The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag + DLC

Context

Assassin's Creed 3 came out in 2012, and just one year later we see another installment in the series churned out with Assassin's Creed 4, Black Flag.

At this point, my reminiscing about playing through the series the first time around somewhat blurs together, and I stop losing track of how excited I was or not for the next game to come out. That being said, I do distinctly remember playing the first missions of Black Flag when it first came out, and some of the big differences in this installment, most notably locations being broken down it much more numerous but smaller areas.

However, I don't remember the ending of Black Flag, which is the first game in the series where this is the case. That doesn't bode well for playing this through again, but let's see how we go second time around

The Setting

Black Flag is set during the time of the height of piracy, and major historical pirates are present in the game, the highlight of which is Blackbeard himself! Our protagonist this time around is a chap called Edward Kenway, and it is somewhat of an Enigma with how how he fits in the Assassin-Templar war.

The eagle eyed (or brained) among us will note that Edward shares the same surname as Haytham, and although it is not remarked on in the game very early on, I believe the build-up to the release of the game mentions that he is Haytham's father.

So that explains how Haytham ends up mixed up with the Assassins and Templars, but not Edward.

His introduction into this world of Assassins and Templars is by sailing with an Assassin turning defector. After the ship ends up destroyed by a storm, this Assassin and Edward end up being the only survivors (conveniently) and Edward ends up taking the Assassin down out of a sense of injustice. Edward then begins impersonating the Assassin to complete his delivery to the templars and then get some pay for his troubles. Thus we begin to discover the main thrust of Edward's character, which is that he is largely driven by opportunity and profit.

However, prior to the start of the game, Edward is completely unaware of Assassins and Templars, it's not explained that he has any ancestry in relation to them, and yet he has the full range of abilities of an assassin, can parkour around the place and air assassinate enemies like a fully trained assassin, even though he's only a pirate. It also remains unexplained how, for the most part, his developing relationship with the Assassin's is mostly one of uneasy truce, and yet he ends up doing a bunch of missions for them anyway.

The story of Edward himself, and the development of his character, is actually quite good, but his association with the greater story of the series is convenient to say the least, and I have to say I don't like that. As a sneak preview ahead, the main character in the next game is fully trained by the Assassin Order, so Edward's abilities here are a complete aberation. It doesn't make any sense. This pathway of contrived convenience for the sake of the game continues elsewhere as well.

Regarding the location, Black Flag is set around the Caribbean seas and associated port towns of the time. However, with the design of the locations, really you could be anywhere. You get the sense that you are somewhere around the Americas in colonial times, but other than that it doesn't really matter. The larger towns are a blur of sameness, the small port towns and settlements all basically look the same, and the million random little island are literally copy and paste designs to a great extent.

The Gameplay

The first hour of play is pretty good fun and brings a new direction and feeling from previous installments. You begin chasing down a rogue Assassin on a relatively small and undeveloped island. There is only sand, palm trees, basic wooden platforms lashed together with rope, rock formations to climb up and the like. Not a building in sight to parkour up as you chase down your target. There is a lot of island wilderness in Black Flag, I guess this is not a completely new development in the series with the Frontier in AC3, but with the island and seafaring setting, it feels new and means the start of Black Flag is quite exciting.

It's not long before you being enjoying what is, by far, the biggest new feature of Black Flag; the Naval gameplay. The seafaring aspects of the game are hugely expanded from AC3. Seafaring is no longer a strict mission-based affair and is now central to the open-world gameplay. Moving from one location to the next is originally only possible by sailing to where you want to go, although you unlock fast travel by synchronising the viewpoints in each place.

Also, the seafaring gameplay mechanics are hugely expanded. AC3 saw the use of the side cannons and swivel guns, but now we also have mortars, a tremendously powerful weapon, and battering rams. In addition to the new ship weapons, you can now also incapacitate ships and board them, which serves to bring additional options like using boarded ships to repair your own, to reduce your wanted level (somehow, no idea how that works) or to add to your own fleet for the sub-game.

Naval battles: Tremendous fun for the first 50 times.

To begin with, all these new gameplay mechanics are tremendous fun. And it is very fulfilling to go through the process of upgrading your ship and taking on bigger enemies, to get to the point where you essentially rule the seas.

The problem is, as seafaring is around 50% of the game, and I've essentially explained the most of what there is to it, you end up doing the same thing over and over again well past the point of doing it for fun.

Boarding ships gives up twice the cargo then destroying them and collecting the flotsam. As you need this cargo to upgrade your own ship, expect to be boarding ships ad nauseum. In the middle of a major battle with multiple ships but want that booty? Have no worry, the battle will conveniently go on pause whilst you board the one ship to pillage it.

By the end of the game, I reckon I must have boarded ships at least a hundred times. It wears thin, to say the least.

There's another new type of gameplay in Black Flag as well, which are the underwater areas. Once you get a particular upgrade to your ship, you can investigate and swim around underwater wrecks for yet more collectibles. There's actually a lot of original design throughout these levels and no one location is really much like another. However, these sections of the game have a fundamental flaw. A lot of locations have you dodging sharks and, in principle, you can do so by keeping out of line of site or keeping within clumps of reeds on the sea bed. The problem is that you move very slow and the sharks quite fast. Also, unless you can keep them on screen, which generally you can't because they'll be above you and you'll be on the sea bed, you have no idea which way they facing, which doesn't really matter much anyway because they'll have turned around long before you get to the next hiding spot. In the end, the sharks become largely unavoidable, and you'll have several chomps taken out of you as you move around. The best solution is to use the air barrels for health as well as air rather than worry too much about avoiding the unavoidable. Great stealth mechanics, these are not!

The excessive tedium applies to the collectibles as well. There is something like 80 collectibles in "uncharted" locations, of which the vast majority are tiny strips of sand above the waterline or a tiny strip of accessible land stuck on the side of a larger island. These areas have no defining qualities at all, and only exist so you can sail to them to pick up a collectible. These uncharted collectibles are the ultimate of contentless, empty gameplay. Just spend your time sailing to the next island, jumping off your ship into the sea, swimming to the island and grabbing the collectible. Then if you are lucky there'll be a moored rowing boat you can use to fast travel back to your ship, or more often then not there is no sailboat, so it's back in the sea and swim back to your ship. Literally Ubisoft added 10 hours to the game with this crap.

Visit an endless number of barren locations like this just for the collectibles

This repetition persists into the on land sections as well. The 50% of the game which is on land is much like previous installments. In AC3, we saw the parkour mechanics simplified, somewhat to the detriment of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in AC4, the parkour takes an additional turn for the worse. There is no change in the controls, but a huge change in how it works. Edward, will get stuck between different height stones on a fort wall instead of leap over the edge into the sea, this enabling him to get spotted by a guard and break the optional challenge for a mission. He'll frequently climb up the side of a building and when he gets to the edge of the roof, just stop there rather than climb up onto the roof. When running across rooftops, he'll also often opt to drop down to the lower platform you can't see, rather than make the leap to the next rooftop you can see.

The really bad parkour ends up not being too much of a big deal mainly because there's much less need for it in Black Flag. 50% of the game is at sea and even when you are at land, the locations are much smaller, tend to be relatively simple in terms of buildings. The most annoyance I had came from an early mission where you have to sneak around a fort undetected, I had to change my plotted course around the fort three times, not because of any intentional design or device in the game, but because the bad parkour means what should work, doesn't, and you have to change your course once you accept that Edward is not going to be able to go this way because he'll opt to drop down a deep crevice rather than just up on the roof right next to you.

And to top it all off, the ultra-dumb floating page collectibles returns in Black Flag as well, so you can have great fun running after those whilst Edward does the opposite of what you want him to.

Summary

From the perspective of the average Assassin's Creed fan, Black Flag seems to hold a lot of appeal for many gamers. I guess I understand why, because on the surface of it, the sea battles are a blast. However, considering Black Flag as one of the better Assassin's Creed games overlooks an incredible amount of endless tedium. The game had huge potential to add to the series, especially with the seafaring gameplay, but it all completely drowns in a sea of generic design and empty content-less filler. Boarding ships becomes tedious after the literal 100th time. Although Edward's character development is pretty good, the convenience of his full-on assassin abilities even though he's apparently never heard of them before is the height of plot convenience, Edward's abilities are unexplained.

For me, Black Flag is the worst of the series so far.

DLC1: Aveline

The Aveline DLC is a self-contained one to two hour episode where you step back into the shoes of Aveline de Grandpré, from Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation. Quite what the relevance is of Aveline popping up again in AC4 is not clear, especially as the mission she is on is at the request of Connor, from AC3. Maybe it was a left-over mission from either of those that didn't quite make it, so Ubisoft stuck it onto AC4.

The Aveline DLC returns back to the normal basics of Assassin's Creed on land, and to be honest, after the soulless repetition of Black Flag, it is a welcome change of pace. It's not particularly spectacular, completely linear and the parkour issues of Black Flag persist, but somehow the issues do not overcome the welcome change of pace, and this DLC is fun for the short time it lasts.

DLC2: Freedom Cry

The second DLC is more like a traditional DLC. Similar to AC3's DLC "The Tyranny of King Washington", Freedom Cry is more of a mini-version of Black Flag itself. It comes with its own collectibles, upgrade system and game mechanics. Unlike Tyranny, however, Freedom Cry is not linear in that you are free to explore the open-world in parallel to completing the main story missions.

Freedom Cry sees you playing Adéwalé, an ex slave who was Edward Kenway's Quartermaster in the main game. As an ex-slave during the continuation of rampant slavery in the Americas, Adéwalé's relationship with the world is obviously much different to Edward's, and it is reflected in some of the basic game mechanics.

Firstly, Adéwalé is essentially constantly under suspicion by the guards. They won't react to his mere presence, but if Adéwalé does anything against the oppression of his people in sight of guards, they will react aggressively, regardless of what that action is. Alongside this, there is obvious oppression and cruelty against slaves all the time. Adéwalé can act to free his brothers and sisters in many of these situations. Not only is one of the upgrade paths based on the number of slaves freed, but some main missions are locked off until Adéwalé has reached certain milestones.

Some "everyday" situations will result in the death of the slave if Adéwalé does not intervene, which may make the player feel compelled to act. However, these situations are commonplace, and so you get to the point where you think "Should I risk the mission I am on to kill this slave's pursuer, knowing that if I don't, the slave will die?" It's a very effective way of getting Adéwalé's situation to resonate with the player, he sees oppression and cruelty all around him, but if he takes the time to help every person, he puts at risk his efforts to combat slavery at large.

Treating humans as property. Do you intervene at the risk of your main objectives?

The plantations are transformed in the DLCs as well. For Edward, they were seen as a way to loot resources from the authorities if you can dodge the guards and find the key that opens the warehouse. If Edward was spotted, the only risk was to him. For Adéwalé, plantations are basically slave camps. Adéwalé's goal is to kill enough overseers (guards, basically) so that the slaves can break free and make a run for it. However, if Adéwalé is spotted, not only will the guards start coming after him, but they will start killing slaves out of spite as well. The overseers would kill slaves rather then see them freed.

Personally, I feel Freedom Cry does an excellent job of inviting the player to see slavery from the side of the oppressed rather than the oppressors. I find this actually quite fitting given the current day situation with the Black Lives Matter movement, the roots of which stem all the way back to slavery and how the same racism persists today.

Adéwalé manages to capture a ship, which gets crewed with slaves he has freed, thus continuing the sea-faring elements of Black Flag. However, in Freedom Cry, much more time is spend on land than at sea, which eliminates a lot of the repetition of the seafaring parts as well.

In terms of size, Freedom Cry's map is a mini-version of one of Black Flag's hub maps, maybe a quarter to one third of the size. There are around 13 main missions, an upgrade and collectibles system just for the DLC and all new everyday events. It's a well considered, insightful and enjoyable add-on for Black Flag, completely unlike the relative stale King Washington add-on for AC3.

Review Score

I feel like this will be my first controversial score, because so many folks seem to have Black Flag as one of their favourites in the system. For me, the foundation of what could have been a great Assassin's Creed game are there, but it has been completely ruined by piling repetition upon repetition on the basic gameplay. The main missions and Edward's character development are fairly well written, and Edward's role is quite a major one as far as the overall series goes. However, outside of the main story, everything you do in this game, you'll end up doing again and again and again until by the end of it, the initial fun of the first few hours and relatively little time spent on the main missions will get swallowed up by the hours and hour of repetition you'll face if you try and 100% complete the game.

For me, Black Flag is not only not a highlight of the series, it's actually the worst game in the series so far for me. I have fonder memories of playing and finishing Liberation then I do Black Flag.

It's a 2 out of 5, the worst score so far.