"Edward's voyage still sings, drowned out by the storefront"
About
Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag Resynced is Ubisoft's full remake of the 2013 pirate adventure, rebuilding it with new lighting, textures, ray tracing and reworked animation. You play Edward Kenway, a privateer turned pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy, sailing an open Caribbean between Havana, Nassau and dozens of smaller islands. Minute to minute you climb towers and rooftops with parkour, sneak through restricted zones, fight with swords and pistols, and captain the Jackdaw through naval battles and boarding actions. The remake modernises controls and combat flow, cuts the original's present-day Abstergo sequences in favour of 'rifts', and adds some new missions and dialogue. It ships with a large slate of day-one paid extras.
Verdict
The pirate game underneath is still worth sailing, and the visual pass genuinely flatters Havana and the open water. But this remake keeps tripping over decisions Ubisoft made around it rather than in it: a pause menu that sells you things, an options screen buried behind loading screens, cutscenes frozen at 30 FPS, and combat stripped of the variety that gave the original its edge. Newcomers curious about Edward Kenway will find the story intact and the sailing satisfying. Everyone else is paying full price to watch a good game argue with its own storefront.
You'll like it if …
- +You never played the 2013 original and want the pirate campaign in its prettiest form
- +Naval combat and open-sea sailing are what you come to this series for
- +You can look past storefront prompts and technical rough edges if the ship battles deliver
You'll dislike it if …
- −In-game stores, DLC funnels and launcher menus sour the whole experience for you
- −You loved the original's combat variety, present-day sequences and open island access
- −30 FPS cutscenes and city stutter are dealbreakers at full price
Breakdown
- +Modernised controls and smoother combat flow make Edward more responsive than the 2013 version
- +The naval loop, from cannon fire to boarding, still carries the whole game the way it always did
- −Parkour has a sticky hitch where Edward seems to snap to a surface before moving, which several players compare to jerky claymation
- −Combat variety has been gutted: fists, the hidden blade and weapon swaps are gone, and it stays trivially easy even on harder modes
- −Stealth rarely matters anymore, and fewer environmental hazards flatten the encounter design
- −Legacy control scheme is missing, and rebinding sprint to a trigger disables parkour entirely
- +The Caribbean sandbox is as large as it was, with a full campaign and side content to fill it
- +Multiplayer achievements are gone, so 100% completion is finally reachable solo
- −Little genuinely new content beyond a couple of missions; the scope is the 2013 game
- −Islands are walled off with invisible barriers and restricted access, shrinking the freedom to roam
- −Cutting the present-day Abstergo layer for 'rifts' removes a whole tier of the original's structure
- +Edward Kenway's arc and the core story hold up well, and newcomers get a genuinely worthwhile version of it
- +Some localisations, notably the Chinese voice work, come across strongly
- −Added narration has Edward describing his own actions, which makes him sound cheesy and green rather than the hardened privateer the original wrote
- −Removing the Abstergo meta-narrative thins out the worldbuilding for returning players
- −Cutscenes often fail to load, forcing a manual pause and unpause to trigger dialogue
- +The visual overhaul is real: cleaner textures, richer lighting and ray tracing, and Caribbean water that sells the setting
- +Environmental detail and character animation are a clear step up on the original
- −Cutscenes are locked at 30 FPS while the game runs at 80 to 90, a jarring drop nobody expects in 2026
- −Odd frame-rate mismatches everywhere: capes and pigeons animate at 60 FPS against a higher game rate
- −Audio is heavily compressed with no dynamic range, so every character sounds flat and podcast-like
- −Havana in particular stutters, and frame drops, texture pop-in and long freezes recur across the map
- +Steam Deck verified status is at least present out of the gate
- −The menus are built to sell: the pause button opens a storefront, a tutorial pop-up points you at DLC, and the main menu doubles as a launcher for other AC titles
- −Opening the options menu means sitting through multiple loading screens and half a minute of waiting
- −Ubisoft Connect account linking can trap players between accounts and block the game from launching at all
- −Progression-blocking bugs at launch, including an ocelot skinning hard lock, plus save corruption and crashes when you change graphics settings
- −Roughly 80 to 140 euros of paid extras at launch on top of the full price
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