Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Xbox ONE)

My very first Xbox One Review. How exciting! I followed on from the completion of Assassin’s Creed III and cracked straight on with this for a few weeks, however the sheer vastness of the game caused me to make it an ongoing project which spread out over the next six months.

The in-game world is huge and beautiful. A lot of effort has gone into the development of the game, especially the first area, which makes sense as it is the first place that people see. However the whole world is fantastic. Characters, locations, sailing, everything.

Anyway, enough praise and on with thereview – in a dramatic Assassin’s Creed U-Turn, we actually go back in time and play as Edward Kenway, Connor’s grandfather. Against the grain for linear progression but okay, we’ll go with it. Now, let’s not forget that the whole Assassin’s Creed world is just a simulation. In the ‘real world,’ Desmond Miles is dead and his body has been shipped to Abstergo Industries where you, a new Abstergo employee, are reliving his memories to create a new computer game based on the life of Edward Kenway. How crazy is that? The framing is that we are working in a computer game developing job to create a game where you play as pirate in the West Indies. Ubisoft just love their framing.

Onto the story within the story, playing as Edward you are a master Assassin with absolutely no assassin training whatsoever. It is actually quite funny. Your ship crashes onto a desert island and it is just you and the actual Assassin, Duncan Walpole, who survive. In typical pirate fashion, Edward kills Duncan, takes his stuff including the hidden blade, years of assassins training and all, and goes to Havana and pretends to be him in a meeting with the Templar.

Unlike all of his predecessors, Edward does not possess a moral compass. He is out only for himself and his pursuit of The Observatory is totally self motivated. I don’t know why he thinks the Observatory will give him untold wealth, but at some point he is told it is valuable so he goes after it with no expenses spared.

He makes lots of friends along the way, gets them killed and also makes more enemies... generally speaking Edward is a horrible person and while this was funny for the first thirty or so hours, it did start to wear thin towards the end.

The sounds effects are good for the most part and again I enjoyed the sea shanties that you can collect and are then sung by your crew when sailing the high seas. This is very good as you will spend a lot of time travelling around in your ship looking for various collectible items.

The gameplay has the standard Assassin’s Creed issues in that the free running isn’t as seamless or easy as I would expect it to be. My Edward continually gets caught on various objects, doesn’t grab hold of ledges when I wanted him to and generally acts like a brain damaged moron from time to time. The worst instances of these were his survival instincts or lack thereof. When I jumped from a tall building in an attempt to land in a haystack, several times I died landing right next to the haystack. There was a similar issue in Assassin’s Creed III and to be fair, it has noticeably improved but it’s still something I would be happy to live without.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, the achievements are plentiful and varied with loads of stuff to collect and, of course, multiplayer.

There are 19 achievements obtainable for playing through the game but you will also nab a few others including swimming a certain distance, plundering ships and recruiting crew members. I made a habit of collecting everything every time I visited a new location so I had a lot less to do once I had completed the main game.

Two challenging achievements include destroying all the forts and taking care of the Legendary Ships but once you have fully upgraded your ship it shouldn’t be too problematic once you identify the patterns required to take them out.

There are also the generic achievements for killing certain enemies in certain ways and getting chain kills, etcetera, but nothing too painful. The whole single player element is very time consuming though and despite fast travel, sailing around the map is a bitch.

Multiplayer

I really did think we were on to a winner after the sparse achievements on Assassin’s Creed III however, I was very wrong. There are nine multiplayer achievements (including DLC) to get, the most painful of which is getting to level 55. The easiest way to do this is to play one wolfpack multiplayer map every day to take advantage of experience boosts.

Outside of getting to level 55 there are a few small pain-in-the-ass achievements. Playing a match on every game mode was a struggle as everyone has already decided they didn’t want to play the shittier game play modes by the time I got around to playing it.

There are two achievements I used a boosting session for; killing someone using a booby trapped lift which I may have got through luck, and being the highest scoring player in a game of Domination as The Jaguar. In order to do the second one you have to get the opportunity to select the Jaguar which requires you to have the multiplayer DLC. There is a one-in-two chance of doing this if you have four players and you are the leader for one team. Next, you have to be the highest scoring player which means you need to actually be good at this game mode. Both of these scenarios were unlikely for me to pursue. So I didn’t.

Downloadable Content

The extra 250 points consists of two downloadable packs. The first is the MP Characters Pack #1 Blackbeard’s Wrath which has four achievements, the two I mentioned above and another two which can both be obtained in Wolfpack mode once you reach the correct level to use the abilities.

The other is Freedom Cry where you can play as Edward’s one time friend, Adewale as he liberates slaves from plantations. It is essentially the same gameplay style as the main game, only you get to play as someone whose moral compass is pointing in the right direction. And he is badass. He carries a machete as a default weapon and can use a blunderbuss to kill multiple dudes at the same time.

I had a lot of fun with Black Flag even if Edward’s self destructive personality threatened to ruin everything. There is the option of replaying the game on the 360 but I can’t bring myself to play the whole game again. At least not yet, anyway.