User blog comment:Master Sima Yi/Assassinews 12-05-'15 — Assassin's Creed: Syndicate has been revealed!/@comment-5174994-20150717232456/@comment-13471981-20150718150836

'Aight, my bad. I went too hard on you.

"And I have a felling Evie will be just another lesbian fighter,pissed off at everything,always putting blame on somone for all the bad stuff, always making a stand for something, but not knowing for what really, just for the sake of it, and being emotional where there is no need whatsoever for that. But I don't want Evie to be "lady" kinda woman,or being to emotional,or even "Barbie" kinda girl, it just wouldn't fit well being an assassin,killing people and considering the time period."

To me this came across as "women can't be assassins it's not historically accurate" - it's perhaps not what you intended, it just reminded me of that kind of complaint, which I've just seen so often I don't have the patience to deal with it nicely anymore. But evidently, I jumped to conclusions and I'm sorry for that. I got very side-tracked >.>

Anyways, for your original questions: Yes, the game shares quite a bit with Unity. Jacob uses a lot of Arno's animations, particularly parkour and basic movement. We don't know about Evie's movements because we've only seen her in cutscenes so far - she does have her own trailer, but it doesn't use in-game animations. Also, there's a grappling hook (just think the Batman Arkham games) that can be used to quickly scale walls. If you're not down with the idea of a grappling hook, you can of course not use it and simply climb, though I believe it'll probably be pretty handy as some of London's streets are very wide.

Visually, it appears the game developers have scaled a back from Unity a bit, possibly because Paris was so taxing on the next-gen consoles. I don't think it looks bad by any stretch of the imagination, there's just no marked improvement when it comes to visuals imo.

Combat-wise, it's a lot faster than Unity's. We've seen a cane-sword in action, but mostly Jacob's fists, for which the animations have been a bit jerky. Some people who've played the demo said it felt better than it looked. Throwing Knives are back, in case you didn't know.

Unity's stealth is no longer "snap-to-cover" as in Syndicate. It's not been on display very much, so it's hard to judge at this point.

The other thing that Ubisoft is selling is the new carriages, which you can use as transportation throughout the city. You can ram them into each other for vehicle vs vehicle combat, but you can also have Jacob or Evie abandon the reins and fight atop the carriages (horses will follow automatic pathing when you're going after someone, for convenience's sake). I'm convinced there's something with boats as well, but Ubisoft hasn't said anything about that yet, so don't quote me on that.

Finally, character-wise, your guess for Jacob is probably spot-on; he's the charming rogue of the duo, looking to building himself a gang and take over the gangs sponsored by the Templars. It sounds like something bound to go wrong. Evie is the tactical one, and also the Assassin more faithful to the Brotherhood and its tenets. You can check out Jacob and Evie's articles if you want to read some more about them.