A pirate's life isn't focused quite right for me
I'm not a big fan of the Assassin's Creed franchise. I only played 2 previously, and while I had some good times, I didn't finish it and obviously didn't play anything between then and now. So, if you're a devotee of the series, this review isn't for you. However, if you're more like me and were interested in seeing whether this franchise has matured with age, I would say that the answer is mostly no. And if you're here because while being an assassin doesn't sound like much fun, being a pirate does, I would say the answer is a more of a conditional yes.
First and foremost, AC IV is still an Assassin's Creed game first and foremost. You still go on contracts, you still feel vaguely as if you've broken the game every time you end up using swords instead of your wrist blades and have to kill everyone with relative ease (if the game hasn't given you a tail mission and doing so represents an automatic fail state), and you still have to deal with Templar/Assassin mumbo jumbo that's founded on some moral edifice that I've never quite been able to hold onto. You'll even still occasionally be taken out of history into your modern-day self in a sequence that isn't quite as intrusive as in the past (admittedly, this is based mostly on hearsay) but which contains a bunch of optional content that I have to imagine is only of interest to people who are more caught up in the lore of it all. I don't think that this portion of the game has changed or improved at all over the course of four years.
So really, the unknown factor in all this are the contributions that playing as a pirate brings, and this obviously comes as a huge break from the series' past. In tone, it does manage to be a bit lighter, and the rendition of the sea is beautiful. Occasionally, as during a storm, sailing manages to be an engaging experience all by itself. However, when you boil it down to its gameplay essence, being a pirate ultimately boils down to one of three things: attacking and boarding ships, whaling, and underwater wreckage. Of the three, only the last manages not to become repetitive by the end of the game, and I don't believe the second was any fun to begin with. My experience with pirating was that for awhile I got caught up in the upgrade loop that slowly led me to turning my modest brig into a weapon capable of bringing down the largest galleons, but once I had reached that apex, I realized that I was still doing the same things I'd been doing since the beginning of the game, with only the slightest changes in mechanics to reward me.
In essence, I realize this all comes across as very critical, but I really couldn't give this game a score lower than I did. It looks good and controls well, and an intensive amount of effort went into giving the game substantial and varied content to keep the player entertained. And it did so for me to the tune of 20 hours, with only minimal frustration, though I was quite ready for it to be over when I finally finished. But at the end of the day, the main thing I came away with from ACIV was that no matter how you dress it up, I am not the audience for the Assassin's Creed franchise. I have to imagine that anyone who really saw magic in the AC formula in previous installments would come away much happier with the game than I did.
Now if someone wants to devote a bit more time and detail to being a pirate, on the other hand...
