Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Review

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was one of the first games I played on PlayStation 4. It blew my mind a little bit, if I’m honest, with the seamless transitions between captaining your ship to jumping into the ocean or onto an island. It was truly something new and impressive and the ship combat – sorry, naval warfare – is still amongst the best in gaming, not surpassed even by Ubisoft’s own attempt at recreating the experience as, predictably, an MMO. This Black Flag Resynced does more than refresh the visuals, it remixes and changes pretty much everything at least a little, to bring it more in line with modern Assassin’s Creed games. Feeling a little trepidatious? So was I.

To give an idea of how much has been changed here and perhaps how unprecedented it is, the modern day sections have been removed, taking out one of the main frustration with my replays of Black Flag. You can also use alternate fires for your ship’s weapons, as well as recruit new NPCs to your ship, like a shipwright. The rope dart, which was previously unlocked very late in the game, are unceremoniously handed to you early in the game by William Kidd – who is likely my favourite character in any Assassin’s Creed game, if you’re interested. You can even jump at will, go underwater without the help of a diving bell, and crouch to enter a stealthy approach at any point, tapping into a new visibility meter.

Combat is now somewhere in between its original counter/instakill style and the modern hack and slash RPG action. Perfect parries allow you to instant assassinate anyone, even bosses it turns out. You can do the same thing once you break an enemy’s defence by hitting them with your sword as well, and your chain assassinations upgrade as you play as you play so you can do it more times in succession. Your rope dart can now be used in combat to pull enemies to you for a follow up, activated like the special abilities in Odyssey. This is also how you quick fire your pistols and use your new push and sweep attacks as well. It’s actually a surprisingly effective middle ground, even if it does feel like there’s a lot of different ideas mashed together sometimes.

It does have some quirks. Sometimes when I try to chain assassinations I just can’t for no discernable reason, resulting in me getting a cutlass to the face instead. Enemies often start swinging their sword at someone else, but rotate on the spot mid-swing to hit you instead, which is clearly cheating. The prompt for both assassinating people and using them as a human shield can be unreliable too, sometmies disappearing just as you press it only to reappear afterwards, but it doesn’t happen too often thankfully.

The naval stuff has had a few touch-ups as well. There are the aforementioned alternate fire modes for each of your ships weapons, such as Heated Shot to add a bit of fire to whoever you’re shooting at. Your swivel guns, which are used to shoot uncovered weakpoints on ships, now behave like they did in AC Rogue, where you manually aim rather than just press a button. The objectives like cutting down the enemy’s flag when boarding a ship now seem to be optional, with the aim being to lower the enemy’s morale and the objectives helping with that goal.

Forts have been subtly changed as well. Where you previously climbed over the outside wall and completed some objectives, now it works much like the new ship boarding does. You charge in through the destroyed fort gate with your crew and kill enemies on your way through the fort until their morale is broken, at which point you can finish off the leaders in the war room. It makes a little bit more sense now, I think.

Graphically the game is just gorgeous. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up on the Anvil engine, with ray-traced lighting and reflections at 30 frames if you play in Fidelity mode on console, though you lose the reflections if you drop down to performance for the slicker 60 frames per second. There are a few issues, like when returning to the ship after boarding your ship usually either spawns slightly above the water and falls down into it, or below the water level and springs back up to it. I suspect this is because it spawns at sea height without accounting for the often very large waves. They don’t really affect the experience too much, though.

Outside of all of this you’ve got possibly the best Assassin’s Creed game. The story is excellent here; it’s so good that going back to it makes me realise what has been missing from the more modern games. The writing is excellent, dialogue is vaguely poetic and the characters are phenomenal – I mean, Blackbeard is in this game and he’s so cool, but not quite as cool as the indomitable William Kidd. The really surprising part is the attention to detail, you wouldn’t need to see Blackbeard before his big beard, but doing so allows you to experience his development into the dread pirate, which is very enjoyable.

It’s good then that there’s about 6 extra hours of missions and story here as well. This includes main story and side content, while the removal of the modern day sequences has made space for Rifts, where various ‘what if?’ scenarios play out, like what if Edward had never left Caroline? Then there’s Kenway’s Fleet, which has been completely revamped. You’re now sending your ships to the actual game map, which must be unlocked piece by piece by conquering forts. If I’m honest I much preferred the older system here, as this one feels far less expansive.

There is the usual list of Ubisoft clutter and jank though. There’s the Animus rubbish, from things like a giant sparkling animus menu access point in the cabin of your ship to the constant nagging animus notifications stopping you from accessing your menus because they take over the button that opens it for a while. That button takes you to the Animus, where you can get cosmetic rewards. There’s also the opening menu that has basically the whole Assassin’s Creed franchise on it so you can supposedly access each one from there, but it’s basically pointless because you would need to have them all installed and nobody can afford that amount of storage space.

You also get caught on scenery a bit, as Edward sometimes won’t step up a tiny little ledge or a rock about the size of a single stair because you’re not holding the climb button, which is absurd. Occasionally you’ll jump to the wrong ledge as well, but you have to expect that despite how much Ubisoft developers used to talk about reading your mind through your thumbs. Other than that, there’s also the weird feeling of two very different schools of Assassin’s Creed being pushed together – for example, you can see gold and silver glints when you hold L2 pointing you towards chests and objectives, as in  AC Shadows, but there’s also Eagle Vision, which seems like it should have been consolidated into one easy system rather than two that overlap.