2/5

Pointless and frankly degrading to women. This is a DLC that should live in ignominy.

Set a few years after the events of *Syndicate*, the team attempted to shoehorn the story of Jack the Ripper into an *Assassin’s Creed *game by pitching him as ‘Jack the Lad’, a boy who Jacob Frye took in to train as an Assassin.

Because of some unknown beef with the Fryes’ ideology, Jack attempted to change the Brotherhood and the Rooks to follow his more extreme view of the Creed. What this view is is not revealed, but apparently it included a lot of murder.

Jack’s story is one of the flattest and least convincing in all of Assassin’s Creed. There is no mystery about his identity: from the photo above Jacob’s bed and his own messages, it is perfectly clear.

The cause of his mental stability appeared to have been witnessing Starrick Crawford’s men murdering his mother, and his subsequent internment in Lambeth Asylum. Jacob had evidently misjudged the level of mental damage when he took Jack in.

I think this is incredibly lazy storytelling. A murdered parent is the oldest trope in the book, and Jack’s story is never shown fully despite the player taking on Jack’s role in a couple of missions. Shay Cormac he is not - the lack of empathy we have for the titular character effectively kills the storyline. (He also had a ridiculous Cockney accent.)

What I really didn’t like was the pitching of Jack’s victims as female assassins who wanted to take him in (sporting ridiculous Assassin Rings to boot). Whilst in reality they were innocent women, one of the most vulnerable in Victorian society, the DLC paints them as combatants who must, to some degree, have known what they signed up for when they joined the Assassins, and especially when they volunteered to bring Jack in. This demeans the true victims.

The Ripper DLC brings two new assassination missions, a number of side quests and detective scenes, and a final showdown with Jack at Lambeth Asylum. The assassination missions were nothing to write home about, and the side missions were either rehashes of the missions from the main game, or nonsensical additions. For instance, there are a series of side missions where Evie has to close down fighting rings - the very same that she participated in, with gusto, in the main game.

The Ripper DLC also introduces the ‘Fear’ mechanic. Killing an enemy brutally, or using ‘Fear Spikes’ or ‘Fear Bombs’, can frighten nearby enemies into becoming more manageable, or fleeing.

Whilst this may make sense when playing as Jack (because look at him), the designers put in this ridiculous orange ‘fear gas’ effect when Evie does it, to show that Evie was actually using non-lethal means to rout her enemies even when she was ‘brutally assassinating’ them. This gave me war flashbacks to *Assassin’s Creed III*, when again the player was forced to not kill enemies to satisfy the optional objectives. In the case of *Ripper*, sparing the police I can understand, but sparing the Ripper Rooks is senseless.

Finally, the *Ripper* DLC is all about being ‘grim’. The weather is perpetually overcast and everyone is looking decades older. Abberline has lost his sideburns and the man who we once spotted trying to disguise himself as an old woman by merely putting a bonnet on, is now some hardbitten, weary grouch who’s lost his patience with Evey. I think this was the last nail in the coffin for *Ripper*, as the supporting characters had also lost all their charm.

First posted: {LINK REMOVED}http://qr.ae/TU1Zb2