Game is way, way better than I was expecting so far. It controls pretty nicely and the characters are fun, if a bit flat and simple. It also looks very nice, too - not as gorgeous as Unity's faked GI, but I think I prefer the less gorgeous but more varied dynamic lighting in Syndicate. Framerate is a bit dodgy, but nowhere near as bad as Unity's. So far there seems to be a good variety of missions. Glad I pulled the trigger on this I suppose. Maybe it'll all fall apart later but it's alright so far. Some stray observations:
-If you would have told me a month ago driving a carriage like a car in GTA would actually work I would have laughed in your face. It totally does, though.
-The soundtrack is... really annoying? Really good? I'm very hot/cold on it so far. I'm impressed they pulled the relatively bold move of letting Wintory just use a string quartet essentially (in a series previously defined by loud Hollywood score and Kyd's classical/rock mix) but sometimes it gets super grating. Some of the themes are lovely, sometimes I want to reach through the screen and strangle a violinist.
-Maybe it'll even out a bit as the characters get fleshed out, but the "brother dumb, sister smart" thing is a tad on the nose so far.
-Combat is fun! Melee is anyway. Fairly brainless but looks way better than it has in previous games. It won't win anyone over but it's an improvement. Except...
-...Christ Evie's finishers take f o r e v e r
-the modern day stuff is just as fucking bad as ever but they at least acknowledge in-universe that you want to get back to your game probably. Bad but mercifully short so far.
-Climbing can be a bit confusing now that they can climb stuff that doesn't look obviously scalable. Sometimes they'll just fwooooop up some bricks I had no idea I could climb.
-Chases are still bad
anyway yeah. Seems solid so far.