The first saw a bad guy about to execute a pair of bound, kneeling pirates. Two of the encounters were decidedly more heroic. It was the former that kept pinging on my radar (side note: how many damn fights can even pirates get into, anyway? Hockey players must’ve evolved from pirates.), as one after another I’d make a beeline for the indicated hotspot, jump into a fight, stab a few opponents, and earn another small lot of hired hands to sail with.

I was told I could either hire them or win their service in exchange for helping them. Case in point: at the start of my Sequence adventure, I had to recruit a 14-man pirate crew for the Jackdaw while on an island port stop.

Sure, the art direction and geography conveys a great sense of scale and location (playing on the PS4 sure didn’t hurt, either) and the open-seas stuff gets downright tense (as Goldfarb will cover below), but the actual thread that pulls you through the Sequence seemed a bit lacking in weight and intensity. I spent a couple of hours sailing, roaming island ports, and platforming, and a lot of the time it simply felt like an endless series of time-filling fetch quests. Fortunately, it’s just one small slice of the campaign and so I remain optimistic, but for me, thar be murky waters ahead, matey.

And this is coming from someone who loved Assassin’s Creed II, skipped the rest of the Ezio Trilogy, and was turned off by the opening hours of AC III. We got a look at each unique facet of the game and made it home scurvy-free to report our findings.Ĭampaign on LandI played all of Sequence 03 in Black Flag and I must admit: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

Odds are, the full day we recently spent playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is the last crack at the pirate-y Templar adventure we’ll get before we review the final version this month.

Assassins creed 4 black flag theme