Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

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IamLEAM1983
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Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

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I remember sitting down with a friend for my first shot of Assassin's Creed III, a year ago. We played through various snippets of the game, following his save files in a semi-random order. That didn't so much give me a vertical slice of Raton'ake'ton's time spent as one of the Assassins as it introduced me to various bits and pieces of Ubisoft's fairly mad and spirited take on the foundations of American history. Having Paul Revere on my horse was an interesting event in my life as a gamer, and helping Benjamin Franklin recover his lost almanac page after page was also a fairly weird and oddly gratifying experience.

Not that it stopped the game from feeling disjointed in the end, but there were enough stand-out bits for me to derive some enjoyment out of the whole package. The ending was and still is a messy and hastily assembled piece of crap – but there was one particular element that stood out from the rest.

Early in the game, you're made to sail from Boston to Martha's Vinyard. I figured we were just going to fast-travel our way across the East Coast but nope, the game unexpectedly throws a full-fledged naval exploration and combat simulator at you, complete with shanties, salty crewmen, buried treasure and whispers of ancient piratical misdeeds.

I was hooked. Not on AC3 proper, but on the ship parts. I wanted more.

One year later – lo and behold! Assassin's Creed 4 : Black Flag unfurls its sails and throws you into the Golden Age of Piracy, amidst the azure waters of the Caribbean.

I've been playing this for two days and every time I boot this up, I mentally regress to my childhood obsession with Treasure Island and my years spent with you guys, sailing across the Etherium. It's awesome. Utterly and simply awesome.

What really helps is the fact that Ubisoft has done its homework and taken notes based on the previous chapter's reception. The opening hour is blessedly short and the game wastes no time in giving you a ship, along with the opportunity to take off and chart the hundreds of islands the game's almost load times-free world map contains. It contains everything that makes an Assassin's Creed title a, well, Assassin's Creed title, from wrist blades and expansive hoods to Templar conspiracies and climbing up tall buildings to reveal sections of the map – but all of it is not so much optional as it's stuff you can disregard for as long as you want. A bit like Skyrim, Black Flag is happy to give you the archipelago and to offer you plenty of reasons to ignore its story missions and side activities. You're entirely free to just pick a heading and see what's over there.

Then, there's the notion that pirate-themed adventures are generally light-hearted in their tone. Gone is Connor Kenway's dour countenance and utter obsession with avenging his Mohawk brethren, replaced with grandfather Edward Kenway's free-spirited nature and decidedly self-interested goals. There's a bit of Jack Sparrow in there, in the sense that the Welsh expat is only ever concerned with making a name for himself amongst gentlemen of fortune and returning to Cornwall with his pockets filled. His story starts in Wales around the 1690's, at which point he tells his loved one that he intends to leave for two years, and then transitions to a beach located a few hundred miles away from Havana, where Ed is forced to square off against the Assassin turncoat Duncan Walpole. Street smarts and sea legs apparently mirroring the Hashashin's anachronistic Parkour skills, Ed kills Duncan with relatively little effort and, while rifling his pockets, realizes that a sizable prize is waiting for him in Havana.

It so happens that the Templars intend to use the era's shifting political tensions to forge a monarchy-free society in the South Atlantic, with the help of a device called the Observatory. Left behind by the series' ubiquitous “Those Who Came Before”, the Observatory is half-orrey and half-GPS, capable of following the goings-on of every single human on the planet. The conspirators, borne out of Spain, France, the Netherlands and England alike, believe that controlling the actions of everyone on the planet would usher in a period of peace and prosperity. The Assassins, obviously, believe in freedom, and seek to oppose the Templars.

The catch is Edward is neither one or the other. He steals the clothes of a dead turncoat Assassin who was on the verge of defecting to the Templars, and more or less stumbles along Duncan Walpole's role until it lands him on the former knights' wrong side. Surviving and escaping his would-be ruinous trip to Seville as a slave, he incites a mutiny aboard the Spanish brig he was stuck on and uses the awful weather the fleet is stuck in as a pretext to free all the other slaves. In short order, Edward rechristens the brig as the Jackdaw and takes a former Trinidadian slave as first mate. For much of the game, his only concern is racking up cash, gaining some reknown, and sailing with his former privateering buds. Unbeknownst to him, most of his former buds are future historical pirates. You'll meet Edward Teach a few years before he grows a (black) beard and starts sticking lenghts of cannon twine under his hat as well as James Kidd and Anne Bonny (well before she'd take to cross-dressing to captain her own ship in impunity). The game eventually becomes a pretty gleeful pirate-themed's Who's Who, as Black Flag is more than happy to name-drop pirates from other corners of the globe or to stick Edward in the company of those who shaped the Caribbean and the coast of Florida.

The Jackdaw is entirely customizable and so is your eventually earned pirate's hideout, there's about six bottles of rum per camera change in the game, taverns are adequately furnished with Flamenco or United Kingdom trad music and your time spent at sea can be marked with your crew belting out a wide variety of sea shanties – all of which offer lyrics to read in the game's options.

Yeah. You do buckle quite a few swashes and slide down sails and shrouds with a dagger between your teeth à la Captain Blood. The only way Blag Flag could be more of a pirate game by default would be if it were being released by a Scene group in Torrent format. That's not the main draw, though. The main draw is the naval combat. How is it, then?

It's awesome.

The control scheme mirrors what AC3 had to offer, seeing as the Forward key functions as a gear shift of sorts. The Backward key slows you down by the same increments, and leaving the helm is as simple as holding the Use/Interact key. With your sails completely furled or folded, the Jackdaw turns on a dime but can't move forward or backwards. Bring the smaller sails down first and you start to creep along – which is handy if you're trying to negotiate reefs. Another key press adds the mainsail, and a third one deploys all sails, while also pulling the camera back. The game then offers you a nicely cinematic view of your brig as it slices through clear blue waters. Depending on what you do while driving the Jackdaw as if it were a slightly unwieldy truck, you'll hear Edward and Adewale belt orders that actually do make sense in relation to your speed or what you're trying to do. The Space key acts as a command for your crew to brace themselves; seeing as you can't exactly brake, while at sea... Bracing allows you to potentially avoid the loss of your crewmembers and to increase your chances of surviving solid cannon volleys or ramming attacks. Firing cannons is as simple as turning your camera portside or aft, holding the right mouse button to see the projected arc of your shots, and then pressing the left mouse button. Depending on where you're looking, different weapons will fire. The only exception is the mortar array, which requires you to look through your spyglass beforehand.

There's a catch, though : the more crew you have, the faster and more responsive the Jackdaw is. On land, you'll regularly have the option to come to the defense of pirates stuck fending off Colonial authorities. At sea, defeating an enemy vessel usually earns you one or two extra crewmembers. You'll also find makeshift rafts or men stuck floating aimlessly at sea. Picking them up is as simple as passing by them at a reasonably slow speed and pressing the appropriate button. You're also better off using a defeated ship as repair materials, seeing as adequately boarding a ship earns you its total bounty. Ramming them or otherwise destroying them only earns you half of what they carried – and impacts your crew's morale.

Generally speaking, it feels as though Assassin's Creed and Sid Meier's Pirates! made sweet, sweet love and contributed the best of one another to the offspring that resulted. As long as you play it like an open-world title, Black Flag might as well be a next-gen Firaxis project. You can forget all about Templars and Assassins if you'd care to, and focus entirely on the new mechanics it has inherited from other titles. It has FarCry 3's crafting system and Mayan puzzles to solve, there's buried treasure to find and a fleet to build – to the point where Black Flag eventually becomes a bit of a Tycoon game, as you manage piratical routes around the world and more or less build up an empire of scoundrels pooling their ill-gotten gains in your coffers. Once Blackbeard goes Heisenberg and really does start thinking “Empire”, you earn the option to keep the ships you board and to assign one of your crewmembers as its new captain. The Fleet gameplay also partially takes place online, as your ships can and probably will run into rival pirate empires. The battles aren't exactly cinematic and feel like a duel of Magic : The Gathering cards, but seeing your routes shift and warp on a map of the world is fairly satisfying.

The cons are fairly small, but easily noticeable in a game this size. The Parkour engine is still as finicky as ever, Edward stubbornly sticking to ledges when you intended to run past them. The camera has trouble handling big mêlée brawls, seeing as one of the goons will always be hidden by some bit of level geometry or some pretty fixture. The game comes complete with an Arkham-esque counter system that should technically makes fights a breeze – but it's kinda hard to kick ass in a tavern brawl when you can't see the enemy's “I'm going to attack you now OK get ready” red indicator. The game includes honestly fun diving-bell segments that involve looking for sunken treasure while avoiding sharks and eels – Jesus, if this isn't terrifying, what with your oxygen meter steadily decreasing – but the underwater controls are a bit sluggish, making you lose precious seconds. There's nothing quite as frustrating as dying just strokes away from the diving bell.

Otherwise – there is a modern-day segment, but it feels almost optional. Playing as, well, yourself, you're Abstergo Entertainment's new Memory Research hire, and are tasked with combing through the life and times of Edward Kenway as part of the production process of an Animus-based entertainment product. Think something along the lines of a self-insert pirate movie where the morally objectionable elements of History have been sanitized. In a bizarrely meta turn of events, Abstergo Entertainment is located in Montreal and is published by – you guessed it – Ubisoft. The real world has essentially merged with the series' events, right down to these rare first-person segments putting you in a gleaming office complex that's filled to the brim with subtitled French-Canadians like myself. Eventually, you're pulled out of your routine office duties and are forced to play the part of the office's spy, hacking keypads and reading documents on the workstations of your fellow researchers. Faster than you can say Conspiracy, you realize that there's an Assassin mole, hidden somewhere in the employee roster.

On the flipside, I have to hand it to Ubisoft's optimization and QA teams. My rig is now resolutely in the sub-par category, and I can still play the game without a hitch. I can't stare at the prettiest of high-def textures, the shaders are set on Low and I had to lower the resolution a tad – but the result feels resolutely current-gen. Couple that with the astounding art direction at play, and you earn a title that's exceedingly pretty even at its lowest settings. A quick jaunt over to the System Requirements Lab will show you that the game's minimum settings officially require a quad-core processor and the reccomended ones steer towards the newer generations of i7 cores, but I can safely say this runs just fine on my six year-old dual-core setup. The game is very much set to run on the bleeding-edge range of next-gen hardware (which does make sense) but it inexplicably tolerates even ancient beasts like mine. I do experience the occasional framerate dip and momentary freeze on land, but I haven't run into anything that would seriously put my enjoyment of the game in peril. Half of the niggles I experienced have been pointed to the game being in need of a patch, as the lip-synch and foley can sometimes be disturbingly out of touch with what's going on onscreen. A bit of research showed me that my configuration isn't to blame.

Of course, if you can't run this on your rig, pick it up for one of the last-gen consoles. It's entirely worth it. You might catch yourself humming some sea shanties, before the end...
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