As a huge fan of the so-called Ezio trilogy, I was immensely let-down by the abysmal Assassin's Creed 3. The shift of location to the Americas stand out to me as the single greatest fault the series ever made. AC3 was buggy, boring and had none of the charm and enjoyment of the prior game. In fact it was so bad that it made me abandon the franchise altogether. Until I out of boredom decided to give Black Flag a try, having heard nothing but praise. I will say this: I am so glad I didn't buy this game at anything close to full price because man oh man do I hate this game.
The characters are, with one chubby exception, flat and boring. The same goes for the narrative; featuring a bunch of planks dressed up as pirates throwing around pirate sounding words while they drink and shout beneath the palms. Only the extremely repetitive AC1 serves as a lower point in the franchise in terms of narrative and story.
Controller issues are back, often leading to unwanted deaths. This has become a thing one must accept when playing an AC game, and skill in the game is not so much avoiding these moments but instead learning to correct your ****-ups as quickly as possible, hoping that the horrible AI won't notice.
Speaking of the AI, I have to wonder if it was always this horrible? Honestly, having played through the whole series up to this point I have never found the AI to be this lacking. Granted, it has never been great but what Black Flag delivers is nothing short of either broken or insulting.
What truly breaks the game for me though is the naval battles. A welcome highlight in AC3 that was fleshed out and upgraded to central selling point in this sequel. The idea behind this is good and solid, it was the one part of AC3 that wasn't altogether in shambles. I found myself enjoying a bit of naval warfare in AC3, mainly because it was a side-note. As a main focus of the game it's just terribly boring, and utterly unavoidable. I found myself avoiding ship battles as often as possible, trying instead to explore and find some semblance of Assassin's Creed in the game. You know, jumping and stabbing and exploring the sprawling cityscapes of yore. This avoidance policy turned tricky at the later stages in the game when it becomes entirely necessary to have a upgraded ship unless you want to be blown out of the water. Fair enough! The problem is that you can only upgrade your ship by acquiring resources only found by doing naval battles. Which I loathe. I cannot state it enough, I hate the naval battles of Black Flag with the kind of fiery passion you might find on either side of a middle eastern conflict. The only upside to this is that I'm not missing out on some great plot by shattering the disc into a thousand tiny pieces.
This game was a waste of my money, my time and more importantly it got me so angry that I had to vent my fury by writing this entirely superfluous rant of a review that the great majority of you tossers are going to disagree profoundly with. I hate Black Flag, I hate even more that I got both Black Flag and Rogue in that damn bargain bin, which means there is more wrath to come.
On the upside, the game is very pretty. The oceans and islands are very scenic, the rain is atmospheric and the sight of light fog rolling over the streets of Kingston was an amazing sight to behold. If only the actual game had lived up to the looks.
In conclusion: Playing this game is like dating a very beautiful woman with the IQ of a slightly retarded hamster and bipolar mood swings. Also she hits you with a frying pan for no reason sometimes, and you will probably wake up to her slicing off your penis some idle morning. But hey, at least she looks good!