daninthemix
Member
Recently picked this up on Steam and have just about finished it (hovering around the 60% completion mark, and have no intention of doing all the side stuff). The game looks amazing, has decent voice acting, and a somewhat interesting story that feels a little fractured due to the number of characters and frequency of timeskips.
In terms of traversal theres very little to say, as in my opinion the game is as quirky, unreliable but ultimately serviceable as every other in the series. Sometimes youll be in an urgent hurry and suddenly climb up a lamppost. Sometimes youll hit some piece of environment the game doesnt understand and stop moving entirely. Overall, the parkour is pretty good. Just like its always been. And kudos to Ubi for making Edward almost immune to fall damage at least when he decides to jump off randomly rather than haystack dive it doesnt cost you much.
Combat is hideous. Hitting people with your blades or swords is utterly pointless, as only counter-kills seem to work. For me, this was utterly immersion-breaking. I can stab a guy ten times and it does nothing, or counter-stab him once and then he dies. That makes no sense. I loathed almost every second of combat in the entire game.
Conversely, assassinating people is really good fun. Stalking through bushes, whistling to attract their attention, then whisking them out of sight is fantastic. So is pulling them into hay bales. And air assassinating people is glorious (although the game did occasionally misread my target and jump onto some random dude, resulting in several minutes of diabolically tedious combat). Berserk blowdarts are extremely fun to use just shoot an enemy from cover, then watch them go mad and attack their buddies. The game is at its best when it just gets out of the way and lets you be an assassin.
The excess of tailing and eavesdropping missions has been well-documented. The problems are many youre so concentrated on your route and trying to evade combat that many players will probably miss the conversation entirely, making it a comprehensive storytelling failure. In many cases, I simply had to fail a mission several times in order to learn the targets route, so that I then had a hope of plotting my own optimal course such as ensuring I made my way to a haystack the target will end up pausing near. Theres no way of knowing this kind of stuff without trying and failing the mission, and the problem is that the missions arent compelling enough to sustain interest over multiple checkpoint retries. The ship stealth missions are woefully ill-conceived, too.
There were a number of times I felt arbitrarily restricted in a way that was most irritating fast travel unavailable, because I was in mission limbo or some other reason the game hadnt adequately explained. Sometimes, it simply didnt feel like an open world because you werent permitted to use it as such.
While I quite enjoyed the present-day segments, the hacking minigames are completely extraneous. Im vaguely interested in all the lore but frankly not enough to attempt a Frogger minigame more than once. Just let us walk up to the computers and access the information. How hard is that, Ubi?
The diving segments could have been a relaxing change of pace, but instead theyre infested with sharks, spines and glooper fish, making the sub-optimal swimming controls desperately frustrating. As a result, I collected the ship blueprints but ignored all other underwater chests, as these areas simply werent fun. Once again, the developers draw attention to their failings by making a challenge out of them, rather than simply letting us explore at leisure.
Naval warfare was well done, but ultimately outstayed its welcome due to the sheer volume of materials needed to upgrade your ship. Actually boarding ships was onerous because of all the terrible combat failings plus the fact that the camera doesnt always show whos attacking you. Often, Id attempt to counter someone but it wouldnt happen because a shipmate countered the assailant first. Then someone else would abruptly hit me. Basically its a clusterfuck, and the game itself doesnt seem to have a clue whos attacking who half the time. And if you dont upgrade the ship you cant conquer forts, making sea traversal a more tedious affair due to the large hostile zones, plus various story missions become yawnsomely hard without an upgraded ship. I have no solution to how Ubi shouldve improved the upgrade mechanisms or the naval economy. I only know that what began as a good thing became very wearisome after a while.
Kenways Fleet is kind of okay, but I wish it interlocked more pertinently with the main game. You do all this stuff, unlocking shipping lanes and dispatching vessels on missions and for what? Just money. Actually, rather than earning additional resources that are only relevant within Kenways fleet, why couldnt the principle resources of wood, metal and cloth also be attainable through it, thus giving us an alternative to naval warfare for upgrading the Jackdaw? Ultimately, if the player decides that money isnt an issue, Kenways Fleet ceases to be relevant and so does the whole add this vessel to Kenways Fleet mechanic. Very disappointing.
The optional mission objectives are eye-rollingly boring you can either ignore them and let the game smarmily rub an 80% synchronisation in your face, or obey them and consequently narrow the mission down to a more prescribed, linear task thats less engaging than a simple accomplish this however you want style sandbox which the very first game achieved quite nicely, thankyou very much.
Many have said this would be better as a pure pirate game, but I dont agree. Assassination and parkour are still enjoyable, on the whole. Sailing, sea shanties and island exploration are great fun but could you base an entire game around that? Im not so sure. As Ive said, I consider naval combat flawed (as in, naval combat is fun but boarding ships isnt, and the upgrade economy is way too stingy and grindy).
In summary, Black Flag is flawed as both an Assassins Creed game and as a pirate game, but theres enough to like on both sides that I consider it worth playing. In my opinion, the single direst thing about it is combat, as it remains a major gameplay component that is barely functional.
