Frigate spotted off the starboard bow, Cap’n! Ready the mortars, me hearties! Fire! All sail! We’ll split her in twain with the ram! She’s not done, swing around and ready the cannons! Fire! She’s dead in the water, bring her in for a steely kiss! These are the sounds of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag at its best, and all these years on, they’re the sounds of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced at its best.
As much as wizened older sailors might tell tales of Sid Meier’s Pirates, and I might sing the praises of Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, the original Black Flag’s legacy is being the king of high seas skullduggery in our medium, assuming what you’re after is the rush of taking on galleons and amassing a great treasure horde to blow on alcohol. It’s also hiding an Assassin’s Creed game under the 20 flintlock pistols lining its frock coat, which conveniently solves what can be a problem in pirate game land: finding stuff for you to do on land that isn’t totally boring when compared to the rum-fuelled romps at sea.
Hence the original Black Flag being a beloved Assassin’s Creed game, largely because it’s quite happy to spend a lot of its alt-historical adventure not getting too bogged down in hooded people moaning about their philosophical disagreements with non-hooded people. That makes it an intriguing, if thoroughly understandable from the perspective of obtaining booty, entry to get a makeover that puts it more in tune with the latest Assassin’s Creeds.
The result is a remake that deliberately narrows the focus towards Edward Kenway, its Welsh protagonist whose fast and loose relationship with the titular creed is neatly summed up by the fact he learns all their fancy moves just by stealing a set of clothes. Much to the chagrin of my second favourite Black Flag character, Mary Read, he doesn’t really give a toss about being a sneaky thorn in the side of evil as much as he does earning enough cash to pay for his debilitating addiction to ship and pirate cove upgrades.
The main story, spoiler alert, sees Kenway gradually convinced that maintaining his relationships with those around him is worth more than the means to buy mortars which can sink a schooner on the other side of the world. It’s an arc Black Flag Resynced’s devs love so much that they’ve basically decided to have it play out all over again over the course of some newly added epilogue missions, thereby introducing a bit of tonal whiplash by virtue of the fact that by the time you unlock that mini-adventure, Edward’s at the point in the main quest where he’s largely come to his senses and stopped seeing dancing doubloons every time he blinks.
The decision to plop that epilogue in, where the extra adventure of original Black Flag DLC Freedom Cry would offer a more memorable and distinct excuse to keep sailing about once Kenway’s main tale has slid into port, is disappointing. As much as its effectiveness as a depiction of slavery can be debated, having Adewale – Kenway’s quartermaster and resident voice of reason throughout the base game – get to pilot his own vessel largely in the pursuit of good, rather than plunder, is a nice change of pace. Having Kenway essentially run through similar paces again, but with a much shallower baddie on the opposing deck, makes for a rather damp squib to end on.
That said, I do think Resynced’s addition of three new officers to recruit for the Jackdaw’s crew is a shrewd move. While the bulk of Kenway’s crew remain nameless grunts, having the Padre, Lucy Baldwin, and Deadman Smith striding about your deck helps the ship feel more alive, and its capabilities slightly more realistic once you’re routinely besting bigger vessels. The trio are decently distributed throughout the game’s runtime and come with side questlines which flesh them out with a bit of backstory. Their input on main story missions is generally quite minimal outside of the handy extra abilities they each unlock in ship battles, but they’re given larger roles in the aforementioned epilogue.
There are also some new standalone side quests, which help add a bit more narrative weight to the fates of your main story pirate mates Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. In particular, Black Flag Resynced feels very keen to finish off shaping the former into Edward’s beloved and quirky uncle/father figure, a legend who stands out even more heavily from the other historical swashbucklers he meets on his travels. To be fair, given James Kidd’s already claimed the leader of Black Flag’s Assassins’ chapter as his mentor, it makes sense that Kenway would seek out a different old bloke to offer him pearls of wisdom. Resynced also introduces an art collecting butler for Great Inagua’s manor, but sadly for those in favour of him going full Batman, Edward’s not after tips on how to keep dust from building up on 18th century portraits.
Rounding out the narrative bits are Rifts, which are the reason you don’t have to spend hours running around the modern day offices of a French video game/film studio. Instead, Ubisoft have opted to keep the Animus bollocks contained within pocket dimensions you can seek out at any point after beating certain missions in Kenway’s adventure. If you do delve into one, you’ll have some alternate history narrated to you by a computer-dwelling being determined to convince you that the major choices Kenway and co. made in their lives were bad, actually. This is conveyed by means of often visually impressive dioramas you parkour your way through, fighting off ghostly enemies as you go. As Animus bollocks goes, I didn’t find them any less meh than the original’s office drudgery, but I can certainly appreciate the call to keep them as optional extras which don’t tank the main plot’s pacing in unskippable fashion.
What does screw with the pacing at times is the decision to yank the lengthy tailing/eavesdropping sequences out of certain main story missions, such as the first one in Kingston. Previously, this mission worked as an ideal introduction to the city, taking you on a tour across rooftops and down backstreets before culminating in a cutscene. This time around, I found it boiled down to grabbing a note from an enemy camp and then walking over to where the cutscene takes place, resulting in a mission that was over in barely any time at all. There was still a bit of sightseeing as I chased Kidd down at the end, but no challenge to stay in range of targets stories below while silently murderdeathing musketmen.
By ditching the desynchronisation insta-fails that often enforced at least a degree of sneakiness upon the original Black Flag’s stealth sections, Ubisoft have also rendered a lot of them rather toothless, and made it very easy to get into the bad habit of abandoning the quiet approach too early – which, in turn, leads to excessive gulping of health tonics after going in swords-blazing. Without the threat of a no-heals-allowed battle to nudge me towards playing smart, instances of me rolling around trying to out-slash small armies of plantation guards at once have become more regular than I’d care to admit. Rounding out the mission front, I did run into the occasional bit of jankiness that’d see characters freeze up for a short time at the start of sequences where you’ve got to follow or talk to them, as well as one glitch while taking over a fort which saw enemies stop spawning before their morale had hit zero, necessitating the reloading of a save.
As for the combat itself, Black Flag Resynced’s sword battles lean a lot more heavily into timed parrying. Like any modern AC, enemies’ strikes glow with a white dot when they’re blockable and red when they’re not. Since enemies default to a blocking stance, which can otherwise only be broken by plinking down a stamina meter, perfectly swatting away white-dotted attacks is the easiest way to get a hit in (outside of shooting people in the face with your pistol). Fights often therefore end up a matter of retreating and waiting for your opponent to attack, so you can lethally counter. In the original, while certain enemies blocked by default, a single button press on crossing could break their guard, keeping the pace up in much more swashbuckling fashion.
On the whole, slicing through Spaniards or brutalising Brits feels a lot smoother, movement and impact-wise. than the original’s punchy tearing through bodies. Sometimes that’s an improvement, but it can feel less satisfying to land a hit, as is the case with the swivel guns in naval battles. While hitting a weak point with one of these in the original felt like a quick targeting strike with some oomph and urgency behind it, in Black Flag Resynced I’ve found myself fumbling around to hit the exposed points, robbing these follow-up hits of their sharpness. More successful are the new flaming broadside cannonball volleys, added alongside regular ones and the heavy shots used in close encounters. The flaming volleys do so much more damage they almost instantly became my go-to, restoring some of the punch to ship showdowns.
Kenway’s Fleet, the minigame based around sending previously captured ships out on voyages to earn you extra gold and goods, has also had a serious revamp. Previously, while far from perfect with its insistence on using a different main currency to the rest of the game – and the fact it was designed to glue you to a companion app – I dug it because it helped the game feel like its seas rolled on beyond the edges of the map. I’d send a brig back home to England to trade, or order a man’o’war off on a voyage to South America or Canada. The idea that there were ships making runs like this all over the Atlantic made it easier to get into the buccaneer fantasy.
In Resynced, you can only send ships on runs around the specific corner of the Caribbean in which Black Flag’s set. Regions are unlocked when Edward captures their forts in person, which is admittedly a nice way to link the mode to other activities, ditto using it to allow the player to force certain plantation warehouses to be restocked ready for a raid next time you’re out that way. Annoyingly, though, each region is only home to four missions all aimed at different types of ship in your arsenal. Smaller vessels like schooners and brigs can only be used for trade and piracy missions, while to restock plantations you’ll need a frigate.
Bizarrely, the mission type that lowers an area’s danger level – something that grows with each mission done there – is locked to Black Flag’s toughest ship type, the man’o’war. Unless you go hard upgrading your ship and making bank early doors, odds are you’ll not be able to capture one of these monsters until mid-to-late in the game, leaving you without the ability to calm the waters in Kenway’s Fleet of your own accord until that point. To me, it’d have been better if every ship could attempt every mission assuming it had the cargo hold space, as in the original, meaning the benefit of later game ships was more in being extra efficient to boost your profits.
All in all, then, despite its additions and tweaks being hit and miss, Black Flag Resynced’s still at its best when Kenway’s at the helm of his sloop, wheeling it around through storms and battles like it’s a Vauxhall Corsa with gunpowder-lined subwoofers. The navies of two Western empires reel like boomers in Rover 75s at the sound of his pounding iron techno blasts, as he cries ‘heave, ho, heave, heave’ over the throbbing din of class warfare. He jumps out of a window and leaps atop their bonnet, neatly slicing off the aerial as his crew swarm the doomed tub, scratching its paintwork with their rusty blades. Then, Kenway slits Ken and Doris’ throats with his hidden blades, lest you forget that there be an okay Assassin’s Creed game lurking beneath the waves of all the top-notch pirateing.