Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
Producer: Ubisoft
Release Date: October 29, 2013
Platform: Xbox One, Xbox360, PS3, PS4, PC, Wii U
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action-Adventure
Treasure Grab
Written by Josh Schilling
Another year, another Assassin’s Creed game. Although this time, instead of a roguish crusader, or a roguish renaissance dude, or a roguish Native American, you get to be an oxymoronic roguish pirate. You are Edward Kenway this time, a pirate that has some pretty good assassin-like skills and you eventually end up being an actual member of the Assassin Order after infiltrating the nasty Templars. All of this is done through the ancestral genetic memories in the present-day Abstergo Entertainment Company as they try to further their Templar goals. Then goats fly down from the heavens in their fiery glory to usurp the ancient-modern day rule from the Slavic ice limbo-dancers that have enslaved the dark moon of Europa.
I’m joking, of course, about the last part and it might sound like I hated this game, but I didn’t. I’m just a little tired of the franchise as a whole. However, this game has quite a few interesting things that are pretty enjoyable. I’ve always loved me a good open world game, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has a wonderfully rich and diverse area to explore and find adventure. This game takes place during the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean, and you are the captain of a ship that gets to traverse the extremely large game world. The ship-based combat is borrowed from what many believe was the top aspect of the previous Assassin’s Creed game and there are a ton of collectible items that you can use to customize your character and your vessel. Mix that in with the typical assassin-type quests that harken from the previous titles and you’ve got this gist of this game.
One of the things I truly like about the Assassin’s Creed franchise are the historical aspects. These games take you to places that you rarely see in video games and introduces actual people from these eras that you get to interact with. Black Flag adds to that by bringing in Blackbeard, Mary Read, Stede Bonnet, Anne Bonny and quite a few other historical figures. This game in particular does a good job in weaving the real characters with the fictional ones, and might even get some of the curious fanbase to wiki a name or two.
What it boils down to is that Black Flag lacks anything that would set it apart in the gaming world. I’ve experienced better stories, I’ve witnessed better scene rendering, and I’ve played games with better combat styles. Not only that, but this game gives you character modeling that looks like a bunch of Barbie dolls that have had their teeth under a UV ray for too long, and then hands you story inconsistencies that make you go question the plot. But hey, at least there are some clunky mechanics and an uninteresting story to go along with the rest of the game aspects that you played in last year’s game. And you get to be a pirate!
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag feels like a cash grab. It takes advantage of a trendy motif and pairs it with a popular franchise. What this game actually needed was time to breathe. It needed to distance itself a little from its disappointing predecessor, and refine the things that made it more popular in the first place. This is not a franchise that needs to be an annual event like Call of Duty or Madden. These game designers need to build some urge from us gamers by letting us stew upon the qualities and uniqueness of the Assassin’s Creed world for a couple of years, rather than bombard us with unfinished monotony year after year. When they should try to immerse us in a gaming experience, instead it just feels like they are flicking water in our collective faces.