For a game that has been charting tumultuous waters complicated by leaks and delays, it’s convenient that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has finally reached port, and it’s in a particularly sweet spot in this year’s release calendar — about four and a bit months out from the world-eating GTA 6. For those of us who buy only a handful of full-price games each year, the prospect is undeniably tantalising. Here’s a content-rich remake of one of the most beloved open-world games of all time, and better yet, a particularly well-written Assassin’s Creed game grounded in a singular historical setting that you explore through pioneering naval combat and world-design systems.
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It’s easy to forget when you’re playing it in this beautified state that Edward Kenway’s adventure is so old that it came out on the Wii U. Its Goldilocks position in the seventh-generation of consoles allows Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced to capture the nostalgia of older players seeking something comforting, while providing respite from the overwhelming, bloated nature of the contemporary RPG-ified Assassin’s Creed games, without too much 2010s jank to deal with as a consequence.
I’ve played it for 40 hours so far, and to me, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced feels like a ‘heritage’ open-world game. It’s underpinned by a well-paced, Caribbean-trotting story which takes about ten hours to complete and features plenty of thrilling set pieces. But crucially, when you approach the end, there’s enough friction baked into its old systems that you feel a strong desire to continue wrapping things up in the aftermath.
Black Flag Resynced pulls an old open-world design trick where you don’t feel like an unstoppable monster when the credits roll. You might have a hideout, a little fleet, a half-upgraded ship and a couple of new tools, but you’re still just a pirate larping as an assassin at the whims of the armadas of Imperial Britain and Spain. So it’s in your interest to liberate those forts, hunt rare animals, check out all the treasure-laden coves, and dive the underwater shipwrecks for upgrade plans. Being able to rattle off four side activities like that, all quite varied and interesting to engage with, speaks to the remarkably solid base Ubisoft Singapore is working with here.
And yet, there have been a bunch of new additions to Black Flag’s initial content suite. A trio of new Officers have been brought to the game, their questlines providing important upgrades for the Jackdaw and some isolated, emotion-laden stories to boot. The officer quests also feed into a brand-new Epilogue, called A World Without Gold, which extends the game’s original bittersweet ending into a new high-stakes conclusion with a hearty moral core.
My favourite thing about Resynced’s new additions is that they are anchored in fuelling the player’s desire to seek out secrets. Now you can free-dive anywhere on the map, with new hideouts and locations to loot for vanity items and equipment. Lingering character stories that deserved a touch more narrative runway have been added in too, and, remarkably, it doesn’t feel like saccharine fan service. By honing the scope to only a few new questlines and optional activities, it seems that Ubisoft has managed to stop short of over-egging its pudding.
Resynced’s mechanical modernisations are impressive too. The naval combat in this game has been refined carefully — it’s real heart-in-your-mouth stuff when you first face off against a Man-O-War, but the quality-of-life additions only up the ante further. Manual aim Swivel Guns, the all-new Ram Dash and the Perfect Brace are small features, but they add a lot to the dance of offence and defence on the water. Most importantly though, the Jackdaw feels like a big, lumbering beast that is faithfully awkward to manoeuvre, and as a consequence, it’s so rewarding when you manage to thread the needle through a convoy or escape pirate hunters unharmed.
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On the ground, it’s a bit more spotty, but Ubisoft Singapore has made decent strides in improving Black Flag’s Terra Firma gameplay. It feels amazing to ride the momentum of boarding an enemy ship when all the motions are connecting correctly, but you’ll still die in frustration when the game sends you the wrong way from a perch, or you dismount a tower to your doom when you just wanted to drop to a ledge.
Elsewhere, the combat has been significantly overhauled to focus on parries and now includes enders, new enemy types, and most importantly, a kicking motion that lets you boot people into the ocean. It can be fatiguing when you’re surrounded and mashing away at groups of navymen, but it gets you back onside when you put together a flurry of parries and takedowns or wipe out a compound with your darts and blades. It’s fine, all told, but this is where the game still feels most old and cumbersome, and more focus on refining the combat would have turned Resynced into a remake on par with Capcom’s recent Resident Evil output.
The worst part is easily the visibility meter and the wider stealth perception system after you break cover. It feels like enemy sightlines are too rigid and robotic — they aren’t suited to the open world and all of its emergent combat scenarios, so if you want to continue a mission or engage with an activity where you have to become anonymous, there’s a lot of awkward downtime and running away from the action, which kills the fantasy considerably. I found it a struggle to hide successfully after a simple brawl in some cases, and often endured long, endless wave battles with troops instead of making a satisfying, stealthy escape.
You may also be wondering why it’s called Black Flag Resynced instead of just… Remake. Well, Ubisoft justifies this by replacing the Modern Day sections with Rifts that lead you into interactive ‘What If…’ scenarios across the Caribbean. You also start the game in the Animus Hub, which is a bit like the Call of Duty hub, a kind of base layer for the franchise from which you can access all the Assassin’s Creed games available on your console. Within this system, there are cross-game projects where you hunt Animus anomalies — say, a corrupted ship in Black Flag — to unlock Data Files and keys that give you access to lore-expanding Data Files and special cosmetics, like Connor Kenway’s suit from Assassin’s Creed 3.
As one of those weirdos who was quite enamoured with the Modern Day narrative in the early Assassin’s Creed games (remember Subject 16 & the glyphs!), It’s cool to see the story return and progress in an interesting direction, especially in an otherwise by-the-book remake where I wasn’t expecting it to surface. Black Flag Resynced’s modern narrative continues the concepts introduced in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, in which Abstergo is trying to rewrite history and induce a placative bleeding effect on the populace through a VR headset-like consumer product.
I’ll leave the rest for you to find out, but there are some really cool moments in here that, like the new content introduced to flesh out the story, don’t feel abrasive to Black Flag’s core but meaningfully expand the universe surrounding it. I guess that is what makes Resynced so compelling: it manages to recreate the experience of a beloved game, even with some quite bold additions to the expected suite of content. It’d be an easy tap-in for Ubisoft to put this team on a remake of the first Assassin’s Creed, which is easily the most deserving of a facelift after Black Flag. And I’m now rather excited for Assassin’s Creed Hexe, which looks a bit darker and, hopefully, more entwined with the underlying narrative that made the series so curiosity-inducing in its infancy.
The Verdict
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is a rare kind of remake that refines the original experience while expanding the universe around it, and in this case, it does so without feeling like needless fan service. While the on-the-ground combat could still use some refinement, there are few open-world games that can go toe-to-toe with the thrilling promise of Edward Kenway’s seafaring odyssey in its 2013 state, never mind this levelled-up reimagining, which looks so beautiful on PS5 Pro and delights with its warm characters, compelling side activities and endearing ‘fish out of water’ narrative.
