The Assassin’s Creed franchise will turn 20 years old next year. Let that sink in. Considering the series age, it’s not surprising Ubisoft is now jumping into the remake boat with this series. Remakes are all the rage these days, so of course they will jump at the opportunity to plunder some new life out of entries that are close to two generations old. But instead of going the expected route and doing a remake for the one that kicked it all off, they have gone straight for the gold with a remake of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
It’s easy to understand the choice. Ask any Assassin’s Creed fans their top games in the franchise, and chances are Black Flag is in their top 5, if not their absolute favorite game overall. The official sixth entry in the series and the first that moved away from the initial arc from the series, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag both ushered a more carefree, accessible era for the franchise while simultaneously being one of the greatest pirate themed games of all time (so much so, people asked Ubisoft to take the pirate side of things and make it its own franchise, and well, we know how that went).
As debates continue about the future direction of the franchise after the release of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, how does Ubisoft fare with their return to the sacred waters of the high seas with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced?
I Am a Man of Fortune, and I Must Seek My Fortune
Like in the original release back in 2013, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced tells the story of Edward Kenway, a down on his luck former Welsh privateer who turned to a life of piracy in search of fortune and glory. Wishing to fix his estranged marriage with the promise of immeasurable wealth, Kenway’s adventures has him partnering with some of the most famous and notorious pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy, as well as inadvertently crossing over into the eternal struggle between the Assassins and the Templar Order. As his eternal pursuit of riches pushes him to his limits without considering his impact to those around him, Edward eventually has to come to grasp with his own avarice, and the idea of embracing a life that’s bigger and more important than his own.
Even 13 years after the release of the original, the story of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced remains one of the most simple and easiest to follow from the entire series, and Edward Kenway remains one of the series’ best protagonists since the days of fan favorite Ezio Auditore. There is an affable, smarmy charm to Edward that holds up strong with the remake, and while some of the line re-recordings have made Edward slightly more likable in this remake, the complicated nature of his personality and ultimate journey still remain as entertaining today as they were in 2013.
The overall plot, however, still feels a little too scattershot for its own good, with some time leaps that tend to undercut some of the plot beats due to rushing halfway through the story. Considering Black Flag Resynced took extra steps to try to embelish things within existing story missions, while also adding things to the side with the introduction of new naval crew members that dovetails into the added epilogue quest “A World Without Gold”, it is kind of disappointing they couldn’t fully fill in the blanks around the story parts that muddle the narrative halfway through.
Besides some of the embellishing in spots, the biggest change for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is the complete excising of the dynamic between the story in the past and anything happening in modern day. In the 2013 original, the modern day plot picked up the pieces from the disappointing conclusion to Desmond Miles’ story in Assassin’s Creed III and told a cheeky, bordering on self-parody tale about an Abstergo employee working at a video game subsidiary of the company helping to find “the next big thing”.
As he analyzed the DNA memories of Edward Kenway, he discovers a more nefarious plot than initially suspected. Some of the plot happenings in the past would then find meaning in the present, and sparse as the segments were, it led to a nice twist that connected both timelines in a fun way that justified the inclusion. The irony of the complete excising of this angle is that it makes certain plot points in the past lose any sort of meaning divorced from its relation to the present, and makes me wish the game’s tale had not been mostly a 1:1 retelling considering the removal of this element.
However, I want to give credit with what’s been put there as a replacement. While I’ll always be forever annoyed that most of the modern day element is tied to the Animus “live service” unlockables introduced in Assassin’s Creed Shadows and continued here, I do like a lot of the implications that rise from the playable “rifts” you find throughout the adventure. While these rifts give you some story glimpses of alternative outcomes for Edward’s story, I also liked the implication that a different person is accessing his memories. It manages to, in a meta way, establish that the original 2013 release and Black Flag Resynced both exist as separate games within the timeline, and this remake is not meant to replace the original. A little token for purists that I appreciated more than I expected.
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced takes the gameplay, locations and world of the 2013 original, throws it into the latest iteration of the Anvil engine that powered last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and spits out a modern remake that looks like what you remember the original looking, but now with significantly better visuals and mostly playing better than before. Black Flag Resynced adds all the tech advancements from last year’s game and now makes the world of Black Flag a singular, seamless beauty. All the different cities of Havana, Nassau, Kingston and the disparate islands from the original are still here and now you can travel to all of them without a loading screen in place (unless you fast travel).
The game has to be seen to be believed. Even as a remake to an existing world, a lot of praise has to be given to the way Ubisoft has rendered the Caribbean with the new technology. It’s an astonishingly beautiful play space that manages to top the visual recreation of Feudal Japan from a year ago. I always thought the 2013 original was a great looking game where its adherence to the tropical setting made it visually boring after long extended play sessions. The way the remake renders the exact same play space and toys around with more dynamic weather and lightning gives it different color hues for a more picturesque aesthetic.
Paired with the increased level of detail in vegetation density and the improved city details and character models, I can’t help but tip my hat off at another incredible job for Ubisoft’s excellent environmental artists. They poured it all into the visuals and it shows, and while the usual bugs and jank that has plagued the series continues to spoil the polish, it’s still a remarkable visual treat, specially played on the PlayStation 5 Pro (base console users will still get a phenomenal looking game). And paired with some great remixing of the great soundtrack from Bryan Tyler, Black Flag Resynced lives up to this entry’s atmospheric legacy.
Many of the different systems from the original remain present, but now are aided by better presentation and streamlined progression that makes doing everything work even more seamless than it did in the original. I had not realized how little I engaged with side activities like assassination and naval contracts, Templar Hunts, and improving your base at Great Inagua in the original game. Black Flag Resynced is better at presenting more cohesion to these activities where I now was better incentivized to do them all. It makes the experience far richer while keeping the game more digestible than the multi-hour behemoths that were the last few major Assassin’s Creed games. Its funny seeing that Black Flag Resynced has mostly retained the size and scale of the 2013 original which was already a fairly big game, but its a more manageable adventure that underlines this series works better when everything can mostly be done at 40 hours than the 80-to-100 hours of recent entries.
Not All Treasure’s Silver and Gold, Mate
The tried and true Assassin’s Creed mix of stealth, action, and parkour mixed with pirate seafaring returns with Black Flag Resynced, and it comes with the added benefits of everything that’s been added to later entries. For one, Edward Kenway can now crouch at will at the press of a button, something the original only allowed while you were on grass undetected. It makes Black Flag Resynced a more competent stealth game than its original incarnation.
However, it also underlines some ways it’s still pretty basic stealth compared to more fully featured contemporaries, including last year’s Shadows. Some of the enemy AI is wonderfully, woefully inept. So much so, it’s hilarious remaining in one of the hidden bushes or corners and easily killing enemy after enemy that comes over with nary any repercussion. It’s to the point I actually do recommend cranking the difficulty to Hard, as the game comes off way too easy played in stealth, and being discovered doesn’t really have much consequences at Normal difficulties, especially with the removal of the failed states of the tailing missions, which was the original’s major sour point.
Combat flow takes its cues from last year’s game, using its control scheme which is way different than how the original controlled. The benefits is that there’s a bit more of an aggressive slant to the combat compared to the mostly “wait to parry and reverse” flow of the original. While enemies having health bars and stance meters brings worry the series’ RPG spongy combat made its way into Black Flag Resynced, I think Ubisoft found a perfect marriage of old and new with what they cooked up with this remake.
You can still do a “wait to parry and reverse” like the original that allows for immediate takedowns, and you can pair it with some added mechanics like kicking enemies to walls, sweeping them off the floor, pulling them in with your rope dart Scorpion-style, or shooting them to break their stances. It creates a combat flow that manages to modernize the swift way Edward was able to kill enemies in the original. While jamming the attack button to break stances will still do the trick, it’s way less satisfying than being able to mix all these new options together.
However, this comes with subtractions where, unlike the original, you can’t enter combat unarmed to focus on disarming or picking up dead enemy weapons, or use your hidden blades as actual weapons. Some purists will decry this takes away some of the “combat variety” of the original. For someone like me that never really engaged in any of those extra mechanics as the game never incentivized me to, I much prefer the system that we have now, as it’s better incentivized and frankly more fun.
Then we have the parkour system, which has been a subject of much debate about how it’s evolved in later entries. Recent entries took a backseat in improving parkour, and only recently it became a focus again with the way Ubisoft updated Shadows over the past year. Those improvements were added to an “Advanced Movement” toggle for that game that made its way into Black Flag Resynced. Playing with that toggle on, I can certainly say it gives Edward a nimbleness and fluidity he didn’t have in the original. Unfortunately, it still comes with the usual problems with precision that has plagued the series since its inception, where Edward would make jumps to rails and walls I didn’t intend, which is an aggravating problem I doubt the series will ever resolve at this point. It’s been nearly 20 years, so any moment now?
And finally we get to the sea faring, where Edward has access to his ship the Jackdaw to scour every corner of the Caribbean map in search of all the little secrets, treasure chests, hidden collectibles, and the like. This is the element of the game that remains the closest to the original. It is almost unchanged at a fundamental level, having the added benefit of the seamless exploration of all the map without the loading screens. Engaging against different enemy ships, from the rank and file all the way to the terrifying Man O’ Wars remains a thrill, even when the actual invasion of ships remains an utterly repetitive activity as the hours pass by. Considering how often invading those ships is tied to better rewards, lowering your bounty, or recruiting a ship for the game’s strategic ship mini-game, I wish they’d gone as far as making each invasion have an additional quirk besides killing every enemy to lower the morale, which has now also been added to the Fort Capturing. Doing them once in a while amongst the rest of the game’s activities is not a problem, but back to back, it grates after a bit.
Even meant as a good will gesture to tickle the nostalgia many hold for the 2013 original, I can say Ubisoft was successful in delivering a great modern update to its perennial, pirate-themed classic. While some story and gameplay excissions will irk some, if the goal was to present Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in its best form in 2026, the teams at Ubisoft completely delivered on their goal. There is a reason why the original is held up in such high regard in the pantheon of the series, and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced made me appreciate this entry even more in the grander context of where everything’s gone since. As I eagerly await to see where the series will go in the future, this look into the past is a great peak back to the series golden age, and a hope for where the future will take them next.
Thank you to Ubisoft for providing review access to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
