REVIEW: ‘Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced’ Is A Worthy Re-Rigging

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is a highly worthy re-rigging of Ubisoft’s 2013 masterwork, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Completely rebuilt from the ground up in the Anvil Engine, the remake faithfully reconstructs everything that made the original game special while tuning it up to modern gaming standards and adding a bevy of great new content.

The drunkard Edward Kenway (Matt Ryan) left his wife, Caroline, in 1715 to live a life of adventure as a privateer. She made him promise to return to her in England in no longer than two years’ time, but privateering quickly turned to piracy, and Edward’s lust for riches and freedom found him fast friends with the most famous pirates of the day: Ed “Blackbeard” Thatch, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Benjamin Hornigold, Jack Rackham, and James Kidd among them.

His greed and ego drive his service to the growing pirate republic that he and his friends have fought the Spanish and English alike to maintain as a free nation under no crown. But rumors of pardons from King George I are tearing the pirates of Nassau apart. Meanwhile, a fateful encounter with an Assassin sets Edward at a crossroads between his ego and a greater purpose.

Black Flag Resynced makes an already amazing story even better with new quests.

Whether you’ve played Black Flag before or this is your first time meeting Edward, the story of Black Flag Resynced is great. It’s one of gaming’s best, in fact. It remains unadulterated compared to the original, with substantially enhanced graphics and character models, though they are far from perfect. Faces are often lifeless and blocky-looking, and the middling lighting and rain effects are frequently distracting.

The story is also seriously enhanced in Black Flag Resynced thanks to the addition of several big new side quests and storylines. Throughout your adventure, opportunities to recruit newly added ship officers to your brig, the Jackdaw, provide a slew of new quests. Each of the new officers has their own rich story to discover, all of them interesting and fulfilling. The side character Stede Bonnet also receives an expanded set of quests, and a full new post-game quest line offers a very satisfying epilogue to a journey well-played.

Once each new ship officer is recruited formally to join the Jackdaw, they bring with them new upgrades for naval combat. The new upgrades make a massive difference in how you can tactically approach naval combat, which in itself feels as familiar and satisfying as ever.

The upgrades include new fire modes that make big differences in battles, but require you to be tactical about which fire mode you use when, since they trade off power for distance or reload time. There is also a new “perfect brace” to unlock that substantially reduces the damage you take if you time things just right.

Naval combat is as familiar and satisfying as ever.

Naval combat is still a dance of balancing attacking, turning, and speeding up or slowing down, while navigating multiple enemies at once, poor weather, rogue winds, and the need to constantly board battered ships to repair your damage mid-battle. It gets old from time to time, since the cycle of most battles is always the same. But there’s so much else to do all the time that by the time you get back aboard the ship, you’ll be ready again for another row.

The new quest tracking system is also great. On the game map, every quest is neatly organized in a toggleable menu by mission type: main quests, Assassin contracts, crew missions, side quests, etc. There is an annoying tendency for the wrong quest to find itself highlighted, because missions don’t become directly selectable on the map until after they’ve already begun.

This makes it harder to use the new autonavigate feature that sets the Jackdaw on an automatic path towards your objective. You can only autonavigate to manually selected locations, which is counter-intuitive against the brightly selected official mission symbols that you often mean to travel towards. The neatly organized list of area objectives that made treasure hunting all the easier in the original remains too, but it’s often hard to select on the map over all of the other selectable symbols crowded around them.

Stealth is not highly prioritized in Black Flag Resynced.

Assassin’s Creed has struggled as a franchise to properly balance action and stealth. Black Flag Resynced improves the stealth mechanics compared to the original, including the ability to crouch anywhere, at any time. It puts the game in line with recent games in that regard. But Black Flag Resynced often overemphasizes its action-first nature, despite many missions originally designed to encourage stealth.

It’s a huge improvement that breaking stealth no longer causes desynchronization, except in one specific late-game situation where it makes contextual sense. If you fail to successfully eavesdrop on a target, or an enemy spots you while you’re supposed to be tailing them, you instantly enter a combat situation, and the objective description changes to fit.

But like in most recent Assassin’s Creed games, if you were hoping to play the scenario stealthily, there is no way to reset the situation. You can’t even leave the area and restart, like you often could in games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game badly needs an option to restart from the last checkpoint, as the original had. Your only option is death, which is tedious.

The combat is a bit repetitive but well streamlined for quick action.

Many missions are clearly designed for you to approach them stealthily, but remaining hidden throughout a mission is often nearly impossible. Even with the stealth difficulty set to the easiest option, guards will constantly catch you because there are so many of them everywhere all the time. Plus, why be patient and stealthy when the second you mess up, you won’t get a chance to try again? It feels like the game is pushing you to just run right into battle most of the time.

The combat is pretty decent. It’s a simplified version of the combat in the recent Assassin’s Creed games. There is only one attack button, which can be charged for a heavy attack or tapped for light ones. The combat is based on reducing enemies’ shields until they are vulnerable enough to either chip at their health or insta-kill them with a takedown. It’s meant to mimic the counter-takedown system from the original game that allowed for basically infinite kill chains once you got things rolling.

Kill chains aren’t infinite; they’re limited by the weapon you have equipped and its maximum number of takedowns. But with one-button quickfire options for your gun and ropedart, as well as a kick and a sweep move that instantly enable takedowns, you can theoretically chain together creative combat moves.

However, the enemies feel inconsistent with what moves they’re vulnerable to. You also cannot cancel attacks, which means if you’re mid-attack when an enemy strikes with a move you’re meant to parry or dodge, you will just get hit by it every time.

Black Flag Resynced is by far the definitive way to play the game.

Assassin’s Creed enemy archetypes have always been designed so that each enemy type has moves they’re invulnerable to and moves they’re weak against. Too many enemy types feel like they have no vulnerabilities, which makes fighting them tedious. Or it feels random whether an enemy will take a hit. When the combat is flowing, it’s at least fun, though a bit repetitive. Especially since there are far too many enemies in most areas.

It is, however, probably for the best that the combat is as simplified as it is. The developers of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced have been abundantly clear in the run-up to the game’s release that it is an action- and narrative-focused experience, not an RPG. Keeping things simple with a limited set of moves and a limited set of weapons to unlock or buy keeps the focus in Black Flag Resynced on what you came there for: piracy and a good story.

This isn’t a knock on the RPGs in the franchise by any means, and maybe Resynced would have worked as an RPG too, but being able to jump right into the fray and feel perfectly at home, as the original game did, is very satisfying. The removal of the modern-day segments from the original game also helps streamline the experience so you don’t have slow, outdated segments breaking up the action. In their place are new Animus elements that are fully optional.

While the gameplay has its hiccups, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is a fantastic way to experience the life and times of Edward Kenway. The game looks beautiful for the most part, plays smoothly, and has a rich story with deep characters and thrilling adventure. It’s by far the definitive way to play the game, and with everything newly added, it even surpasses the original.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced releases on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on July 9th, 2026.