Setting sail is more compelling than stabbing in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag

I’d guess I got halfway through Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, and I still couldn’t give you a succinct plot summary.

It’s not that Black Flag is lacking in interesting characters or topics. If anything, the game is crammed over-full with features and potential plot arcs, many maddeningly under-explored. Black Flag is overflowing with things that would, in a more restrained title, be enough to carry it on their own – naval battles! Stealthy assassinations! The story of the short-lived Pirate Republic of Nassau! The exploitation of the New World by imperial powers!

And let’s not forget the modern-day conspiracy drama, just in case there wasn’t already enough material in the historical narrative. Better still, let’s – it’s not bad by any means, but it’s mostly a cheeky tweak at the gaming industry itself.

Protagonist Edward Kenway is a layabout on a rambling mission: get rich quickly. Whenever you’re at the helm of his stolen Jackdaw, Black Flag picks up the pace. But whenever he gets dragged back into the hoary old conflict between smug Assassins and sneering Templars – usually after some bizarrely self-righteous criticism about following a higher purpose by carrying on an endless and to all appearances pointless clandestine war – Black Flag, well, flags behind.

The thing is, assassination hasn’t been the star of Assassin’s Creed for quite some time. The series’ increasingly fleshed-out open worlds have crowded it out; past titles have seen you spending at least as much time managing local politics or playing at tycoon as quietly disposing of inconvenient targets. But in those cases the assassination was always the climax of gradual buildup; the other stuff was the distraction. Black Flag may be the first title where you really just want to tell the Assassins to buzz off and get back to the plundering.

Part of this is that the world ashore simply can’t match the world at sea. Most of Black Flag’s cities are poorly suited for parkour or social stealth, with scattered dwellings and empty streets lacking in large crowds. Most feel more rural than urban, and the lack of fast-travel ashore requires you to spend quite a bit of time getting about. They simultaneously feel too large and too small, too policed by habitually suspicious guards and too scarcely populated by anyone else.

Kenway’s enormous arsenal and fearsome allies encourage a brash shoot-your-way-out approach in the absence of nuanced stealth mechanics. Unfortunately, allies are available for side missions but scarce otherwise, and the game frequently demands stealth by placing instant-failure alarm bells near guards who sensibly run for them at the first sign of trouble. When you load a protagonist down with up to four pistols, a brace of swords, and a pair of hidden blades, requiring them to creep from bush to bush like a frightened bird is a strange choice.

Things liven up out at sea. Black Flag’s sailing controls are surprisingly fluid – selecting weapons is as simple as looking at them and giving orders to fire. Battles with ships of the line or coastal fortresses are stirring affairs (aided by a dynamic weather system). Mandatory boarding actions once a ship is disabled are occasionally clunky – the parkour controls often kick in at the worst moments when you really just want to stab someone or run to a crewmate in trouble – but can usually be skipped if you’re willing to send a ship to the bottom with another volley of cannon. Even tailing a ship through fog feels more enjoyable than eavesdropping on foot, if only for the novelty factor.

The game’s straddling of nautical adventure and shore-bound skullduggery is also curiously segregated in bizarre ways. You can hire dancers and pirates ashore to aid you with various tasks, but your crew aboard ship is a purely generic resource with no customization potential whatsoever – a fancy sort of health bar. You might amass a formidable crew aboard ship, but they’ll rarely step in to help you on land in battle or otherwise, as this presumably violates some obscure portion of the pirate’s code.

As for the open-world element, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly the Caribbean is a fascinating setting and Black Flag’s enormous world is filled with verdant isles, shipwrecks you can explore with a diving bell, and isolated plantations and settlements ripe for plundering. Diving, whaling, destroying shore fortresses and raiding naval convoys are entertaining ways to pass the time. But far too much of Black Flag’s open-world content is simply collectible-hunting: Mayan statuary, chasing sea shanties, Animus fragments, and the world’s most prolific writer of bottled manuscripts.

But we’ve talked enough about mechanics: the plot is no less muddled.

Black Flag’s plot lacks the tight central narrative of prior Creed titles. Edward Kenway is introduced as a small-time pirate who stumbles into the age-old Assassins-vs-Templars plot after a rogue Assassin shanks his captain. He joins up first with the Templars by slipping into the fellow’s shoes and sticks around just long enough to learn about the latest mystical MacGuffin known as the “Observatory,” a precursor super-NSA capable of spying on any living person on the planet. Then, unsatisfied by the pay, he promptly jumps ship.

Our stalwart hero: a man whose entire motivation consists of “get rich quick and easy”. He doesn’t get much better for a long time, a hanger-on in bigger stories. But at least he’s not nearly as self-righteous as this game’s versions of the Assassins, whose mumblings about freedom and a higher cause are positively eye-rolling compared to the raucous pirate characters. Of course, the latter are no less willing to slit throats, but their doomed quest to build a pirate republic in the Carribean gets precious little screen-time amidst Kenway’s obsession with the big score that will never come.

Kenway’s an unrepentant scoundrel with a certain easygoing charm to counteract his amorality, but he can’t compete with his supporting cast, a colorful rogue’s gallery of piracy’s celebrities. Worse yet, the game’s focus is schizophrenic, repeatedly sidelining potentially interesting plot arcs for busywork, when it doesn’t outright forget about plot points. His freebooter companions drift in and out of his story whenever they require his services for this or that act of thuggery, while he meanders on aimless and static. His interest in getting rich quick is used to string him between plot sequences with hunts for the Observatory, even when by all rights he should be more than set with his takes. An especially infuriating sequence has him capture a governor with a king’s ransom, but put the fortune aside to use it for ransoming away a man who might get him access to the Observatory – and then when the job goes bad, the decoy escapes and the rest of the ransom is never mentioned again.

As for villains, there’s precious little to say, because frankly they either get no characterization or seem positively reasonable – and not in the series’ traditional fashion of a misguided idealist. Kenway’s angry rant at a dying Commodore about the man’s decision to sink a harbor’s worth of pirate vessels rings hollow when one considers that said pirate crews were intending to break out, all but requiring you to massacre half a garrison of redcoats in the process.

Little about Black Flag says it should be an Assassin’s Creed game. Even the marketing emphasized the piracy, to say nothing of a plot that has precious little use for either the Assassins or their Templar rivals for much of its running time. It bears the Assassin’s Creed name seemingly because it operates in the same general setting – and almost certainly because it would be easier to guarantee sales than with a fresh franchise.

It’s a shame, too. When Black Flag isn’t preoccupied with serving two masters and remembers to zero in on exuberant high-seas adventure, it carves out a distinctive niche all its own.