Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Review: The best Assassin’s Creed game since… Black Flag

As the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series generation wobbles on unsure footing, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced took me right back to the previous one, when things seemed much simpler. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced could have been just that, a simple remake, but it isn’t.

By sanding the rough edges off the original, adding new content that feels right at home alongside the classic quests, and rendering a visually stunning West Indies, Ubisoft reminded me exactly why, for me, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag was a series high point.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced follows Edward Kenway, a pirate who, rather than being inducted into the ancient creed, simply kills an assassin and steals his gear. It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure this game was for Assassin’s Creed fans back in 2013 if you weren’t there at the time.

The previous game, Assassin’s Creed 3, was met with mixed reviews after the beloved Ezio trilogy. While the games were selling incredibly well, and became one of the video game series with genuine mainstream appeal, fans wanted something different.

That difference took the form of a pirate ship. Edward’s ship, the Jackdaw, is essentially the game’s other main character. It’s your method of transport, the home to the game’s best exposition, and, of course, the means through which Edward blasts the Spanish and British armies down to Davey Jones’ Locker.

Sailing The Jackdaw is still a great amount of fun. Sailing mechanics became a regular staple in the series, but for my money, it never got better than Black Flag. It makes sense, then, that the popularity of the game’s sailing mechanics would go on to form the basis of the live-service game Skull and Bones. Much of the Skull & Bones team served as the developer of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced.

When disagreements are too personal for canon fire, and Edward has to get his hands dirty, this is where Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced’s biggest change comes to the fore. Combat in the original game largely boiled down to waiting until the enemy attacked, countering them, and then wiping out the remaining enemies with a series of chained takedowns.

In Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, Edward must now pull off a fairly generous perfect parry, which will open the foe up to a quick kill. He can then chain that to another enemy, but gone are the days of pinging around an 11-a-side team of British soldiers while they just look at you. It’s still not very hard, but it requires more thought than the original.

“In Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, Edward must now pull off a fairly generous perfect parry, which will open the foe up to a quick kill.”

Other gameplay changes, like making tailing missions less tedious, giving Edward access to late-game equipment earlier, and other housekeeping measures, are all just very smart changes. It’s clearly made by a team that adores the original but can acknowledge that there are a few things from the 2013 vintage that could, and have, been smoothed out.

The other big change is the addition of new missions. The biggest compliment I can give these missions is that a new player would struggle to pick out which missions are from the original and which are from the remake. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag had one of the widest casts of memorable characters of all the Assassin’s Creed games, and the new members fit right in.

The story of Edward’s band of merry pirates is still one of the best they’ve ever told, and the pantomime performances from some of history’s greatest pirates are just as memorable and sweary as they ever were. Mark Bonnar’s Blackbeard performance is a personal favorite.

Matt Ryan’s Edward Kenway remains at the top table of Assassin’s Creed protagonists, and in the new scenes that actor Matt Ryan returned to record, he hasn’t missed a step.

Speaking of the cast, it’s a shame that Adéwalé’s excellent Freedom Cry DLC wasn’t included in this package. He remains one of the game’s most engaging characters, and his expansion deserved the same treatment as the rest of the game.

What compels me most about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is that it feels like a game from the last generation of open-world games before things went too far. The world feels vast, but it doesn’t take a commute to sail across.

“Matt Ryan’s Edward Kenway remains at the top table of Assassin’s Creed protagonists, and in the new scenes that actor Matt Ryan returned to record, he hasn’t missed a step.”

I remember a genuine sinking feeling when I opened the map in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to discover I could have scrolled for a working week before getting to the end of it. A great trick the original played was to make the islands look massive on the map, but have the actual playable town areas be fairly small.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is very graphically impressive. Ubisoft’s recent Assassin’s Creed entries have all looked great, but the brightness inherent to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is perfectly captured in Resynced.

Unlike the original game, which had bespoke diving sections, Edward can now plunder for treasure anywhere, and the newly modeled ocean floor is also a looker. On the console side, the PS5 Pro offers a 40 FPS balanced mode which combines graphical heft with high frame rates, but this is only available to those with displays that can handle 120 hertz.

Did Assassin’s Creed Black Flag need a remake? Probably not. Does that change how much fun it still is to swing from your ship onto an enemy Man-O-War and do your best Jack Sparrow impression? Not one bit. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is a total comfort blanket of a game. For me, it reminded me why I was so obsessed with this series at the tail end of the PS3 generation, and just how far things deviated in the 13 years since.

Sure, the missions from the original are simple, and there’s plenty of late 2010s nonsense like a particularly ludicrous boat stealth mission, but at no point while playing Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced was I bored. It is a small-plates approach to Assassin’s Creed: grab a quick contract, do a short mission, help out your crew, sink a boat, go for a swim, all in a stunning setting. A setting that’s large without being off-putting.

Perhaps we’re past the point where the Assassin’s Creed series can just be this, but the strength of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag was how it took the bones of the franchise, wasn’t afraid to kill sacred cows, and focused on a big, ship-shaped idea. That level of clear, uncompromising vision could be the shot in the arm the series needs.