Assassin’s Creed IV review: Enormous, but ultimately empty

For the past six years, the Assassin’s Creed video game series has hosted murderous sprees across the history of Western civilization, all with a weird meta-connection to modern-day times. Beyond its consistent “run-anywhere, kill anything” core gameplay—as if Spider-Man were scaling giant buildings while hiding swords in his sleeves—the series’ soup of ancient evils and corporate villainy has always proven an awkward juggle.

Still, at least settings like ancient Italy and the American Revolution maintained a tenuous connection between past and present by way of, say, the Illuminati or conspiracy theories. Wackadoodle, but doable. The series’ sixth major installment, conversely, seems to say “aw, whatever” to such strides. “People love pirates, right? Let’s do pirates.”

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag doesn’t necessarily play as half-assed as that might sound. Once the game sets sail, its swashbuckling hero combines the extremes of a superpowered assassin and ruthless ship captain on a quest that seems to go on forever, traversing nearly the entire real-life enormity of the West Indies.

Yet this stupidly huge game—yes, even bigger than the giant Assassin’s Creed III—somehow feels claustrophobic. Even if you haven’t burnt through every AC entry thus far, and even if you’re charmed by the variety of set pieces throughout the latest campaign, ACIV sees the series both run out of creative gas and miss out on opportunities to refine its most basic gameplay elements. Interested pirates can expect a mighty long journey in ACIV, but they should beware dehydration and scurvy along the way.

Metagame testing 101

Edward Kenway is the assassin this time, a Welshman eager to find riches on the open seas in the early 18th century. No parrot on his shoulder, though; just a chip, mostly in the form of a beleaguered wife left behind during his travels (and hinted at in numerous flashback clips).

Unlike the protagonists in other AC games, Kenway doesn’t start things off as an officially ordained assassin. Once he reaches the West Indies, he kills another assassin and steals his identity—and his trademark white robes—while trying to deliver cargo under a new name. Once that jig is up, Kenway goes full pirate. He rounds up a crew, secures a pirate ship, and sails from island to island in search of rum and loot.

Of course, by then, he’s also caught up in an order of assassins, a few mystical relics, and a batch of Templars, the series’ longtime foes. From here on, his missions—mostly on-foot like games of old, with a smattering of open-sea missions in between—alternate between noble efforts and ignoble deeds.

As in prior entries, ACIV sporadically drops you into modern-day society, though this time not as series regular Desmond Miles. Instead, you’re a new, unnamed employee at Abstergo Entertainment, the company that has mined Desmond’s efforts in prior games. You’re asked to play through Kenway’s memories to build an entertaining virtual reality experience. At one point, an executive barks about the project by saying that pirate movies were “what made Hollywood, and we have access to the real deal!”

So to review: you play as a video game tester who plays as a pirate. Seems like a perfect canvas for despondent game designers to lambast their companies’ working conditions or the drudgery of bloated, corporate games, yet such commentary is mostly left on the cutting room floor. (Tucked away in menus, Abstergo employees argue about things like the game’s mentions of slavery: “It’s kind of part of the history of the region,” one says. “Folks want to have fun, right? Not think about social injustice and stuff,” the other replies. That’s as subtle or sophisticated as the game’s “meta” content really gets.)

What remains instead is a well crafted but forgettable campaign about piracy in the West Indies, often featuring real figures from history. The vocal performances and text are rarely offensive or annoying. That said, these are neither the campy, fun-loving pirates of a Bruckheimer production nor the cold-hearted, memorably brutal savages of pulpy pirate stories.

Thankfully, Blackbeard shows up midway through the quest with fire in his eyes—and in his beard—to put some juice into the otherwise staid cast. Too bad Kenway doesn’t emerge as much more than a money-first pirate with occasional flashes of the moral high ground.

Pirate’s life for thee?

On land, the play in ACIV is largely the same as every other game in the series. Missions typically revolve around finding a stealthy path to an objective. That means sneaking through cover, hopping over buildings, or throwing some in-game coins at dancing ladies or dreadful pirates to woo or attack obnoxious guards, respectively.

It would be simple enough to dismiss the majority of ACIV’s quests in a “we’ve played this before” way. It’s also a somewhat valid criticism, considering how we’ve done a lot of these missions in the past: tail a bad guy to eavesdrop on a conversation, reach a point and fight a few waves of guards, chase a baddie as he runs and climbs across the city, etc.

Ultimately, even that complaint would let Ubisoft get away lightly. The bigger problem is that so many of the missions fail thanks to a pretty disgusting cocktail of weak AI and awful mission pacing. The game’s foes and guards are painfully stupid, quick to forget about the assassin who just ran in front of their face. They’re also awful at signaling each other when their peers—often only five feet away— suddenly disappear from their awkward posts of staring straight ahead at the edge of a cliff.

If the missions were built in ways that encouraged sneaky paths, that issue might not be so glaring. Instead, the brute-force tactic of running madly through an ACIV mission tends to work just fine, even on missions that require you to remain undetected. Once, I racked up a chasing gang of about 30 guards who simply stopped chasing me once I reached a certain boundary on the map and jumped into a bush in front of their eyes.

Worse, if players ever get caught, swordplay poses little challenge even before upgrading swords and other gear in the game’s shops. Deflect a sword strike with one button, stab with the other. Run to dodge the occasional bomb. Repeat. The deflect maneuver is such a gimme, there’s little reason to bother with new gadgets like smoke bombs and sleeping darts.

By sea!

Once the game’s overlong tutorial portion fades, players take the helm of a pirate ship, and it’s a refreshing moment. The world map opens far and wide, revealing many giant islands across the expanse of the West Indies. The resulting ocean-scape looks beautiful (when it doesn’t suffer from glaring pop-in issues, anyway).

Gaming diehards will likely compare this part favorably to the sea-obsessed entry in the Legend of Zelda series, The Wind Waker, which also featured a lot of island-hopping by way of pirate ship. Ubisoft has engaged in petty theft here—the pirates’ life for them, I suppose, and it’s fine by me.

Ubisoft goes one further than Zelda ever did by equipping its ships with guns and flaming barrels on all sides of the boat. At first blush, ACIV‘s open-seas combat is incredibly satisfying. You’ll turn and flank to get the best of your foes; your guns bang and pop with a great ruckus, while your crew shouts merrily throughout your battles. The simultaneous act of steering and shooting works pretty smoothly.

However, such dramatic open-seas battles also turn tepid over time, since the best tactic is simple and easy to repeat. Aim your side cannons at a certain point, fire, then hold down an “auto-aim” button for a stronger follow-up shot that hits automatically. The only challenge comes from facing overpowered foes and outposts who can quickly tear your ship apart in a battle of statistics. You’ll win that one not by careful steering and aiming, but by hitting up the shop for armor and bullet upgrades.

At the very least, the open-sea approach affords ACIV a real sense of enormity. Its individual islands already feel massive, made all the more daunting by the journey required to reach them. (The game’s fast-travel option shrinks repeat visits, thankfully.) But ACIV‘s quest repetition is only intensified by the feeling that the game’s islands all look pretty much the same. The same tropical trees, same rotted buildings on the coastline, same architecture filling out their interior cities—and worst of all, the same gorgeous, rolling hills in the distance that you don’t really traverse, since this game doesn’t come with a horse like ACIII did.

Also, once the game reveals its many fetch quests—assassin contracts here, templar hunts there, treasure search here, shard hunt there—you’ll feel like you’ve entered a late-’90s platforming game, forced to collect, for example, over a dozen keys to unlock a single door “whose treasure is surely worth it.” (Spoiler: It’s not.)

Kill or be killed

Buffering that single-player portion is another stab at Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, which will feel incredibly familiar to series fans. Once again, players face off as assassins in city-styled arenas, sneaking past computer-controlled characters while looking for their actual human foes. Make one wrong move and your foes might realize that you’re a human and drop the blade.

The biggest change is a new meter that builds once you get incredibly close to a rival; keep them in your sights for a while and you’ll get a ton more points for pulling off the kill (though also risk them getting wise to you and blocking your attempt). It’s a nice tweak to an otherwise ain’t-broke-don’t-fix entity. Otherwise, multiplayer sees a few new modes that only add superficial changes to the stealth-kill mix, like one in which players take turns hunting or being hunted.

The “wolfpack” mode returns as well, asking players to team up against computer-controlled foes, but again, ACIV‘s wimpy AI rears its head. A great co-op online mode needs legitimate terror and opposition, like in Left 4 Dead or Gears of War. This, on the other hand, doesn’t deserve much in the way of replay value.

There’s one other notable “addition” to multiplayer this time around: an in-game currency shop where players can spend real money to unlock everything from perks to character skins. Conversely, they can unlock all of the gameplay-specific bonuses with in-game points, but superficial stuff will always cost real cash. (Everyone, all together now: Arrrrrr.)

Time to abandon ship?

Were this the first—or even second—entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, it probably wouldn’t merit this level of scrutiny. The series’ best bits still feel fantastic here, like hopping from building to building with ease or pulling off a particularly brutal double-stab on a pair of moronic guards.