Assassin’s Creed® IV Black Flag™

Controversial opinion time: I've never liked any of the Assassin's Creed games, for one reason or another. The only one I like is this one, Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag, and that's largely because this game is probably the least Assassin's Creed of all the Assassin's Creed. A swash-buckling adventure featuring ship battles, treasure, and the unmistakable air of rum and scurvy, AC4 is the pirate game that beats all other pirate games. You play as the assassin Edward Kenway, or rather the false assassin. Edward loots the corpse of an assassin and uses his identity to sneak into the war between Assassins and Templars to try and make a profit, along the way becoming embroiled in some of the 18th centuries most nortorious historical moments of piracy. You naturally encounter some of history's greatest pirates, like Jack Rackham, Ben Hornigold, James Kidd, and Blackbeard, taking part in the moments that made them historical legends. While many AC protagonists have left me cold, Edward carries the edge of an anti-hero, interested in nothing but becoming rich to prove his worth back home. While this makes his arc somewhat predictable, it also makes it heartbreaking as we watch and experience all that was truly valuable in his life crumble away as love ones succumb to the ravages of time. Oh, and occassionally you go to the present (i.e. Ubisoft in 2013) to hack computers or something. In game, you play dual parts. One being the typical assassins gameplay on land, and the other embracing the high seas in ship combat. The Assassin's work comes across as totering and in some cases cluncky, while the ship combat makes the game come to life in all the best ways. By AC4, the Assassin's gameplay was attempting to streamline itself, but this alleviated many problems I had, but also didn't fix many of the core issues I had with Assassin's Creed as a whole. What better way to address my problems than to simply add an entirely new, and in my opinion better, core gameplay. The assassin's gameplay more-or-less carries over from AC3, with a few changes to accomodate more jungle-y environments, and adding some new tools that make stealth nearly trivial. A late game tool, the blow pipe, allows you to put an entire army to sleep with knockout darts, or turn foes against each other with Beserk darts. Otherwise, you sneak through crowds to assassinate targets, setting them up for a coup de grace when you leap on them from up high, or knife them from the crowds... or more likely try to be sneaky, get spotted from a kilometer away by guards, and have to fight every single soldier on the map to your taget. Meanwhile, the parkour system has Edward shifting between smooth, linear free climbing that has him effortlessly navigating towns and jungles like a pro, or becoming confused and clingy to walls at the worst times, unable to so much as budge even when you're three feet off the ground. You shout at Edward to JUMP ALREADY, and he ends up leaping in the opposite direction to his doom, the game admonishing you like it was your fault. The ship combat is by far the superior experience. Sailing your vessel and positioning it just right to the enemy frigate to let loose a barrage of cannon fire while battling the waves and bracing for enemy retaliation carries an exhiliration I never felt on land with my wrist-blades. Explosions across the enemy hull ring out as you readjust and move into ramming speed, breaking the wood on the enemy vessel with a satisfying crack. You break the vessel's sails, but the fun isn't over as now you get to decide between simply sinking the ship, or boarding it, instigating combat between your crew and the enemy, ensuring you get more loot you can use to buy weapons and upgrades for your ship: the Jackdaw. Granted, you still have to engage in somewhat sluggish and, in my opinion, unnecessairly complicated combat with enemy grunts. Not that the combat is hard to learn or has too many mechanics to remember, it just has too many mechanics included when you can literally just block and kill with every grunt you fight. Except the big guys and commandos, in which case you guard-break them and then kill. Not particularly deep, but the game insists on also allowing you to damage enemies, throw them, or use one of a dozen gadgets to execute them. Consider this game the cheaper, less graphically impressive, but generally purer AC4 experience to the Resynced version. It has a few things the remake doesn't, not as technically advanced, but still just as fun and exciting to play. It's a high sea adventure for the ages.