Video Games

I finished the London one

Syndicate seems to be the least liked in the whole series, probably because it's the only one that doesn't take itself seriously and indulges in a lot of high camp Music Hall comedy. I liked it for the same reason. I liked being able to defend Karl Marx in a pub brawl, and I loved standing on the top of a stolen hansom cab and shooting at enemy carriages like I was in some Jellied-Eel Western, particularly once my gang had grown to the point where they were following in two other carriages in full Keystone Cops mode.

Generally, the AC games aren't good at storytelling (huge swings in quality over the length of any given one) and terrible at pacing. The ideas are usually good (some of the ones in Valhalla were really good and innovative for the series) but their actual implementation is often frustrating, and only partly because their toxic marketing department had a habit of messing the studios around. Several of the games were massively rewritten because the devs planned for a female protagonist and the marketing dept said "People don't buy games with female leads".

try Odyssey at some point

Do you have time for that, given what you said previously about time and grind? You're looking at 45 hours minimum, and that's if you work carefully from a walkthrough so that you know which of the many story lines are actually essential. Odyssey is where they really decided to stop guiding the player through the plot and let the player find it for themselves. It's quite well done, for once, but the game is huge. They also locked a significant part of the story in a DLC; on my first attempt, I got that far and just gave up from burn out. You might find that it can only be completed by one of your descendants using an animus to pick up from where you left off.

Judging by the length of each of my comments on this topic, I've definitely played too much Assassin's Creed.