Thirteen years after Ubisoft ditched Desmond Miles to go full pirate in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, this seafaring adventure is still considered by some to be the best pirate simulator of all time. So it’s no wonder at all that Ubisoft has decided to dust off this bad boy and remake it in the style of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, complete with all the modern trimmings you’d expect. That includes stuff like drastically improved graphics, modernized combat mechanics to make Edward Kenway faster on the draw, and my personal favorite, a near-complete removal of all the pesky loading screens that is an absolute godsend. My time with Black Flag Resynced included a few red flags to go along with the black ones though, like how some of the modernizations involved removing aspects of the original that seem like maybe they’d be best left as they were, but on the whole it’s pretty hard to be mad about this gorgeous second voyage of one of the best Assassin’s Creed games.
Many of Black Flag Resynced’s best parts come courtesy of the Ubisoft Anvil engine, last seen in AC Shadows. It’s been used to recreate Black Flag from the ground up, and that allows it to be every bit as beautiful as more recent Assassin’s Creed games. The tropical environment of the Caribbean is a night and day improvement over the original, specifically when it comes to how bright and colorful areas are versus the previous generation’s somewhat muted and dark appearance, especially when running around forested areas. Similarly, character models somehow manage to look absurdly better than they did in 2013 while also being exactly as I remember them (weird how that happens, right?). That said, I did find many of the characters to be a bit prettier than I expected, particularly when it comes to pirate characters who spend all their time boozing, sailing, and fighting. The cast seems to have been given a Hollywood glow up and aren’t nearly as gross and dirty and you might think.
Black Flag Resynced also benefits from many of the other upgrades the series has seen in recent iterations, especially changes to combat that make it faster and more decisive, and to sneaking around that make it a more competent stealth game than the original. Despite the Assassin’s Creed series ostensibly being all about sneaking around, it’s wild to think that it wasn’t until Assassin’s Creed Unity that we got a dedicated crouch button – absolutely insane in retrospect. In the original Black Flag you could only go undetected when hidden within a group of people or when walking in bushes that automatically put you into crouch mode. Aside from that, your character genuinely couldn’t crouch at all. Thankfully, Black Flag Resynced adds a dedicated crouch button, so you can go about your business of stabbing enemies to death from the cover of shadow as you please. There are also a few new gadgets in your stealth toolbelt, and some that were in the original but come to you much sooner in this iteration. For example, the badass ropedart that didn’t appear until the tailend of the story is now added to your inventory in the opening chapters so you can almost immediately start yanking enemies toward you like Mortal Kombat’s Scorpion, which, I think we can all agree, is just a great decision.
If you aren’t in the mood for stealth, though, one change to this iteration of Black Flag is likely to bring you joy: those deeply irritating tailing quests have been reworked. Whereas before you’d have to slowly follow people around town unnoticed, paying the ultimate price of having to start over from the beginning if you got caught, now you’re provided alternate ways of completing the mission instead. In the one example included in the demo, I decided to sprint right at the two people I was told to follow just to see what would happen, and although the result was sloppy and most unbecoming of an aspiring assassin, I can confirm that I was indeed given separate means for completing my objective anyway, though they were significantly bloodier and less smooth than planned. A pretty great change, if you ask me!
Likewise, combat has been modernized to focus on player skill, complete with my favorite: a perfect parry mechanic that opens enemies up to be instantly killed if you get the timing just so. As someone who has been honing his parry timing for years in the crucible of soulslikes and uber-difficult action games, this is one of my favorite changes. Not only does it make you feel like a complete badass when you slap someone’s sword out of your face and finish them off with an execution, but it also allows for combat to go faster – something that feels quite needed at times with all the samey boarding combat sections that happen every time you want to pillage a ship of its cargo before sinking it. I also played with the difficulty turned all the way up and found myself dying quite a bit, both in ship-based combat and while swashbuckling. Some of this is surely just the fact that I was playing this remake for the first time and learning as I went, but here’s hoping this iteration of Black Flag is a bit more challenging than the original, where I rarely found myself in any real peril.
Though this remaster draws on many of Assassin’s Creed’s more recent entries, it steers clear from the RPG elements found in Valhalla and Shadows, instead sticking to its action-adventure roots like Mirage and, crucially, the original Black Flag. There are still some stats on weapons that can be purchased in shops and some RPG-like upgrades here and there, but Resynced focuses much more on being a competent action game than an RPG, so you won’t find yourself stealth-assassinating someone and not doing enough DPS to take them out in one strike. I actually enjoy both the more RPG-style Assassin’s Creed games and the less chunky action games that the series found its roots in, but if I’m being honest, this one just feels like it’s much better suited as a pure action game. After all, I’m a bloody pirate for God’s sake! I’m meant to be showing these nautical narcs the business end of a flintlock, not running the numbers on my armor set or doing math on my critical hit chances. Yar, I say! Yar!
Some of the streamlining of Black Flag Resynced’s action has led to some peculiar choices, though, like how you can no longer pick up the weapons of slain foes to use in combat. In the original, if you downed a big guy who was wielding a two-handed ax, you could then pick it up and use it to mop up the rest of the scallywags in your path. For whatever reason, that was removed in the demo I played, though, possibly to simplify things and keep the action moving along without having to clumsily retrieve a weapon from the ground in the heat of battle. I can certainly see the logic in that choice, but honestly, I kinda missed being able to have that kind of freedom, and it felt to me like one of those wholly unnecessary changes that could have just as well been left as it was. Then again, this feature hasn’t been a part of the series in quite some time now, so maybe it’s just one of those things that no longer fits within the Anvil engine.
While reliving my time with Black Flag was largely awesome, one surprising revelation is that the entirety of the present-day storyline has been removed from this version. As someone who misses when the Assassin’s Creed series actually tried to tell a story within its sci-fi world, it’s a bit of a bummer to see them follow in AC Shadows’ footsteps of giving up on that aspect of the series entirely. It’s especially odd if, like me, you have the twist ending at the end of the original Black Flag burned into your memory – I’m honestly very curious how this remake will be able to cut around that aspect of the story entirely, and worry the story might feel a bit awkward in doing so. That said, the historical story and pirate gameplay is quite obviously Black Flag’s strength, so maybe it won’t be any big loss not having it around, even if it does feel a bit strange.
Perhaps as a way of making up for the lack of a present-day story, Resynced interestingly adds content to Kenway’s story that wasn’t in the original, some of which I played. This includes whole story sections that focus on Black Beard and Stede Bonnet, who were only briefly involved in the original version of Black Flag, if memory serves. There are also new party members you can recruit to join your pirate crew, complete with quests to indoctrinate them into your privateering operations. One such quest involved breaking a shipwright out of jail and persuading her to join my team by agreeing to help her with a personal matter down the road. Her name is Lucy and she’s pretty much a complete badass. I think she’ll fit in with Kenway and company just fine.
After a handful of hours playing this remake of one of the best Assassin’s Creed games, I’m pretty sold on replaying through it in its entirety when it comes out later this year. What do you think? Will you give Black Flag a return trip? Let us know in the comments.
Author: Ryan McCaffrey
Source: IGN Gaming
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
