Review: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced - The Golden Age, Again

A review copy was provided to us by Ubisoft, thank you very much!

With Black Flag Resynced, the remake of the original game, Ubisoft set out to give us that nostalgic experience with a fresh coat of paint, but also much more than that - did they manage to preserve what made it so special?

Good to Be Back

The story, unsurprisingly, remains exactly as it was. We play as Edward Kenway, a pirate who lives only by his whims, with the only thing driving him being the desire to get rich by any means possible. Edward gets caught up in a Templar plot involving an ancient location called the Observatory, which gives whoever uses it the ability to spy on any person anywhere in the world without limitation. Edward makes finding this location his life's mission in order to sell it to the highest bidder, and along the way meets quite a few historical figures who accompany him like Blackbeard, James Kidd, and Stede Bonnet, while discovering the existence of the Assassins who are also hunting for the Observatory.

This is without a doubt the same effectively simple and excellent story you remember, along with the removal of the modern-day segments that Ubisoft understood simply don't contribute to the plot in any way. In their place, the game gets new missions called Rifts, which are a sort of What If situations that examine how things would have looked different for Edward and the characters around him. These are mainly missions that require some thinking and some parkour, and although they don't add any volume to the modern-day story, I still enjoyed doing them mainly because of the dialogue included in them.

Joining these missions is more new content for the main story, in the form of missions that expand on the stories of Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. What amounted to a few lines of text in the original game has become full missions with new scenes that show exactly how much Ubisoft knows these characters are important to and beloved by fans. These are welcome additions to an already excellent story, and for fans of the original game, it simply hits all the right spots.

The Same Blade in a New Outfit

The gameplay is probably what received the most extreme makeover here after the graphics, and this is where I can completely understand people who are less charmed by it. The combat system at first glance will immediately remind you of the series' RPG games, when it's built mainly from combos you can perform with Edward's swords, some "abilities" available to you like kicking an enemy or knocking them to the floor, tools he can use like the iconic pistols, the Rope Dart, smoke bombs, etc. Seeing this combat system dressed onto a game remembered in a certain way was very strange for me at first, but as I continued playing I understood that this is an evolution the series had to take. Returning to how combat looked in Assassin's Creed 3, which evolved with the fourth game and the multitude of spin-off games created from it, simply wouldn't work with today's players. The system we get in the remake is more challenging, with many more options and works more smoothly. People who didn't like the combat in the RPG games, I completely understand your reservations, but I promise this is a step in the direction the game had to take.

Along with the combat system comes the logical change to the stealth system. Ladies and gentlemen - Edward can crouch! No, not just in bushes, at any given moment you can bend your knees and sneak to your heart's content. True, this is something the series introduced a long time ago, but it will always be funny to see Ubisoft emphasize once again that the assassins we play as can crouch to make themselves harder to detect. This is an addition that was obviously going to happen and one that makes the stealth experience much smoother and more enjoyable, which is also true for the game's parkour which now allows free jumps, faster animations, and climbing that again - simply feels more fluid.

One thing that isn't really clear to me, and this is something the game's developers talked about in interviews, is the very noticeable lack of variety in Edward's weapons. His main weapons were and will always remain the dual swords, but the remake simply removed the ability to pick up enemy weapons like axes or single swords, completely removed the ability to fight with Hidden Blades, which are now only available for silent kills or finishing animations during combat, and doesn't give us the option to decide if we want to fight with fists and knock out enemies instead of killing them. In interviews with several content creators and journalists, the developers were asked if this is included in the game, and the answers were always quite evasive with the claim that they listen to player feedback and they're known for continuing to support the series' games for a period even after they launch them. This makes me think that these elements will arrive at some point to the combat system, similar to the parkour system upgrade that Shadows and Mirage received after launch, but it just makes me wonder why it wasn't there from the start.

In terms of equipment you can find for Edward, here too the series' RPG systems seep in, as Edward will be able to find a variety of swords, pistols, outfits, and charms that give various bonuses. Higher-ranked swords will deal more damage and allow you to finish more enemies in sequence through a chain of Takedowns, pistols are measured mainly by the distance at which you can fire them, and the outfits (which look simply stunning, every one of them) don't come with built-in bonuses like in the original game, and for that you can choose between the different charms, which gives you more freedom in terms of your playstyle.

King of the Seven Seas

Naval combat was always Black Flag's signature feature, and Resynced deepens it and turned the addictive gameplay loop from the original game into something even more addictive. I admit that the moment I had the opportunity, I started roaming around the map and fought every ship that stood in my way because I simply enjoyed everything this system gave me so much. After you neutralize a ship you can board it in order to bring the crew's morale down to zero to make them surrender, which will allow you to choose whether you want to use the ship to repair your own ship, recruit it to send it on missions through the Kenway Fleet system, or loot the captain's safe for additional plunder. All the loot you get from the ship will amount in the end, besides money, to raw materials you can use to upgrade your ship, and as you progress in the game you'll get access to weapons like mortars, fire rounds, explosive barrels, etc.

The remake adds new missions called Officer Quests, which allow you to recruit key characters to your ship that after completing them, will give you new abilities. For example, instead of using Brace normally, which reduces the amount of damage your ship takes from attacks, recruiting a certain officer will upgrade this ability, and now if you time it just before the attack lands on you, you'll take significantly less damage, somewhat like a Parry system that works with your ship. You can be sure that just the naval combat system alone can provide you with several dozen hours of content without getting bored of it, thanks to the enormous amount of side activities available in the game like plundering supply convoys, hunting sea animals with harpoons like sharks and whales, underwater diving in search of treasure, and of course, the biggest fear of every original game player - legendary ships, boss battles at sea with ships you don't even have a chance of fighting against if your ship isn't almost fully upgraded.

The New Coat of Paint

Finally, I'll touch on the massive graphical upgrade this remake brings with it. There's not a shadow of a doubt that this is probably the most beautiful game in the series, and I'm definitely not saying that because of nostalgia goggles. The Caribbean islands have never looked so beautiful, with every detail from the original game getting an absolutely incredible makeover here. Every island, fort, character, and animal look simply excellent, and I have nothing to say except praise Ubisoft for the truly excellent work done here graphically. It's simply a pleasure to see Edward, or any other character for that matter, with such high detail. I played the game on a base PlayStation 5 and throughout my 40 hours of gameplay I experienced maybe one frame drop. The rest of the time it was a smooth and simply perfect experience, but then came the bugs.

The game in its current state suffers from a very large amount of bugs that need to be fixed as quickly as possible. I encountered many problems and technical glitches, starting with cases where I boarded an enemy ship to take control of it, but the moment I stepped on it, it exploded and sank, which killed me and made me start the battle from the beginning. In other cases I got stuck on a rock on one of the islands only to discover I was being swallowed into it, which forced me to load a previous save (thank god for the game's frequent auto-save). Slightly more minor issues include enemies who managed to see me through walls, walls and trees that I could definitely climb that simply didn't let me do it, and enemies who were quite close to me that simply weren't loaded by the engine properly, which led to models standing in T-Pose when they're not really rendering properly. This was actually amusing, and was fixed the moment I got closer to them, and I'm sure these things will be sorted out in patches with the launch, but these are still issues I need to address because they interfered with my gaming experience.

The Bottom Line

Black Flag Resynced works because it treats its source material as something worth genuinely improving, not just repackaging. The naval combat is deeper and more tactical than it's ever been, stealth finally sheds the one mechanic players complained about for over a decade, exploration flows without interruption, and the new story beats give Edward's arc room it never had. As a rebuild of one of the genre's most beloved pirate adventures, this is close to a model example of how it should be done. Golden Age of Piracy fans have their game back, sharper than they remember it.