How far are you able to stray from home before it’s impossible to ever return? That is the question on the heart of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. It’s something that plagues Edward Kenway, the game’s roguish hero, as he explores the Caribbean looking for wealth and the dream of returning to England a more respectable man. But for up to Kenway longs for the day he can leave the pirate life behind, the liberty of the open sea is a hard thing to withstand. And who can blame him? Because after this stunning and fantastically realized tale of adventure at the high seas, it’s hard to visualize the Assassin’s Creed series returning to its landlocked roots
The world of Black Flag is little short of remarkable. That is the foremost expansive setting within the history of the franchise, a virtual rendition of the West Indies that encompasses all manner of burgeoning colonies, Mayan ruins, and deadly jungles. Cities like Havana and Nassau reflect the series’ trademark attention to detail, from the stonework cathedrals of the previous to the ramshackle taverns of the latter. Then there are the remote islands inhabited by nothing greater than crabs and sea turtles, underwater shipwrecks waiting to be explored, and vast stretches of sparkling Caribbean waters which are every piece as deadly as they’re gorgeous.
Indeed, what makes Black Flag so special is how it captures the fun of cruising the open sea. It’s greater than the spectacle of a humpback whale leaping into the air and spraying the deck of your ship, or the sound of your crew breaking out right into a sea shanty just because the sun is starting to set around the horizon. It is the feeling that there is always something on the market to be discovered, rewards waiting to be captured regardless of who’s standing for your way.
What began as a sequence of isolated side missions in Assassin’s Creed III has exploded right into a full-fledged technique of exploration, discovery, and combat. Early into Black Flag, Kenway takes the helm of the Jackdaw, a pirate ship that has clearly seen better days. From there, it is your charge to construct the Jackdaw right into a vessel able to taking over the foremost powerful warships within the Caribbean. In any case, that Spanish gold isn’t going to plunder itself.
Taking on naval superpowers appears like a tall order early on, but pushing yourself to enhance your once-rickety ship is a process that Black Flag makes incredibly rewarding. It is a game that provides you an absurd selection of how you can acquire the coin and resources had to hold your personal at sea. You can run off in quest of buried treasure using nothing greater than a crudely drawn map, or silently infiltrate an army storehouse to gather the wood and metal had to bolster the Jackdaw’s hull. That little bit of flotsam floating inside the distance could be a crate of rum one could sell to make up the adaptation in your new mortar upgrades, or it’d be a stranded sailor you are able to rescue to expand the scale of your crew. Black Flag doesn’t just present a stunning world; it will provide you with a mountain of reasons to run off and go exploring.
Black Flag builds on ACIII’s naval side missions to create an experience each piece as important as running around on dry land.
Upgrading your ship is important because Black Flag places a large emphasis on naval combat. Both the storyline and side missions are filled with tense sea battles, where strategic positioning and explosive cannon fire come together in exhilarating contests of naval supremacy. It is a system that enables for plenty of tactics while never getting slowed down in overly complex controls, whether you’re picking off enemies from afar with a well-placed mortar strike or dumping explosive barrels into the trail of an unsuspecting foe. Whatever approach you’re taking, managing sea battles is an absolute blast.
It’s not only wanton mayhem, either. Black Flag encourages you to take pause and survey the landscape before charging right into a fight. With the aid of your spyglass, you’ll be able to scout another ship’s cargo to make a decision whether the resources onboard match your current needs, in addition to scout out what quantity of money you can actually loot. This same tool also reveals an enemy’s overall combat level, letting you understand in case you should warm up against a couple of more level-8 schooners before taking over that level-20 frigate. All this reconnaissance makes naval combat that rather more satisfying; success comes not just from how accurately you lob your cannons, but from how adeptly you measure the danger versus the reward.
These naval battles often lead directly into more traditional Assassin’s Creed swordfighting, and it’s in those seamless transitions that Black Flag fuses its two halves into one cohesive whole. Destroying a boat outright rewards you with only half its cargo, so that you deserve to board these vessels and wear down their reluctant crews to harvest the complete reward. That implies swinging acrobatically from one ship to a different, exchanging sword strikes with enemy sailors, and watching your crew erupt in cheers once those enemies have surrendered. an analogous transition occurs through the game’s numerous fort takeover missions, where you bombard the defenses of a seaside fortress by ship before charging into the following chaos to assassinate its officers amid a storm of fireplace and smoke.
Black Flag doesn’t just present an attractive world; it offers you a mountain of reasons to run off and go exploring.
That these acts of naval piracy remain so exciting so deep into the game’s lengthy story campaign is a testament to simply how excellent Black Flag’s progression loop is. Raid an enemy gunboat, and you’ll scrap it for parts or send it on trade route missions to make more money at the side. Overtake a fort, and you may unlock dozens of latest activities at the map, whether they’re the site of serious white sharks whose skin you possibly can develop into improved armor or an underwater shipwreck you may explore once you’ve saved up enough for that diving bell. Notwithstanding where you go or what you do, it’s virtually impossible to feel like you are not advancing someway.
And it is a quick game to advance, too. Assassin’s Creed III’s crawling preamble and frequent pacing issues are nowhere to be found here, as Black Flag wastes no time throwing you into the lifetime of a pirate. The tale revolves round the aforementioned Edward Kenway, a captivating troublemaker from Bristol via Swansea. If his name sounds familiar, it will: Edward is the grandfather of ACIII protagonist Connor Kenway. The elder Kenway’s backstory is rooted in a reasonably standard trope–a peasant off trying to find wealth to construct a closer life back home–but it’s his unique place within the series’ overarching fiction, and the universal themes the tale explores, that makes the narrative shine.
At the game’s outset, Kenway is neither assassin nor templar. He’s a person whose only allegiance lies along with his ship’s crew, playing both factions against each other for his own gain. But because the years wear on, the luster of youthful indiscretion fades away as Kenway wrestles with a desire to find some greater purpose and a longing to do right by his estranged wife back home. It’s a story that explores the human side of pirates, painting larger-than-life figures in a light that even manages to turn Blackbeard into a sympathetic character.
The narrative grows a bit unwieldy toward the end, but finds its footing just before a credit sequence that is far more touching than any story about pirates has a right to be. An eclectic cast of side characters briefly dance with but never fully tackle more powerful themes like race and gender in the age of colonialism, but such narrative flirtations are one of the few shortcomings in an otherwise terrific story. Even the modern-day chapters–brief and innocuous as they may be–manage to add a refreshing and occasionally humorous take to the Abstergo story arc.
Despite the presence of pirates and scoundrels, the world of Black Flag is a consistently gorgeous one. The Assassin’s Creed series has always had a knack for establishing an engrossing sense of place in its dense urban landscapes, and Ubisoft hasn’t missed a step in applying that same level of craftsmanship toward the islands and jungles of the Caribbean. Black Flag looks especially impressive at the PlayStation 4, where improved lighting and a greater resolution bathe the world in a terrific level of visual fidelity and artistic flourishes. You’re better able to notice the little things, like the way foliage gives way to Kenway while he sneaks through the bushes, or the realistic flutter of fabric on your sails when a strong wind sweeps across the sea. The current-generation versions of Black Flag still look terrific, but all those little details in the PlayStation 4 version draw you into the world that much more.
Kenway’s adventures on dry land don’t amount to the same wholesale reinvention of the series that his time aboard the Jackdaw does, but these portions of the game have hardly been ignored. Ubisoft has borrowed a number of concepts from Far Cry 3, and they improve the on-foot experience immensely. Crafting animal hides into better equipment is a far greater incentive to hunt wild animals than it was in ACIII, while the ability to sabotage alarm bells in an enemy base adds more flexibility to the stealth experience. But once a fight breaks out into a full-on melee, Black Flag begins to feel much more like its predecessors: swordfighting is as fluid and lively as ever, but lacks any substantial refinements over previous games.
Where that sense of deja vu hits Black Flag the hardest is in its overuse of eavesdropping missions. Throughout the main story, the game asks you time and again to tail your targets (but not too closely!) and eavesdrop on their conversations (but not too obviously!) before finally letting you decide what to do with them. These types of missions–a staple of the very first game in the series–had already begun to show their age in recent Assassin’s Creed installments, and time hasn’t done them any favors since then.
Not all treasures are above water in Black Flag.
While less glaring, a similar lack of advancement can be found in Black Flag’s multiplayer. The cat-and-mouse nature of Wanted and the co-op chaos of Wolfpack are still tremendous fun, but outside of a new story-driven tutorial mode, there aren’t any substantial additions. Even though Assassin’s Creed multiplayer has always occupied something of an “icing on the cake” role, it’s a shame this part of the game hasn’t enjoyed the same creative renewal that its single-player portion has.
But these moments of stagnation are isolated events in what is, ultimately, a massive and highly ambitious game. Black Flag presents a world full of adventure and opportunity, where treasures scavenged in a remote jungle can be used to turn the tide in a massive naval battle against mighty Spanish warships. It is a game where you can sail the oceans for hours at a time, either hunting great white sharks or simply listening to your crew sing one infectious sea shanty after the next. There’s an incredible scope to what you may do in Black Flag, with a degree of harmony between its component parts that encourages you to check out all of it, and a narrative that keeps you invested within the whole thing. If there has been ever any question that Assassin’s Creed needed something ambitious to get the series back heading in the right direction, Black Flag is that game after which some.