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Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, what Exactly are the Rooks? And Fire Engines

To answer the title question the Rooks are a street gang formed by Jacob in order to help him, Evie and the Assassins take on the Templers and their gang, the Blighters. Over on Ubisoft’s blog earlier today they went into some details on what the Rooks will be doing moment to moment in the game, and how they’ll help out the two main protagonists: Jacob and Evie. Allow us to break it down for you.

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Well back in 2010 Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood introduced assassin recruits and the Rooks work a lot like they did. The Rooks will back you up in a fight, or distract guards so you can sneak by, if you get the Little Rooks upgrade the children of London will even back you up by providing things like ammo when you’re in a tight spot. The blog also confirmed that while the Rooks were Jacobs idea they’ll be happy to take orders from Evie too.

Apparently this is a 19th centenary fire engine.

Apparently this is a 19th centenary fire engine.

Depending on how far you level up your leadership ability you’ll be able to boss around up to five Rooks at a time, but even better is the fact that each Rook can be levelled up as far as level 9 which will make them pretty effective in combat. One key thing to remember is the Rooks aren’t assassins, so while they’ll be able to follow you around the city they won’t be as agile as you and they don’t have a rope gun for scaling buildings, so you might have to wait up for them if you move too fast. However there is an alternative to running, you could always gather your Rooks and take a carriage ride through the streets of London, or you could all pile onto a fire engine and charge at an enemy base. Yeah an Industrial Revolution style fire engine.

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There are three different skill sets for upgrading Rooks. The first is the “Insider” skill set which is based around intimidation. Then comes the “Ringleader” skill set which focuses on improving the Rooks and sabotage. Lastly there’s the “Swindler” skill set which will go towards getting discounts on items and increasing the amount of money in “your train’s safe.” There’s an abundance of ways the Ringleader skills can aid you via sabotage, one example is by letting your Rooks tamper with enemy weapons so their guns will misfire or even explode. The Swindler skills will help you earn more money via increasing your profits in Fight Clubs and so on.

The Rooks sound like they’ll be pretty useful then, but we’ll find out come October 23rd when the game releases on PS4, Xbox One and PC. That’s just four days before Halo 5 releases, speaking of which it went gold earlier today.