Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Review: A Glimpse of When Ubisoft Was Great
Two first-timers and our resident Assassin's Creed superfan set sail on the remake of the last great AC game. It still holds up.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag is the game everyone points to as the last great Assassin's Creed, and the high-water mark for pirate games. (Sorry, Skull and Bones.) Josh and Ryan both missed it the first time around. Ace, our biggest Assassin's Creed fan, played it 13 years ago and has been waiting ever since. Black Flag Resynced, or as Ace calls it, Black Flag Arrrrrrr, was the perfect excuse to break our "we don't usually deep dive remakes" rule.
What's new
Resynced is more than a fresh coat of paint, and Ace was thrilled with the changes:
- The modern-day segments are gone. Nobody missed them.
- Combat has been rebuilt with more depth from the newer games: perfect parries into executions, chained kills, leg sweeps, kicks, a quick-draw pistol, and a rope dart.
- Parkour is faster and smoother.
- Quality-of-life fixes everywhere. There's an auto-follow button for tailing missions (escort missions are the worst), getting spotted no longer instantly fails a tail, and you can eavesdrop from a rooftop.
- Lucy the shipwright and the Padre are new characters with their own questline.
The things that were cut were things I didn't care about to begin with. Every improvement they made was great.
A slow start, then full sail
Josh will be honest: the first couple of hours felt routine, enough that he told his wife he wasn't sure it was grabbing him. Ryan, a self-described origin-story guy, was hooked from Edward's first scenes with his wife. Then you get the Jackdaw, head out to sea, and everything clicks.
The naval combat is a game in itself. Where you point the camera decides your weapon: look off the side for a broadside volley, forward for chain shot to shred sails, and behind for exploding kegs. There's also a mortar (and a late-game one that fires continuously and follows your cursor; who knew laser-guided mortars existed in the 1700s?). Swinging across on the rigging to board a ship never gets old, even when someone in the crow's nest shoots you in the back.
Sailing's amazing. Naval combat's so fun. This game started really taking off for me.
Then there's everything else: harpooning sharks and whales, diving wrecks in the diving bell, assassination contracts, and rebuilding your mansion on Great Inagua, where your collectibles go on display and your crew parties around a bonfire. Ryan especially loved the water, which is hard to get right in games and gorgeous here.
On land
To Josh's surprise, he ended up enjoying the land missions even more than the sea. Kingston and Havana in the 1700s feel authentic and alive, and the combat is satisfying without being overloaded. It's not groundbreaking, but every fight is fun, and new heavy enemy types make you mix up your approach.
Is this groundbreaking combat? No. Is it satisfying, fun combat where every time I got into a fight I didn't go "ah, not again"? Yeah, man.
Even the busywork feels natural. You're a pirate gathering wood and metal to upgrade your ship and fortify your island, so it doesn't feel like padding.
The story
This is the part that caught Josh off guard. Edward Kenway is flawed, greedy and insecure, and still completely likable. You rub elbows with Blackbeard and dream of a free pirate nation. Quartermaster Adewale is everyone's favorite. Ace points to Black Flag as proof of what Ubisoft forgot: focus on characters you care about instead of bloated mechanics and padded hours.
I'll take a 4-hour game over a 40-hour game if I love every moment of it.
(No spoilers here. The episode does have a spoiler section at the end, and the ending gave all three of us goosebumps.)
Any jank?
A little. Climbing feels lower and less vertical than the early games, so you're rarely more than a few stories up. The parkour still sends you sideways off a roof now and then. And the new in-engine cut scenes for the added story can look stiff next to the original mocap scenes, with Ubisoft's signature hands-on-hips poses.
The VGP take
All three of us landed in the same spot: Josh 8.7, Ace 8.6 (he'd give the original an 8.5) and Ryan 8.5. At $60 for 40 to 50 hours, it's an easy recommendation. Josh summed it up as a very complete game, the kind that's rare these days, where story, combat, exploration and presentation all pull their weight.
If you've never played Black Flag, this is the way to play it.