5/5 ★ – kubachowicki_'s review of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is not just one of the best Assassin's Creed games to date. It is also the best pirate game ever made. Set during the Golden Age of Piracy, Black Flag takes you on a wild and crazy adventure and a rollercoaster of emotions. The game gives us a third (or first) Kenway family member to go on a journey with. This time, it's Edward Kenway, British Pirate turned Master Assassin, father of British Grand Master Templar Haytham Kenway, and grandfather of Native American Master Assassin Connor Kenway/Ratonhnhaké:ton. Edward is very comfortably my second favourite character in the whole series after Ezio Auditore, of course. He is an exuberant and vibrant character who changes so much over the course of the story. He always has good in him, and that is clear to see from the very beginning, but it is often overshadowed by his greed and his pride. We get to watch him unfold and develop as a person who completely reevaluates himself over a multiple year story. The game is both an Assassin vs. Templar story and a pirate story, but also a story about love, betrayal, greed, desperation, and human change. As Edward isn't an Assassin until the late stage of the story, we get to learn everything that happens from the same perspective as him, as neither the player nor the protagonist know about this set of Assassins, Templars or the piece of Isu technology. It feels like the player and the character and more in line with how the story unravels, and I love it for that. Getting 100% was some of the most fun I've ever had, even if this was my second time doing all the side content and collectable clean-up. The naval missions, the Assassin contracts, the legendary ships, the collectables, everything just gave me even more reason to traverse the beautiful Carribean islands and seas. The Templar hunts served as nice little side quests, too. Exploring this amazing map will never get boring. Getting all the non-multiplayer trophies was also a blast. The gameplay revamp is still arguably the best in all of Assassin's Creed. Along with Rogue, because it literally just re-uses the Black Flag gameplay, the only other game in the series that in my opinion comes close to the gameplay level is Unity, which still has my favourite gameplay in the series. The parkour, the movement overhaul, the dual swords, the multi pistols, the naval combat. It just doesn't get much better than this. On top of that, the graphics, the score, the sound, all unreal. I still find it unfathomably difficult to believe that this game came out in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. It holds up so well even by today's standards, both graphics and general gameplay wise. Again, along with Unity, I think Black Flag has aged the best out of any pre-Origins game in the franchise, and definitely the best out of its generation of games (being its five predecessors and Rogue). The game is so much fun and so replayable. Moreover, the game's optional objectives once again felt like objectives and challenges, at least for the most part, rather than the infuriatingly frustrating and badly designed chores like in Assassin's Creed III. The only criticism I (and basically any Black Flag fan) really have of the game is that there are too many tailing missions. From a narrative perspective, I like them as they add a lot of value to the information obtained in the story, but it gets repetitive tailing so many times from an interactive perspective. Out of Black Flag's 45 missions, 12 of them are tailing missions, and in two of them, you have to tail twice, meaning that just over a quarter of the game's missions require you to tail someone. That being said, I do not think that the tailing missions hurt the game enough to take away from how perfect it actually is. I genuinely cannot find another criticism of the game. It's a big shame that the multiplayer servers were shut down a few years ago, as I would have loved to get the platinum trophy on such an amazing game, but it wasn't to be as I can't get the five multiplayer trophies. I will always hate multiplayer trophies in predominantly single-player games because of reasons like these. If they put the multiplayer trophies in a separate tab like they did with Blackbeard's Wrath, then sure, but it's annoying that they're part of the main set of trophies and the platinum.