Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

I'm in an unusual position here, reviewing a game that was regarded highly at the time but presently sits between two iterations in the long-running and long-in-the-tooth Assassin's Creed franchise that were very poorly received indeed, making Black Flag something of an aberration in retrospect. While I believe to some extent that all games should be reviewed in a vacuum, based entirely on their own merits and their own weaknesses bereft of outside factors, it's often hard to escape the grander picture that surrounds them. Whether that's addressing the real-life sociopolitical reservations that might concern a game around its time of release, something that the upcoming FPS violent cop simulator Battlefield: Hardline is going to have a heck of time grappling with, or simply determining its place in an increasingly bloated pantheon of similarly structured assassinate 'em ups, these factors are not something that can easily be tiptoed around, nor hidden from via a convenient haystack. No game is an island, after all, though this one has plenty of islands in it.

The truth is, while Black Flag is a far better product than AC III and AC: Unity in many respects, it's very much of the same caliber overall. The Anvil engine used by Assassin's Creed, appropriately-named given its immovability, gets minor tweaks with each new game, but it's clear from the many glitches and bugs that manage to persist from one version to the next that it's not getting the full overhaul it desperately needs any time soon. Since Brotherhood, we've had to deal with less than fluid "automatic" free-running, the ludicrously spasmodic enemy ragdolls, the many bizarre glitches that range from minor visual snafus to game-breaking AI issues. It's an engine that's been feeling its age for a while now, and having every new game introduce even more systems and features to heap on top of it only forces it to buckle more.

However, the technical flubs pale in comparison with the mechanical. A somewhat cheeky little feature that the game introduces is a feedback system for story missions, allowing the player to confer a one-to-five point score to the sequence they just concluded. Questions were raised at the time as to whether or not this feedback would ever actually be acknowledged by Ubisoft developers (given Unity's reception, I would guess not), but I took the liberty of automatically rating one star any mission that involved the following: eavesdropping, tailing and/or a chase. Turns out approximately one in four missions did, looking back over the rankings on my completed save game file. Before I can explain why this is an issue, we must first establish why these three mission types in particular are so reviled.

Assassin's Creed is at its best when the game presents a target, whether that's a person that needs killing or an item that needs burglarizing, and lets the player ascertain their own path to the goal. Many of the assassination side-activities are like this, presenting a small area filled with guards and challenging players with finding the best way to get to the target, preferably remaining undetected throughout, and remove them before they're spooked by the player's presence and escape. The player is free to be as cautious and patient as they wish, opting to hide and observe guard patrols before quietly choosing their moment to strike, or to impatiently start tossing around smoke grenades and sleep darts and leaping in for the kill before the target knows what's going on. The point is, the player has agency when it comes to the game's pace in all these scenarios. Eavesdropping and tailing missions are incredibly slow, serve little purpose beyond getting to hear the bad guy's predictable plans, always lead to an equally predictable location (which, hey, guess what, is usually a well-fortified position covered in the usual red "this is a prohibited area" filter on the mini-map) and, most critically, remove this player agency by forcing them to adhere to the mission's glacial pace. What's worse is that every eavesdropping mission has the player's targets wandering around in circles walking and talking like frickin' Aaron Sorkin characters. I was genuinely shocked none of them ever said, "Hey, don't talk to me like I'm other Templars". The original Assassin's Creed, though it had its own myriad problems with repetitive mission design, had you locate a primo spot to listen in on two characters who actually stayed put, like regular people do when conversing. We got no variation of that here, instead forcing players to switch hiding places constantly to remain within a moving cone of easy listening distance while they patiently wait for the game to let them play at their own speed again. Tailing is the same only worse, because the target would constantly stop dead in their tracks to paranoiacally look around, an obstacle that wasn't grating because it suddenly forced you to find cover, but because it needlessly extended what was already a tiresome waiting game. The chases are an entirely different (but still every bit as exasperating) kettle of fish, which ties in to what I was saying earlier about the game's less than stellar predictive auto-free-running system, where holding the R1 button was often an exercise in forlorn hope that your character wouldn't, in mid-sprint, suddenly decide to start climbing up the side of a nearby building because you cut a corner too tight in your pursuit.

Also counterproductive to this open-world approach is the full synchronization bonus. Introduced in AC: Revelations, the full sync requirements--additional secondary tasks that the game asks you to perform, with the tacit understanding that this is how the sequence historically went down--were more or less the beginning of the end for Assassin's Creed's greatest strengths, i.e. player agency and mission versatility. While entirely optional, any 100%-aspirant is forced to adhere to a very strict and specific means to achieve their goals, often using weapons or tools or a strategy that runs perpendicular to their usual preferences. There's nothing wrong with being cajoled out of one's comfort zone now and again, as it can be the best way to find a new favorite method of performing assassinations (the overpowered berserk darts, for instance, tend to be overlooked by many), but it's still an unwelcome system that doesn't reward creativity in the player's approach so much as stifle it by telling them exactly how they should act. Somehow, Black Flag has found a way to make these full synchronization requirements even more obnoxious, by flat-out refusing to surface this information to the player in any conveniently transparent manner. The only way to tell if there's a full synchronization condition to pursue is by regularly pausing the game whenever a new stage of the mission is introduced, otherwise it's extremely likely that the first time you'll discover a full sync condition will be after the mission is over and the game skips over it, tut-tutting at your lack of thoroughness.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag isn't all doom and gloom, however. It has a very attractive setting, as the player jaunts around the picturesque and brightly colorful 18th century Caribbean in their modified brig "the Jackdaw", and the story and characters are far superior to anything found in Assassin's Creed III. Edward Kenway, our protagonist, is a deeply flawed hero who suffers from various delusions of grandeur due in part to marrying far above his station in a time period where such things mattered, chasing power, women and wealth because he feels he is owed them for whatever reason. On a whim, he chases down and murders a turncoat Assassin after a pirate hijacking gone awry and dons his apparel in order to profit from his apparent serendipity. He thus gets embroiled in the centuries-old Assassins versus Templars struggle entirely incidentally, spending the majority of the game seeking the Templar's target of a First Civilization device capable of spying on any human being on the planet. Rather than use it to control the various empires of the world, like the Templars are intending, he sees it as a means to earn the power and wealth he deserves. It takes a lot of character development and some well-defined secondary characters, like the conscientious young buccaneer James Kidd and Edward's ex-slave confidante and quartermaster Adéwale, to help him finally see the light. The game also does an all-stops tour of who's who in 1710s piracy, involving interactions with the likes of Ed "Blackbeard" Thatch, Stede Bonnet, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Ben Hornigold, Jack Rackham and Black Bart Roberts. Unlike the Forrest Gump-esque insertions of famous American Revolution figures in AC III, these famous pirate figures are far better fleshed out and given personalities and motives that help to shed light on their decision to turn to plundering and larceny on the high seas.

Likewise, the game's modern framing device has moved from the travails of the milquetoast Desmond Miles and his modern-day Assassin compatriots to a video game development company operated by sinister Templar bigwigs Abstergo that puts the player in the sneakers of an anonymous employee working through Edward's memories so they can be adapted into a lucrative "virtual experience" property. The brief sequences with this character are somewhat entertaining too, and the source of the game's many self-deprecating meta gags regarding the faults of the Assassin's Creed franchise, especially its deleterious annual turnaround and its laissez-faire approach to anachronisms and historical accuracy (though it feels somewhat cynical as well, given how none of these faults are ever addressed beyond pithy "yeah, we suck" meta commentary).

The game also has a few positive additions to the game's beleagured engine, though each has its own negative side as well. The deep sea diving is an entertaining means of procuring extra cash and upgrade plans for the Jackdaw, picking over sunken wrecks for treasures while avoiding the hostile sealife, though this essentially equates to long continuous underwater missions with the requisite untenable underwater swimming controls and oxygen meters. Likewise, the new "Kenway's Fleet" mini-game that replaces the usual Assassin deployments across the world features some appealing if perfunctory turn-based strategic ship combat as well as a means of making even more money and resources in the background as the player continues the main game, but is hamstrung by obnoxious enforced waiting periods that are sometimes as long as 36 real-time hours; a system apparently purloined from all those obnoxious freemium iPhone games.

The improved setting and story greatly ameliorate the problems Assassin's Creed has been suffering for multiple iterations now, but doesn't come close to absolving them entirely. Black Flag is another entry in the same technically broken, mechanically stagnant and functionally identical series Assassin's Creed has been for years, and no amount of funtime pirate adventures can gloss that over.