a gorgeous but underbaked remake

Black Flag Resynced is halfway between a remake and a remaster of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed 4. It’s less of an almost-RPG than Ubisoft’s more modern Assassin’s Creed games; more action-heavy than the Ezio games and Mirage. It falls just about in the perfect spot between balancing stealth and more direct approaches. Black Flag Resynced functions much like any other Assassin’s Creed game. You take on missions, sneak your way to the objective (or blow your cover and find a more violent path), and then do some selective murder to get what you came for. In between all that is an abundance of collectibles to track down, if you’re so inclined. In Black Flag and Black Flag Resynced, all this takes place during the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean Sea.

And in Black Flag Resynced, it looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s a generous remaster of what was a rather ugly game, replacing dull browns with vibrant colors and clunky environments with lush jungles and beautifully lit streets. Ubisoft was less sweeping with its changes elsewhere, though.

The story is broadly the same as the original. Edward Kenway becomes a privateer in search of a better life, before getting caught up in conflicts between the Templars and the Assassins. In true pirate fashion, Kenway does his own thing and plays both sides, albeit occasionally unwittingly, and owes his allegiance to famous pirates such as Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and Mary Read. (Also the fictitious pirate Adéwalé, though Ubisoft excised Adéwalé’s missions from the Freedom Cry DLC.) No disrupting the transatlantic slave trade or playing as marginalized heroes — only shanties and shenanigans. The original game’s modern-day story, which centers around the Abstergo megacorporation mining pirate history for cheap entertainment, also plays next to no role in Resynced for some reason.

“For some reason” echoed through my time with Resynced. For some reason, the combat now features parrying. It’s fine. Not the worst, but not a great fit for Black Flag‘s swashbuckling. You either want to overwhelm your enemy with speed and power or sneak up on them. It’s not the kind of action built for parrying, and the system never evolves or fits with other skills in a way that makes it seem like more than a concession to modern game design trends. For some reason, naval combat remains tedious. The sound design in these battles deserves praise, though, and in Ubisoft’s defense, naval combat in video games is never fun. And for some reason, Kenway is not the star of Resynced‘s new story chapters. That honor goes to his shipmates on the Jackdaw and (for some reason) Blackbeard.

The Jackdaw’s crew were hardly memorable in the original game, and given the amount of trust and cooperation required for a pirate company to stay afloat, I can see why some of the new officers get that extra attention. Blackbeard was one of Black Flag‘s more popular historical cameos; it makes sense to focus on him from a “give the people what they want” perspective.

What makes less sense is how underdeveloped Kenway still is. He’s a poor man seeking a richer life, so he runs away to sea, acts like a total prick, then, once he’s had his fun and gets some advice from other pirates, he realizes he’s strayed from the nobler ambitions of his early privateering days. Stretch that across 20 hours or so, and you have Black Flag Resynced.

Image: Ubisoft via Polygon

There’s nothing wrong with lighthearted pirate tales, but Resynced‘s position demands more depth. It’s launching after Ubisoft’s more story-heavy games (even Basim has more character development in Mirage) and long after the more restrictive games of the early series. The original Black Flag sailed by on the merits of its freedom — freedom from the rigid confines of the Templars vs. Assassins conflict, freedom from the claustrophobic cities. You could go anywhere (within reason) and do anything (as long as “anything” was looting and sneaking). It was exciting! But after 13 years of Ubisoft experimenting with different visions of that excitement — and other studios saturating the market with similar visions — Black Flag Resynced almost feels quaint now. The limited scope is refreshing compared to how overwhelming games like Valhalla and Shadows were. But I often found myself wondering what I was supposed to get out of sailing around the Caribbean.

It’s also odd, after watching Ubisoft embrace the educational side of its historical fantasies for almost a decade, seeing it return to a version of Black Flag that’s treated mostly like a pirate theme park. Light-hearted nautical fun is fine; it’s just a strange contrast to everything Ubisoft’s built since 2013. Giving more attention to Kenway’s story and the forces that shaped him, forces he could only escape by becoming a pirate, would’ve given Resynced the depth and renewed sense of identity it lacks. Extra Blackbeard missions do not.

One thing Black Flag Resynced does improve, greatly, is its mission structure. Gone are the restrictive tailing missions that punished you with instant failure if you were too slow, and the entirely linear objectives. In their place is freedom to find a few different paths to a solution. Screwing up and bumbling your way to that solution is very much one of them, though with Resycned‘s smoother parkour, even bumbling feels stylish.

In one very early mission, for example, Kenway is supposed to sneakily uncover information about where some confiscated goods are being held. The ideal version of this quest involves little combat and a slick takedown of a corrupt naval captain. My version involved accidentally walking into a group of soldiers, ruining any chance of intel gathering, finding where I was supposed to go, scooting up the walls of a fortress, and grabbing the goods before anyone realized I was there.

These open moments of disaster and improvisation are the shining bright spots in Black Flag Resynced. They do the most to recapture the sense of liberation and adventure that characterizes the original. It’s just a shame the rest of the remake never manages the same.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will be released July 9 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a prerelease download code provided by Ubisoft. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.