Then Assassin’s Creed III brought us a more turgid, po-faced dirge than the first game, its only saving graces being that it killed off the series’ phenomenally boring modern-day protagonist Desmond Miles, and featured one neat mission in which you took part in a big naval battle.
In response to the last game’s reception, for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag , Ubisoft has taken that one naval mission, put a pirate hat on its head and made it into an entire game. And it turns out this was an absolutely superb idea, because Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is the best game of the series, and arguably the best game of 2013.
Black Flag casts you as Edward Kenway, a roguish Welsh privateer with two motivations in life – freedom and money – and he’s perfectly willing to sacrifice love and lives in the pursuit of both. Unlike the other protagonists in the series, Kenway becomes involved with the Assassins by accident, killing one of their members and stealing their robes.
Kenway then responds to the Assassins’ attempts to recruit him with a childish ‘nuh-uhhh!’ and spends much of the game’s story exploiting the Assassins, their enemies the Templars, and his own fellow pirates to make himself as rich as possible.
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There’s a streak of unpleasantness to Kenway, but he’s a pirate after all. What’s more, Kenway’s cynical humour and rebellious nature make for a delightful change in tone; the series has historically taken its own rather silly story far too seriously. Kenway’s attitude also makes sense when you shirk the story missions to plunder trade ships or explore the Caribbean. And you’ll do both of these because they’re enormous fun and necessary for progress.
Instead of the usual large cities with small interconnecting areas, Ubisoft has created a sizeable chunk of the Caribbean to explore and exploit, with small, numerous areas scattered amid a beautiful blue ocean. Your ship, the Jackdaw, is your main tool for this task. Sailing is as straightforward as driving a car that handles more like a truck.
That is, if trucks came with 16 cannons abreast and randomly sang sea shanties at you. Wind has no effect on your ability to turn and travel, and the ship has various speeds, which are set by whether you go half-sail or full-sail.
While it isn’t remotely authentic in terms of simulation, the experience feels real enough. The sea dramatically bobs and swells, meaning the ship climbs up and slides down enormous waves like an alpine skier. Blustering squalls regularly threaten to capsize the ship, and occasionally thunder storms gather overhead.
These transform the ocean into a frothing, rain-lashed maelstrom, which is beset by terrifying rogue waves that must be taken head-on in order for the ship to survive. There are also towering, unpredictable waterspouts that need to be avoided at all costs.
Such storms are random, so they might occur when you’re in the middle of fighting a Spanish Frigate. Ship-to-ship combat is undoubtedly the game’s highlight, requiring you to first batter the opposing vessel with volleys of cannonfire, and flaming heavy shot from the ship’s broadside, chain shot from the bow or explosive barrels from the stern.
Once the opposing ship is disabled, you can sail alongside it and reel it in for boarding, which involves killing a set number of enemy sailors using a combination of bloody swashbuckling, quick-fire pistol shots and dramatic assassination leaps from the ship’s masts.
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Yet the smartest aspect of the ship combat is that, unlike in previous AC games, it isn’t frivolous. It has a purpose. The Jackdaw starts out as a fairly weak vessel, only able to take on small schooners. In order to progress through the story and take on the bigger ships that patrol the furthest reaches of the map, you must upgrade the Jackdaw’s capabilities.
But doing so is expensive, and requires certain materials that can only be found on other ships. As such, exploring and playing with the game’s core systems is actively encouraged, a hallmark of successful open-world design.
There are plenty of other ways in which Black Flag evokes this motivational approach. Templar Hunt missions are like previous Assassination contracts with their own little stories, but they’re more involved and completing all the missions will unlock a special suit of armour. Meanwhile, the Caribbean is guarded by fearsome naval forts, which must be besieged in order to make the seas safe for pirating, and to reveal hidden locations on the map.
Diving underwater to explore shipwrecks can help you retrieve plans for unique ship upgrades, while hunting animals is necessary to craft armour and weapon upgrades for Kenway. Almost every aspect of Black Flag has a meaning behind it, and a tangible reason for you to do it. It’s very clever.
Of course, it isn’t perfect. It’s still Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag , which means tasks such as climbing and combat can be a little unpredictable thanks to the contextual control system. Some effort has been made to redress the more pressing issues. For example, a stealthy approach can now be achieved by hiding in dense foliage, luring guards into bushes and crop fields in order to dispatch them quietly. It works after a fashion, but it’s a little like using a wrecking ball to crack an egg. What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned Crouch button, Ubisoft?
The Animus sections have been stripped back further too, but they’re still a problem. Now, instead of controlling Desmond, you’re using the ancestral memories taken from his dead brain to build a computer game based around Edward Kenway’s life, which in turn is being used by the Templars as a ‘cunning ruse’ to find the location of the Observatory.
It’s one tinfoil hat short of being a Dan Brown plot, and to be pulled out of such a thrilling historical fiction to have this dribbling nonsense paraded in front of you never ceases to take the wind out of your sails, in both a literal and figurative sense.
That said, the Animus sections are short, and easily forgiven when the game places you back at the helm of the Jackdaw, with the setting sun glittering off the deep blue ocean, and the silhouette of a Spanish Frigate ripe for plundering in the distance. There really is nothing quite like Black Flag, despite the Assassin’s Creed games that preceded it, and that makes it a remarkable achievement.
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