Daniel Konicek Contributing Writer
“A pirate’s life for me” goes the saying, and for fans of the Assassin’s Creed series, it has indeed become the case. With the release of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Ubisoft has delivered perhaps one of the greatest pirate simulators to date, so great that the assassination is actually the weakest link.
For those unfamiliar, the Assassin’s Creed series uses a fictional device called the Animus that allows users (the players) to dive into the past of a person’s ancestors in a kind of historical tourism. After visiting the Crusades, Italy, Constantinople, and the American Colonies, players now visit the Barbados Islands to live a life of piracy and freedom as Edward Kenway, grandfather to AC III’s Connor. There is very little connection to the rest of the series, however, and Edward is hardly a loyal assassin. No, this game is really about piracy. Everything else falls so far short.
The developers have taken the naval battles from AC III and refined them for the setting. Players can engage ships on the massive, open sea and choose to sink them or board them for valuable cargo for money or upgrades to the player’s ship, and the spectacle of leaping across rigging or blasting massive broadside barrages is complemented perfectly by a superb soundtrack that evokes the best of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. It is not without wrinkles. Multiple times I have swung a rope up and over the enemy ship I was boarding, and your pirate crewmates tend to accidentally attack you from time to time, but it never stopped me from coming back. The piracy aspect of this game is too much fun.
If only the rest of the game lived up to that standard. Almost every single story mission involves eavesdropping or tailing a person of interest, which also happens to be the weakest gameplay aspect of the series. The time spent outside of the Animus as a game developer mining Edward’s life for gameplay ideas is a cool idea, but the game could honestly go without it. A game titled Black Flag, stripping out everything tied to the series and adding more piracy content would be superior.
This game is not a masterpiece, nor an emotional experience like Bioshock Infinite or GTA V, but it is fun. A lot of fun. If, at the end of the day, you want to sit back, relax, and sing a sea shanty as you take a Spanish galleon, this game is for you.
