TL;DR: A good remake, but it is missing many of the small details that made the original feel so polished.
It is the pirate adventure we all know and love from 2013, rebuilt with a modern touch. It also has a proper Assassin-versus-Templar storyline, something the newer titles rarely seem interested in anymore. When they do include it, it often feels shoehorned in merely to justify calling the game Assassin’s Creed.
Visually speaking, this is one of the best-looking games I have ever played. If you have never caught yourself inspecting every little polygon on a blade of grass, this game may change that.
The naval combat feels incredible, and it is easy to lose yourself sailing around the Caribbean for hours. Even if this were the entire game, I would still be satisfied because of how polished it feels. There is also plenty to do: raid other ships, harpoon marine life, which sounds horrible but is strangely great in this game, and dive beneath the ocean in search of treasure.
The sword combat has been reworked to feel more like the RPG-style titles released in recent years. While it is certainly more satisfying, one of the original game’s biggest combat problems remains. You can parry a single attack and then instantly kill most enemies using the takedown prompt. This makes the combat extremely easy to cheese. You can technically ignore the prompt, but the game constantly encourages you to use it, which makes deliberately avoiding it feel unnatural.
Tailing missions no longer fail instantly when you are spotted, which addresses one of the biggest frustrations in the original. This is easily one of the best changes they could have made. The modern-day intermissions have also been removed. Overall, it is clear that a great deal of consideration went into deciding which parts of the original needed updating.
However, what this version lacks is the attention to seemingly insignificant details that helped make the original feel so alive. For example, when Edward jumped through a narrow gap between branches, he would pull his arms back to avoid hitting them. In the remake, his arms can simply clip through them if you move quickly enough. When running through shallow water in the original, his animation would change into an awkward, laboured run because the water hindered his movement. That animation is now gone.
To recreate such a large world within a limited development timeframe, it seems the developers had to sacrifice some of the smaller details that gave the original so much character.
Overall, this is a solid remake that I would recommend to both new and returning Assassin’s Creed fans. It is visually stunning, technically impressive, and improves several of the original game’s most frustrating elements, even if some of its finer details were lost in the process.
On a technical side note:
The DLSS, FSR, and frame generation implementations are also excellent. They allow weaker hardware to deliver these gorgeous visuals at an impressive level of performance, with effectively no meaningful sacrifice to image quality. On a technical level, this is a remarkable achievement, and I hope future games follow its example.
Now I am secretly hoping the first game receives the same treatment.
