Fans of the series have previously been to The Crusades, Colonial America, the Caribbean in the golden age of piracy and even the French Revolution. This time the playground is a meticulous recreation of London in 1868, a mecca of trade and technology basking in the glow of the industrial revolution that was also home to corruption, vicious street gangs and some horrific living conditions for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Production of the game began a little more than two years ago. This might seem short for an experience of this scope, but given the nine Ubisoft studios contributing to the effort are located all across Europe, Asia and North America (lead by a team in Quebec), it would have been possible for development to continue 24 hours a day.

The massive production has yielded a game that adds much to the tried and true formula of the now eight-year-old series — introducing the main series' first playable female assassin and greatly refining the way players get around. It is filled with characters both fictional and historical, but the true star of the whole thing is unequivocally London.

A new story in an old town

"I don't want to know how [horse-drawn] carriages are built," says author Judith Flanders, "I'm curious to know: how did the coachman get up on the seat?"

As the writer of books including The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, Flanders is intensely interested the minutiae of Victorian London life, which is why Ubisoft had her consult on the details of the city and its inhabitants for Syndicate.

There happened to be an old coach nearby where we were talking so Flanders was able to test her hypotheses directly (and she reported back on how coachmen would have done it: "with extreme difficulty"), but not all her research is so hands-on.

"I would get an email from Jean-Vincent [Roy, Ubisoft's on-staff historian]", says Flanders, "he would send me a question like 'what did men do with their hats when they went inside in public places?'

"So I would find him a photograph of a restaurant which still has its fittings, and above the seats there were [compartments] like on an aeroplane, but there were just sort of rods and men would turn their hats upside-down and stick them on there".

It may seem redundant to give so much attention to historical details in a game about mystical orders engaged in a secret war across history — one in which players will spend most their time climbing around the outside of buildings instead of worrying about the nitty gritty of the inside — but it's one of the reasons the series as become so popular. Syndicate's creative director Marc-alexis Côté explains that the games sit "at the intersection of two powerful fantasies".

"There is the fantasy of being an Assassin. However, and maybe even more importantly, I think that as human beings we all have the deep-rooted fantasy to learn more about our past and where we come from", says Côté.

"At the core of the franchise is the principle of reliving a part of our shared history. I think that being able to recreate those settings in the way that we do is what makes these experiences so fascinating.

Playing around in Victoria's London

"Even though it's not perfectly accurate in terms of where the streets are, we have hit on the reality as far as the player will perceive at least," says senior producer Francois Pelland when asked what it's like to try and recreate a city so many people are very familiar with, and much of which still stands today. "That's probably been the biggest challenge."

I was sure during my time with the game to make a trip from Waterloo station down York Street to turn right onto Westminster Bridge, just as I had done in real life the morning before, and as indicated by Pelland I was struck by an uncanny sense of familiarity.

The space between landmarks does feel compressed, but the opening of the bridge felt identical, the Thames was exactly as filthy as in real life (though maybe broader, with more boats and less chip packets), and the huge mass of Westminster Palace and Big Ben looming in the mist was perfectly captured. I took the opportunity to have my character do something I would never do in real life for fear of arrest and E.coli, leaping into the river to explore the underneath of the bridge.

As always in Assassin's Creed the fun of gameplay comes before historical accuracy. This is why the historical figures featured (in the case of Syndicate I spotted Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Alexander Graham Bell and many others) are always in on the conspiracy. It also allows for the GTA-inspired chases, where you can reverse a horse-drawn carriage into a light post which will explode and cascade glass down over completely unperturbed pedestrians.

"The carriages are not just a tool for navigation or getting from one place to another", says Pelland. "I like to say about the carriage: it's a vehicle that has a brain. So if you go up on top of it the horse will continue his route and bring you where you want to go".

Other new additions to the series that were inspired by the changing times of Victorian London include: a police force, which changes the way players can conduct themselves in the richer part of town; factories powered by child labour that the player can choose to liberate; street gangs controlling the different boroughs that can be overthrown the player's own squad of vigilantes, and; a tool called the rope launcher that makes it quick and easy to zip between the towers and across the broad roads of the city.

Perhaps the biggest change is that the player now has two characters to choose between when playing: twins Jacob and Evie Frye.

Assassin's Creed has always had the option of playing stealthily or engaging directly in combat, and while previous games expected players to balance these two approaches using one character, Syndicate smartly splits it up so that Evie is more suited to the quiet approach and Jacob more to the brash.

"In playtests, we've seen there are players who play a lot with Evie, and there's players who will play a lot with Jacob, for their own good reasons," Pelland says, adding that the game purposefully doesn't force players to use both equally. "It's the player's choice, it's player creativity", he says.

Of all the new additions to the game, this new approach to character is perhaps the one I'm most excited for. The difference in the way the world reacts to the player depending on their choice of character, as well as the playful dynamic between the two siblings, was a highlight of my few hours with the game, providing a great deal of charm and levity that I've felt was missing from some of the previous entries in the series.

For Pelland, the biggest shift of all is that all the new elements in the game now merely exist in the world for the player to explore and discover, rather than being set-pieces that the game forces players through in a very specific way.

"It's more the ties that all the systems are having together," he says. "Less scripted, more organic and systemic".

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is out on October 23. The writer travelled to London as a guest of Ubisoft.

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