Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Review

I'm not a big Assassin's Creed fan, I stopped caring for the series around somewhere in the mid 2010s due to my taste in games slowly changing and the series just absolutely refusing to make true on it's idea of being a "social stealth" game after so many games being made. I did however finish watching the TV show Black Sails and I was in the mood for a pirate game on top of me having some fond memories of AC4 due to it being the first PS4 game I played when I chose to be an early adopter of the system and it kind of helped me during my depression I had in 2013.

With that out of the way, what are my thoughts? This might be the last AC game I play where I choose to play it because I am geniunely interested and not because there is no other game I could play instead and need something to play for the moment since AC4 is just an "okay" game.

Some good I'll get out of the way is that the story is pretty good, I don't like the AC overarching story with the modern day stuff but I do like the stories involving the ancestors I prefer the series when it tries to have more complex characters and themes like AC1 and Unity and 4 I'm happy to say is one of those games. I like Edward Kennway's journey in how he starts off as someone who is selfish and only cares about himself to slowly becoming someone drops the notion that material gain is not what you need to live a happy life. The other characters are decently fleshed out and the Templars do a good job at making the player and by extension Edward doubt what he is doing. The decline of piracy and how the Templars is manipulating characters like Hornigold to join their side is done well done. As well as Edward driving away the people he cared because of his greed and how he doubts the Assassins and their Creed but slowly accepts it.

It's a solid story overall.

However the gameplay is where most my gripes with AC4 comes with. It's by no means "terrible" but it's one of those games that does multiple things and doesn't do any of them super well and the game design as a whole feels super confused.

To expand on my latter point, I always heard this was a "good pirate game but bad AC game", I don't get how this is the case. The pirate aspect of the game is mainly relegated to side missions and outside of getting reals and materials like metal and wood to upgrade the ship like heavy canons, hull, ram and mortal which you can do in about a few hours, you rarely need to pillage and plunder anything. You rarely need to upgrade Edward either.

What you will mainly be doing in AC4 is lots of stealth, some naval combat here and there, some on foot combat and parkour. None of these things are very fleshed out or well made.

Speaking stealth there is A LOT of tailing missions in the game, this is a common criticism for the game but there is too much stealth for a game where you play as a pirate. The stealth is slightly improved like more tall grass, a blow pipe, and a whistle. It's still not really the bare minimum. There is no crouch button, wall hugging is contextual, the whistle only works when it feels like it and on top of this, stealth only feels viable when there is lots of tall grass, if there isn't lots of stalking zones then stealth in AC4 without being spotted is a game of luck. The rooftops are filled with snipers and during the tailing missions the blow pipe isn't ideal since you need to aim while yout target is moving. Stealth kills do look nice, I'll give it that.

On foot and ship combat are both pretty basic stuff, on foot combat is basically just mashing the attack button with occasionally breaking someone's defense and pressing counter, enemies never change from the basic soldiers you fight in the early hours. The hard parts is having the game doing what you want since I could try to break someone defense or roll out of an axe attack and the timing for the counter is either too lenient or feels spotty. You also get some pistols but you rarely if ever need to use them. I'll give the combat credit is the kill animations look nice.

Ship combat is fun at first but after doing some upgrades and especially adding upgrades like heavy canons, mortar, swivel and hull becomes a game of getting up close, spam heavy canons, firing swivels and fire mortars at far away enemies rinse and repeat.

Boarding is an interesting concept until you realize that other ships can't attack you and enemies can't board you. While interesting it feels half baked.

The parkour is as always isn't very good and going back to AC parkour pre Unity can feel awkward with the lack of a button to press to climb up and no button press to go down. In AC4, holding sprint pretty much means you will climb everything as well as sprint so it leads to moments where I want to run but will climb instead or Edward just straight up refuses to climb.

Overall, AC4 has a solid and well told story with just "okay" gameplay, I can't picture myself playing again for a 3rd time and my opinions would change.