye. They both have the same skills and are able to do the same actions. Their differences are only revealed closer to the end of the game, when Evie gets a boost in her stealth skills and Jacob in his combat skills, but that isn’t nearly enough innovation to set this game apart from the older, cheaper titles in the series.

Historically, the game portrays Victorian era incorrectly, especially with the inclusion of female soldiers proficient in hand-to-hand combat, use of a large variety of firearms and freerunning. This is a massive inaccuracy, considering the fact that at the time women didn’t have the right to property, let alone the right to join the army. Assassin’s Creed was able to portray women’s roles properly in previous installments — there is absolutely no reason for such a blaringly obvious mistakes.

It is astonishing that this series keeps on receiving more and more installments and that gamers all over North America keep on purchasing these games. This is the most uninspired, repetitive video game of the year, and yet, somehow it is still making enough money for Ubisoft to keep creating new additions to the series. Ubisoft is a genius at making efficient, unfailable cash cows and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is a major example of that.