Over the last couple of years or so I
have become more of a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Each game has
managed to improve on the last one in some way, but also introduced ideas that
don’t really pan out very well. This became more pronounced when the franchise
started going to a yearly release schedule with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
and Revelations, which helped pave the way for the divisive Assassin’s Creed III (though this divisiveness came more from reactions to the main character
and setting). That said, it was a little surprising to me that they would
announce a fourth numbered game shortly after the last, but I was still on
board anyway and wanted to find out what it was like. Though I had pre-ordered
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and picked up on the day of release, I was only
able to play it after finishing a couple other reviews after college finals, so
I apologize for that delay on my end. Once I finished it, I did find myself
overall liking this game more than its predecessors.
Black Flag follows the life of Edward
Kenway, aka Connor’s grandfather. Edward wants to impress his estranged wife, Caroline,
by becoming a “man of quality” and making a lot of money. To accomplish this,
he becomes a privateer for the navy. While out to sea, he turns to pirating and
ends up killing an Assassin named Duncan Walpole and taking what’s on his
person. Afterwards, he meets up with Templars and, in the guise of Walpole,
sells off valuable information that concerns the Assassins. Later in Nassau,
after freeing a man named Adéwalé, he forms his own pirate crew and gains his
own ship, which he dubs the Jackdaw. In search of further fortune, he ends up
on a search for a place called the Observatory and eventually finds out just
how big of a mistake he made in his meeting with the Templars.
The story moves along at a pretty good
pace and is written well to boot. I was very fascinated by the information the
player is given about the Templars and the First Civilization, as well as a
more in-depth look at the titular Assassin’s Creed: “Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted”. Edward is a man who at first runs his life purely out
of love for money and with a blatant disregard for the safety and livelihood of
everyone around him, even the allies who begin to trust him. As a result, he
kind of deserves all of the scorn that he gets for his initial philosophy and
way of life. Not only do I like having a protagonist in the franchise who is
this deeply flawed, as opposed to a total ladies man, I also found it to make
his character development later in the game that much more satisfying as he
comes to realize the consequences of his actions. He does try to right his
wrongs throughout the story, especially in a particular lengthy side quest, but
eventually he grows to care about more than simply monetary gain and it was nice to
see him fully understand the meaning behind the Assassin’s Creed and care for
the lives of others. This real progression of character is what helps make him
my favorite Assassin yet.
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| Yes, that is Blackbeard (left) and Black Bart (right) with Edward Kenway (middle). |
Of course, the other half of the story
is the modern day segments, which I found to be handled surprisingly well.
Rather than focusing on a single Desmond-like character using the Animus, it follows
an unnamed Abstergo Entertainment employee who is hired to look into the life
of Edward Kenway and help the company get footage for a couple of their
upcoming projects, those being a video game and a feature film. Since these
segments are also in first-person, this implies that the employee is you, specifically, which helps some of
the bigger twists in the story carry more impact. Also, in an effort to appeal to
everyone, these segments are deliberately designed so that you can spend either
a few minutes or a few hours trying to explore everything and learn more, so if
you really dislike the modern day parts of the story, you can pretty much skip
them entirely. This is a great move, though I ended up trying to get everything
in the modern day anyway and one should be aware that there are points where
you must interact with the real world to advance the plot.
In an intriguing twist, the setting of Black
Flag is in a time before the events
of Assassin’s Creed III, taking place in the Golden Age of Piracy instead of
Colonial America. As such, the world itself is quite different, taking place in
a much larger section of the globe. There are many different islands to
explore, both big and small, all with varied environments that help them stand
out from each other much more than Colonial America (though I wish to stress
that I liked Colonial America anyway because my ancestors were involved in
America all the way back to the Mayflower). I noticed a brighter color palette with
Black Flag, which is actually very realistic and sells the very open setting as
well as highlighting the high level of detail put into every part of the
environment. The water is also very well animated, though I must say that the
splash animations were a little sub-par. In any case, this is definitely the
best looking Assassin’s Creed game yet.
True Fast Travel is a returning feature
from Assassin’s Creed III, which is good because the world of Black Flag is
absolutely gigantic. Getting to a spot on an island on foot isn’t so bad, but
bigger levels may require you to traverse through dense jungles, so Fast Travelling
on larger islands is more attractive. To get between individual islands
however, you may need to sail all the way from one island to the next, which
can take a really long time. There are ways to ease the length of the journey,
but unlocking Fast Travel points becomes absolutely essential to cut down on
travel time if you’re trying to go to a very specific location. Fluid movement
among the platforms and trees is a returning element as well, albeit much more
refined and less glitchy than before.
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| In searching for an appropriate image, I am assured that this represents at least part of the game's world. |
Combat is pretty similar to that of
Assassin’s Creed III, but at the same time it seemed to be missing some
features that I liked from the latter. Edward can still dual wield swords, but
the effectiveness is limited to the individual stats of the swords, which was a
little disappointing due to the lack of a single weapon to rely on. Unarmed combat
and wristblade-only combat is also pretty much useless, a major disappointment
as I had to depend almost purely on my swords to quickly get rid of enemies.
Guns are also a viable option, though if you want to rapidly chain shots
together, which you can with up to four shots, you have to wait a bit for Edward
to reload before you can do that cool feature if you’ve fired already, and even
then I was never able to reload back up to four (I have no idea if that was
tied to my upgrade choices, so that could just be player error). Thankfully the
momentum-based combat is still present, but the toughest enemies still can’t be
taken down through this method, which awkwardly forced me to resort to breaking
their guard even with a number of the enemies around me. This situation worsens
as soon as a grenade gets thrown, so there was hardly an opportunity to kill a
group with momentum alone. The blowpipe and rope dart also return for use both
in combat and in the field, though the rope dart arrived too late in the game
for me to really integrate it into my strategy all that well, though firing
darts in the field is a good way to thin out the enemy forces before initiating
combat. Also, smoke bombs are very helpful in a pinch to quickly eliminate a
wave of unnecessarily tough opposition.
Since this is a pirate game, you will
see the water quite a lot, mostly if you’re travelling somewhere for the first
time. Fortunately there’s a lot on offer to keep things interesting and core
ship mechanics introduced in III are greatly improved upon in Black Flag. The
Jackdaw was very easy to maneuver and combat between ships is very refined and
much easier to execute. Naval Battles are where the most improvements were
made, including the ability to fire mortars and more advanced versions of
specific weaponry. It takes a little getting used to, but after that it feels
very intuitive and you feel like you can take on any ship. While locked in
combat between ships, you can take two routes, those being to either sink or
personally raid the ship. Sinking the ship offers less of a reward, that being
half of whatever cargo that ship was carrying at the time; sometimes this is
unavoidable once the Jackdaw is upgraded high enough. Boarding the enemy ship after
crippling it will net you all of its cargo, though you may also need to
complete other objectives like killing a certain number of crew members or
destroying a flag. This option is the best route for gathering supplies for
upgrades, so it’s fortunate that they made Naval Battles more fun to go
through.
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| The Jackdaw (appearance can be manipulated by the player). |
With that said, upgrading the Jackdaw
can be extremely difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll not only
need Reales, the currency of the game, you’ll also probably need some amount of
cloth, wood or metal, sometimes a combination of them. Earning the coin is
easy, since you can just sell off all of the valuable sugar and rum you find,
but getting the materials presents a challenge. There are a few ways to do it,
but it can take forever no matter what you do, not helped by the noticeable lack
of metal compared to the other materials. For this, there is both good and bad
news. The bad news is that at certain points in the story you will be forced to
upgrade the Jackdaw if you want to survive, making grinding for materials a
necessity. The good news is that there is an exploit you can use if you haven’t
been spending your time finding ships to raid, or don’t have the time, which
requires you to repeatedly destroy a downed Man-o-War at a specific point in
the story (I will only say Sequence 8, Memory 1) and reloading the checkpoint
over and over before quitting to the Main Menu to save everything you earned.
It may take a while, and the cargo may be random, but it’s the fastest and most
consistent way to get everything you may need.
While you’re out to sea, you can also
complete a number of side activities, enough to keep you busy for quite a while
if you’re looking to do absolutely everything possible in Black Flag. Aside
from Naval Battles, you can also go harpooning for a variety of whales and
sharks [NOTE: While you can hunt whales,
Ubisoft has stated that they do not condone whaling and that you are able to
hunt whales for the sake of historical accuracy], explore underwater wrecks
or even go on treasure hunts across the different islands in the game. There’s
even more to do besides those, but being able to do so much in the first place
allows the water sections to have even more of a purpose and I found what I did
do to be a lot of fun. I haven’t tried to collect everything yet, due to the
sheer number of Animus Fragments hidden underwater for instance, but I may go
back in the future to try and find everything Black Flag has to offer.
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| Whaling doesn't look like this, but you can hunt what you see here. |
The mission structure in Black Flag is
improved over its predecessor, with no difference between gameplay and story to
be seen (e.g. you actually follow instead of lead). I can see that more time
was put into making sure that the missions were balanced and playable, but I
found myself to not enjoy doing missions as much as I did just roaming around
and doing my own thing. Eventually the story missions became a little
monotonous, such as having to repeatedly tail people to find out information or
accomplish something. When wandering through the world I felt more freedom and
less constraint from the story, but I still went through it anyway to fully
unlock everything, including the rope dart and diving bell (required for
underwater exploration).
Before I get to PS3-specific content, I
want to note that this is the first game I’ve played where sea shanties are a feature.
You can find them around the world to have your crew sing them in a manner akin
to a naval jukebox. Having your crew sing a shanty can make trips on the open
sea less stressful and adds a bit of atmosphere. Collecting them, however, is
another story. These things fly away when you try to get them, so you end up
having to chase them down and you may not get them. This led me to do one thing
I had previously never thought I’d say out loud: spawn camp the sea shanty.
When you know exactly where they spawn, you can simply camp where they would be
and you’ll get them without any problems except for the part where you have to
wait what can feel like an eternity; still worth it in the end to get some
vocal variety.
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| Running after a sea shanty can be difficult. |
Since I played the PS3 version of the
game, I also got access to an additional hour of gameplay (actual completion
time may vary). Surprisingly, it follows the point of view of Aveline from Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, so it felt a bit jarring to go between protagonists and
time periods for only a small amount of time. This section has Aveline freeing
a slave whom Connor mentioned via letter would be of interest to her. The story
was more straightforward than the game she’s actually from, though I didn’t
really find any trouble with combat thanks to the über powerful machete in her
possession taking down enemies with ease. It might be worth it for some fans to
get the PS3 version just for this one bit of story, but it feels like it could
be safely skipped as it has no bearing on the events of any of the related
games (including the tangentially related Black Flag). In any event, the
controls for Aveline were a little better than the Vita, so I am now curious
about the HD version of her original game just to see how much differently it
controls.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is a
yearly sequel that is actually fun to play. Edward is a deeper character than
others before him and his time period is a very interesting one to explore.
Improvements made across the board also help his story stand out, though I
think the missions were less fun than going out to sea or just running around
on my own. Assassin’s Creed fans should pick this up to continue the adventure,
though it is getting increasingly difficult for newcomers to jump on without
spending a lot of money. This is my favorite Assassin’s Creed game yet, but I
really hope that Ubisoft actually waits another year to put out the next one
because playing the games is now more of a thing that happens instead of a real
event worth getting excited for.
