LonelyGreyWolf
Banned
After the disaster that was Assassin's Creed 3, I was pretty hesitant to buy another AC title. Everyone kept saying Black Flag was great though, and since the price is low nowadays I really wanted to give it a try. And I have to agree; it's really good indeed. I had a great time with it. No one on the internet likes walls of texts, so I broke my thoughts down into a few bullets.
What I liked
- Exploring the vast world was incredible!
- The sound effects and the music is fantastic. The music feels partly inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean, and while it's not quite on that level, it has a really, really nice theme going. The sea shantys are just absolutely amazing. One of the best additions in the game for certain.
- Simply sailing around and attacking ships was great fun.
- The random events that happen at sea. I remember at one point really early in the game when I was just starting out, I spotted two small fleets, one Spanish and one English, getting in battle with one another a distance away from me. It felt incredible. The distant sound effects were well done, and the feeling of how they're battling independently of me is really cool. I could come over there and join in, or just sail by. And these kind of events happen a lot, and in all kinds of weather. Another cool moment was when several powerful fleets engaged with one of my forts in the middle of a storm. I just stood there watching it in awe.
- While the storyline is nonsense, a lot of the story missions were fun and varied, even if there were a bit too many stalking objectives. There's a mission early on -- I believe it's sequence two, memory six -- where you and your soon-to-be quartermaster break free from imprisonment on a ship, which stood out to me as the first amazing mission. You're on a fleet of ships, and you jump from ship to ship, freeing captive pirates. It felt really cool.
- Apart from up-close facials, the game is beautiful.
- The gameplay over-all was really fun. Great variety and diversion; many activities to do. I enjoyed the mini-games too.
What I didn't like
- The story is complete nonsense. The writing is occasionally mind-blowingly bad, the characters are stereotypic and the twists are predictable from a mile away. The main character is silly beyond belief as well. It didn't even make sense for the longest time why he would run around with the assassins outfit. The modern day part was some of the dumbest stuff I've ever seen in a video game. At times it really felt like there was no communication between the story-writing teams and the gameplay teams. Literally everything was nonsense. However I could never tell if the game was being serious or sarcastic. It sometimes feels as though they're making fun of the whole pirate thing and that they keep joking about themselves, but then it's all serious. The death of
was dreadful. The game was trying to be serious and sad but it came off as a joke. I still kind of enjoyed some characters though, in particular Kidd.Blackbeard
- Sound and musical glitches! So annoying. The music is great, and gets you pumped, but it will occasionally just cut off, especially when you go to board a ship, but in many other scenarios as well. Sometimes sound effects will just randomly disappear too.
- Boarding ships got a bit repetitive after a while. After the first half of the game, I usually just sank ships instead; only boarding them when I needed health. I don't know, it feels like boarding could've been made fresher.
- Too few large fleets! I'd wish there would have been more large fleets for you to attack and interact with.
- I liked how they used the "poo-kah" sound effects from Splinter Cell for the menus, but really, the menus were clunky. Creating arrows/darts, for instance, was needlessly tedious. The interface was also annoying in that it kept telling me things I knew, such as "press [circle] to whistle" or "pick up loot while at sea to upgrade your ship", even though I had been playing the game for 30 hours and learned this in just the first hour.
I'm sure I've forgotten some things, but this is what I liked and disliked from the top of my head. Again; I really enjoyed it over-all. It's become one of my favourite AC titles so far (I've yet to play Rogue and Unity), however it's hard to compare since it's so different. In definitely excited to try out the later AC titles as well.
