Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Black Flag opens with the pirate protagonist washed ashore, shipwrecked on a gorgeous and lovingly detailed Caribbean island. It's an inviting escapist fantasy location with enough incidental detail to suggest a lived-in history and culture. It made me want to canvas the area and search for secrets. Incidentally, every single object of interest is immediately marked on your minimap, meaning I didn't exactly have to do much besides beeline for icons with extreme tunnel-vision. Immediately the lovingly crafted island was an ocean of nothing placed between collectibles. There was no adventure or mysteries to be uncovered whatsoever. There's just a bunch of stuff to make numbers go up on some subscreen that I'm meant to gawk at and feel... satisfaction, I guess? Satisfaction at a job well done, much like how a janitor must feel at the sight of a spotless bathroom. "Oh yeah," I remembered, "I'm playing an Assassin's Creed game."

You collect a lot of bullshit in AC4. Treasure chests, missing documents, animus shards, sea shanties, audio logs, animal pelts, golden bananas, jigsaw pieces, bafmodads... Every time you start the game or fast travel the game helpfully displays a list of all the bullshit in the area you have yet to get. The secret joke is that you don't need to get any of them. For the most part they unlock aesthetic trinkets such as multiplayer icons or bits of flavor text that aren't worth reading.

There are issues with the controls. There have always been issues with the controls in Assassin's Creed. They are still issues. The hero has an extreme sense of weight and inertia, probably in an attempt to make his actions more grounded in reality. He is slow to accelerate, his turning radius is wide, and there's often a hesitation between the press of a button and the hero's actions. Navigating tight areas can be a nightmare. Full tilt free-running is the only available method of moving faster than a casual stroll, so in areas with a lot of clutter you've got the choice of moving infuriatingly slowly or unintentionally climbing and bumbling over all manner of objects, repeatedly scooting past your target, and arguably wasting even more time than if you had just walked. I've found myself climbing on top of treasure chests I've meant to open. The same chest, multiple times. Once you're squatted on top of a treasure chest it might surprise you how difficult it can be to get down. In summation, the free-running mechanic is roughly the same as ever: too clumsy and stop-and-go to be fluid or exhilarating, and not complex enough to be more engaging than holding in the trigger and pressing forward on the joystick. There's the constant sensation that your inputs are considered mild suggestions against a host of automation processes. When it does work it is unsatisfying because it feels like just that-- a machine that is functioning properly. When it doesn't work it's so much more frustrating because it feels like a machine that has broken down rather than an error on the player's behalf. The tech and animations behind the climbing were impressive back in 2006, and still are to an extent, but there have been so many sequels and so many years between the first Creed and Black Flag that it's hard to remain excited for a movement system that hasn't improved much upon its slightly-wonky-feeling base.

Something that has improved over other games in the series is the stealth gameplay. AC4 accomplishes this by actually having stealth gameplay. The whole 'social stealth' theme has been all but jettisoned in favor of a more FarCry-style approach in which you hide in bushes, around corners, or other such ambush spots to take out guards one at a time. You have a small but intelligent assortment of tools, including a dart gun that can be loaded with tranquilizers or berserker darts, the latter of which are fun to put to use. Instead of detection being an inevitable part of the gameplay loop as in past Creeds, ghosting is now very possible. Overall I found the stealthy missions (not tailored around tailing an NPC) to be the most enjoyable this game has to offer. I especially enjoyed the side activities that have you infiltrating plantations-- first to snoop out the guard who holds the key to the warehouse, and second to reach the warehouse itself.

Another happy surprise is that much of the game patterns itself after Zelda: The Wind Waker. After the storyline allows you access to a ship, you are free to explore a Caribbean made up of a few dozen islands-- some large, some small. Although it can't match Zelda in the details or in imagination, it's still enjoyable to sail about and chart out new territories. Another favorite activity of mine has you hunting down buried treasure using only coordinates and hand-drawn maps with very little HUD assistance. Like stealth, treasure hunting is one of the few activities in the game that forces you to examine your environment and treat it like more than a dumping ground for collectibles. Plus, the payouts for the buried treasure are good enough that it's worth doing. On the sea you can engage in ship-to-ship combat, which is also fairly entertaining, but since the boat handles like, well, a boat, it lacks quite a bit in finesse and often turns into a damage race. Which cannon you use (front, side, or tipping flaming barrels off the back) is dictated by which direction the camera is looking, and it's somewhat unfortunately difficult to come to grips with. In particular, you are unabile to use your best firepower AND steer the boat at the same time. It's not bad, but not as good as it could be.

After pummeling another ship enough you are able to board it and engage in the combat system, which has been reworked quite a bit over previous games. It's styled after Batman: Arkham Asylum, but with a worse camera and less responsive controls. It's not fantastic, but it gets the job done far better than the combat in previous games in the series. Boarding comes with secondary requirements, such as offing captains or destroying gunpowder supplies. One requires you to climb to the mast and tear down their flag. The flag one sucks. I hate it. The boats are the worst thing to climb in a game where climbing is already pretty clumsy.

Speaking of things that suck, about 3/5ths of the way through the game you get access to a diving bell. This lets you do underwater missions with terrible swimming controls, a terrible swimming camera, and the expectation that you will do underwater stealth against lightning fast sharks. Sometimes eels will just leap out and bite you and there's very little you can do to avoid it. Luckily, despite the tedium, these are pretty easy to brute force. Unfortunately, some of the best upgrades in the game are unlocked through this terrible, terrible side activity.

Oh yeah, there's an upgrade system. Well, scratch that-- there are actually about four different upgrade systems competing for your attention. At the most basic level you can spend money to equip the hero with swords and guns which have stats such as damage, speed, and range to consider. There are so few weapons to choose from, however, that you'll likely pass the lower and middle tiers within the first few hours and then keep the same loadout until the end of the game, when you can finally afford the highest tier. It's not as though combat is challenging enough to warrant managing your loadout.

Next you have crafting. This allows you to hunt animals and use their body parts to upgrade elements the hero's person such as maximum health and various types of ammo capacity. Seeking which animals populate which areas and then hunting them is reasonably enjoyable, but it's spread far too thin. What I mean is that each animal you find has only a single purpose. The game introduces hunting with a tutorial where you nab some lizard skins and ocelot pelts. Once you do this, you are done with lizards and ocelots entirely for the rest of the game. This is similar to how crafting in the latest Far Cry games works, and it's just a waste of potential. This isn't a crafting system-- it's just an excuse to make you collect more bullshit.

Luckily, the game does provide a singularly good representation of a resource-based upgrade system to use as a positive example. To upgrade your ship, you must gather metal, wood, cloth, and of course money. You can get these by raiding other ships, by stealing from plantations, or by finding minute amounts in pickups scattered throughout the sea. Because you have a small number of resources that can all be spent on a decently sized list of upgrades, picking where you spend what is an actual decision... possibly even a tough one! Because the ship combat can be a bit tricky, the upgrades are things you would actually want.

The final upgrade system is the pirate cove. You get a pirate cove, and you can dump money into it to have shops open up there. You don't get any money from the shops, the shops exist in every town already, and you can fast travel way sooner than you unlock the cove. This is a worthless thing to spend money on and I suspect it's only there as a legacy feature from Assassin's Creed II. I appreciate the effort-- and the lack of microtransactions-- that went into implementing all of these upgrade systems, but they're so undercooked and emblematic of the series' deeper issues. Features and systems are just piled on and on and on without much thought put into how necessary, elegant, or worthwhile they are. This game doesn't need four upgrade systems. It can barely manage to make only one upgrade system interesting. You have to wonder whether the game has a ton of collectibles in order to fulfill the systems, or does it have systems in order to make sense of the number of collectibles.

Story-wise the game starts off refreshing. Since your hero is a pirate unaffiliated with either side in the series' stupid Assassin vs Templar conflict, there's a fun element of the lore being window dressing for simple pirate adventures. And then, about 75% through the game, the protagonist becomes wracked with guilt over a series of contrivances that are only tangentially his fault. Turncoat allies shout you down, "all you care about is gold!" (No shit, I'm a pirate.) Eventually the protagonist becomes an Assassin himself and everything refreshing gets thrown out the window. For some reason becoming an Assassin in these games means also becoming a sullen, joyless prick with a vacuously 'stoic' personality. Obnxiously at this point the game tries to wax nostalgic about itself as characters think aloud, "remember the good times? When it was just about treasure and pirate adventures?" Yes, Assassin's Creed 4. I [i]do[/i]. You took them away from me.

The story-critical missions are a mixed bag. The best of them are simply about stealthing your ways into, out of, and through enemy territories. The number of times you're forced to tail a target as they meander about is unacceptable, but that's par for the course in an Assassin's Creed game. Estimating in my head, I'd say the hit-to-miss ratio is a shakey 40/60. Considering that there are a ton of missions and the... unfortunate pedigree of this series, that's not half bad. Well, 40/60 is actually a little bit less than half good, but you know what I mean.

It's both hard to recommend and disavow Assassin's Creed 4. I feel that the high points are certainly good enough for most anybody, but the low points are low enough to make them not worth it. In any case, if you have even a sliver of love for Assassin's Creed gameplay, you should play AC4. This is undoubtedly the best one so far and likely the best the series will be for a while, if ever.

I should note that the very first thing that happened to me when I started a new game was that the introduction sequence bugged and softlocked the game. Furthermore, on one occasion attempting to quit the game hardlocked my entire PC. I've clipped through geometry and had missions that failed to progress. I've spawned into areas with my boat underwater. And for a game that came as a free pack-in with my current video card, it could not reach 60hz while maxed out and performance was still up-and-down with the settings dialed back.