Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Review

As I write this, I am twenty-six years old. Twelve year old me had very different tastes and looked for very different things in my video games. My favorite game of my twelfth year was Conker's Bad Fur Day. Now that I am an adult, and a father, I need something a little more than gratuitous violence and cock jokes in my virtual experiences. Watching the suggested sex scenes in GTA just doesn't give me the same sort of excitement that it did back when my voice was dropping. The fact that my tastes are changing with my age is exactly why Assassin's Creed 4 is so good. I get plenty of violence, suggested sex, and a well-built game that adds a mature sci-fi angle and a detailed history lesson to boot. It's like playing a social studies textbook, with an upgradable pirate ship.

A lot of my favorite games are my favorites because they ask unique questions about the future of technology, and the morals that get tested as a result. Mass Effect for example, asks if a justifiable genocide could ever truly be the most humane option, Deus Ex challenges the player to decide if the information that the human race receives should be controlled and Bioshock asks what would happen if a city free of god, government and taxes really did exist. Assassin's Creed 4 brings their animus machine to the masses, putting you in the shoes of a new tech hire at a corporation whose goal it is to record actual history by taping their employees' experiences in the animus. The idea is that you login to the animus, relive one of your ancestor's memories, and then make the actual historical events into a movie. Real history as entertainment. It sounds like the greatest invention ever until your boss starts changing dates around, altering and photoshopping real historical events to make them more exciting to a paying audience. This is where the game got morally grey for me, and super interesting. 

Assassin's Creed games always consist of two timeline extremes; the near-future technology revolution and the distant past. Black Flag is simply the most believable pirate experience I have ever had, including movies and books. Ubisoft went the extra mile to ensure that every pirate's backstory was historically accurate, including the details of real battles and untimely ends. Obviously, the narrative about Edward Kenway is fiction, but it is woven into the very true story about the pirates of the Caribbean. Instead of portraying Blackbeard as a mythical, undead water god like every other depiction, in Black Flag he is just a man with a lot of bravery, a lot of crew members, and a hate of colonial governments. So when Blackbeard does something truly remarkable in AC4, it feels so much more intense, because you know he is just a man, and you know that what you are seeing in the game really happened. It is an achievement that I haven't ever seen before in a video game, except for others in this series. 

The parkour controls are the best that they have ever been and this is the busiest sandbox that I've played in a while. Gold is difficult to obtain so big upgrades feel immensely satisfying when you can finally afford them and the swordplay has adapted to the addition of guns seamlessly. Listing the good and bad things about a game like this is unnecessary because the art that has been presented here has to be witnessed, occasional frustrating escort missions be damned. Black Flag is incredible, and marks the high point in a franchise that has only recently garnered my full attention. Can't wait for the next one.