▶ TL;DRBlack Flag Resynced is the easiest game in the world to recommend and the easiest to be annoyed at, at the same time. The remake itself is excellent: the Caribbean has never looked better, and thirteen years later the sailing still embarrasses most open-world traversal. But the day-one DLC wall is a self-inflicted wound, and it is the reason a great remake launched to a Mixed rating instead of a victory lap.
In 2013 I sank an embarrassing number of evenings into Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, mostly ignoring the actual assassinating so I could chase white whales and sea shanties. Thirteen years later Ubisoft has rebuilt the whole thing from the keel up, and my honest first reaction was relief: they did not ruin it.
My second reaction came when I opened the store page and counted nine separate DLC packs on launch day. We will get to that. We have to, because the internet certainly has.
A Remake With the Wind Behind It
Resynced is a ground-up rebuild on the latest Anvil engine, led by Ubisoft Singapore, the studio that spent a decade making the Black Flag spin-off Skull and Bones before coming full circle to remake the game everyone actually wanted. The water, the weather and the light are the show-stealers. Havana at dusk and a storm rolling over open ocean are the two screenshots every outlet ran at launch, and fair enough: they are the game's argument in a single image.
Edward Kenway's story is untouched in the ways that matter, and it remains the series' best character arc: a greedy chancer impersonating an Assassin who slowly, painfully grows a conscience. Traversal and combat have been modernised to current expectations, though a lot of mission design underneath is still recognisably 2013: follow this bloke, eavesdrop on that conversation, fail, restart. The remake sands the edges without rethinking the shapes.
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