WORDS LIAM BROPHY
Set amongst a Caribbean archipelago (the Oxford Dictionary name for ‘set of islands in a line’) in the early 18th century, Black Flag tells the story of Edward Kenway, a pirate with an occasional Welsh lilt who plunders things, fights the navies of both Britain and Spain in spectacular ship battles that are essentially the same each of the one-thousand times you engage in them, and can climb trees. Edward starts the game marooned on a beach with a stoic Assassin for company, stealing his clothes and impersonating him in the hopes of collecting a reward waiting for the Assassin in Havana.
It’s a pirate game. Pirates are not Assassins. It’s almost like a sly nod on the part of Ubisoft that this Assassin’s Creed is connected in name only to previous games in the series. At least, this is the apologia most reviewers will probably give when assessing its credentials. “It’s trying to be as much fun as possible within the strictures of the Assassin’s Creed formula, all the science fiction nonsense is shoved to one side!” they say as I put words in their mouth. “You can go whaling!” they continue (you can go whaling, and incidentally it’s very fun). Assassin’s Creed 4 could indeed be given a free pass by some on the basis that it treats its ridiculously portentous mythology with slightly more levity than other games in the series. This is a cause for concern, because Assassin’s Creed games have been examples of fundamentally bad game design since their inception and this game simply reiterates on the same broken formula but with pirates.
We all have a facility for acquisition. It can become maddening. When people jokingly say that a game like Assassin’s Creed appeals to their OCD they’re probably hitting upon the fundamental tenet of modern game design: people like it when they’re given a sense of progression. You collect maps and fragments and chests and shanties. You hope this will give you a leg up on your next encounter. You imagine a phantom other player who hasn’t collected all of this detritus, who can’t buy what you can buy, who hasn’t spent literally hours of their life jumping between balconies collecting tiny fragments of a non-existent currency. The great irony of this is that the game is also designed for people who will, intelligently, breeze through the storyline, never letting the acquisitiveness get the better of them. They can’t buy the majority of upgrades but need to complete the game. Hence the difficulty is set at such a level that a player can complete the game without purchasing most upgrades. Ultimately, there’s no advantage to any of it, collecting any of these things is pointless.
Once you’ve seen through this there’s genuinely nothing else to recommend this game. The parkour is vapid and requires none of the rapid calculation and intense physicality that goes into actual parkour. Your character will nimbly ascend buildings, leaping deftly from handhold to handhold, entirely at odds with the input of the player which involves nothing more than holding the run button down and the analogue stick in a direction. You see something elegant on the screen but perform an ugly, slovenly gesture with the controller. The combat involves you holding a direction and pressing a button at the right time to parry, attack and counter. It’s a bit like playing Asteroids where there’re only maximum 4 asteroids to worry about at once and also the asteroids do a sort of Beano “I’m gonna sock you in the nose, just you wait” wind-up punch gesture before they even think of hitting you. There’s nothing to it. It’s a rewarmed, new iteration of a game you’ve likely bought before. Possibly several times. It was terrible then, and still is now. Avoid it.
