Whiskey for my Johnny O!
Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag is simultaneously the series' best installment yet, and business as usual for the Creed. While AC3 went to some lengths to optimize its predecessors' hodgepodge approach, AC4 is once again a motley assortment of disparate components and ideas: just as Ezio did in the Mediterranean, Edward encounters a weirdly diverse set of activities in his travels throughout the Caribbean. The good news is that the most prominent of those activities are really, thoroughly fun.
Assassin's Creed has struggled to make a meaningful world map since 2007, but Black Flag's West Indies sailing has nailed it -- once you've taken command of the Jackdaw and the map opens up, you can just go out and explore to your heart's content, hoisting the sails and mounting the waves while your filthy crew belts out drunken shanties. The game's three primary cities of Havana, Nassau, and Kingston dot the sea along with a dozen or so smaller towns, and even more tiny little treasure-carrying sandbars; but the real highlight of the map is ship traffic, which you can freely attack, board, and plunder. In a genius bit of design, the materials you gain from looting ships are used to upgrade your own, adding more armor or more cannons, so you can tackle even bigger and stronger ships.
It's a remarkably fresh spin on open-world gameplay, and perfectly embodies what I would argue is Black Flag's primary theme: freedom. (More on this later.)
Of course, being a modern video game, everything is necessarily stitched together by high-action combat sequences. Black Flag shows that Ubisoft learned an important lesson from Connor's tomahawk prowess in AC3: all of Edward's equippable weapons are pairs of light swords. Combat is really just a fast-paced dance of swings and parries through enemies, and it works really well, ... except when there are a lot of enemies in close quarters, making it difficult to stick to one target. Unfortunately this happens a lot while boarding ships, bringing more attention to this problem than it would otherwise merit.
There are also pistols, which are awkward to whip out in a melee, but are great in a pinch for taking down enemy riflemen. And if the need strikes you, you can pick up a downed enemy's weapon and have-at with it. (Actually, hey, that's a borrowed mechanic from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, another sailing-centric nautical adventure. Interesting coincidence.)
This sailin' and fightin' drives, and/or is driven by, a narrative that is generally of the quality you'd expect from Ubisoft. Edward is frequently surrounded by high-profile pirates ripped from history, but the game throws and twists these characters around so much that they never really define a coherent personality. The story overall suffers from sudden, dramatic changes in how sympathetic or deplorable its players are. With the exception of Edward himself.
Edward's ambition and roguishness are immediately charming, but his flashbacks to trouble at home - and his selfish interactions - quickly paint a flawed picture. His tireless quest for fortune comes not only at the expense of other sailors, but of his closest allies, and of himself. While his friends in Nassau discuss plans of freedom from European empires, Edward is stupefyingly focused on increasing his riches, as if this will solve the problem of his estranged wife. Other characters even point this out to him, explicitly, on a few occasions. But nevertheless, until nearly the end, Edward continues to muddle his incredible, breathtaking freedom with this narrow-minded goal.
On a smaller scale this might be an interesting arc, but it simply isn't enough to sustain Black Flag's running length. For all the adventures he finds himself in, Edward's character is disappointingly shallow.
And then there are the Templar and Assassin bits, which are as wacky and silly as ever. Although to be honest, there is an interesting bit that builds on the questions raised by AC3:
This constitutes only a fairly small part of Black Flag's story, but it - hopefully - signals some much more fascinating lore in the games to come.
Aside from the main story, there is a veritable ton of other things to do, from the challenging and engaging (fighting legendary ships and doing some scripted extra missions), to the tedious and boring (finding dozens of collectibles for no real reason), to the awkward and stupid (the Kenway's Fleet mini-game, which seems like it was supposed to be a mobile or Facebook game instead). I did almost all of it, although in retrospect much of it feels like it was a waste. I just enjoyed running around like a pirate.
And there are some other rotten apples in this mixed bag: the modern-day story is stuck astonishingly high up its own ass, the PC version's performance does not seem as good as it should be, and the second-screen tablet companion app is totally pointless. But these, like the game's more lackluster activities, and even like the story, are forgettable. The freedom of sailing the high seas, sighting land, excavating treasure, hijacking ships; this is what Black Flag does well, and it does this very well.
This isn't just a good iteration of the Assassin's Creed franchise -- it feels like a great game beyond that, too.
Better than: Assassin's Creed III
Not as good as: Saints Row IV
Now that there's sailing: how is a sequel set in the French revolution going to match or top that?
Progress: 95% completion