Is This The BEST PIRATE Game Ever Made?

Personal Reflection on Pirate Games

"I love pirate games. I'll play just about anything, even vaguely pirate-themed, no matter how crappy it looks because there's just one undeniable fact in this life: pirates are cool. At least the fictionalized version of the pirate is cool. I'm talking about terrorizing the Spanish Main, swashbuckling, drinking Grog, digging up buried treasure, exploring Tropical Islands, and finding SK skins of both the regular and reanimated variety and the sea shanties. Come on, the sea shanties, it's all great. So, it's kind of a shame that there are not a lot of games that try to immerse the player in the pirate fantasy. When I was a kid, I was always on the lookout for a good pirate game. One of my favorites and probably the classic example of the Pirate game was Sid Meier's Pirates. You can't talk about video games with pirates without mentioning that game cuz it's the game that codified a lot of the tropes and mechanics that a pirate game would inevitably have. It's a great simulation but it doesn't capture the fantasy of being a pirate, though, you know? The adventure, the actual feeling of boarding a ship or digging for buried treasure, is all a little too abstract in Pirates. 

I certainly don't hold that against the game; it's pretty old, but it's still fun as hell even now. It's just the technology wasn't there to create a truly immersive pirate experience at the time. So, a lot of games followed Pirates, a lot of them expanded on that formula but took it in different directions like the great Monkey Island series. They're pirate-themed adventure comedies but the third game did have Sid Meier-like ship combat which was pretty cool. A few years later, and this is kind of a deep pull, but uh, it's always stuck with me. I played what may be the first game with 3D ship-to-ship combat played from a third-person perspective and it came out of one hell of an unlikely place in Sly Cooper 3: Honor Among Thieves, a cartoon mascot game for the PlayStation 2. There's, I'm not joking, a pirate-themed level where you sail a boat and engage in naval combat and it was much better than it had any right to be. We were almost there with the technology. Assassin's Creed 3 may have been a bit of a mess overall, but if there's one thing I got right, it was the naval combat with the proper ships. All the pieces were in place for a fantastic Pirate game. All they had to do was make it happen, easier said than done but uh, Black Flag more than pulled it off."

Reflection on Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag

"Black Flag wasn't just a big improvement over the previous game, it may be one of the high water marks of the entire series. Originally, it was thought of as kind of a spin-off like how Assassin's Creed 2 got Brotherhood and Revelations. Ubisoft must've realized the good thing they had and officially announced the game as Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. It was the game a lot of pirate fans dreamed of and a strong contender for the best pirate game ever, even though it's now over 10 years old, which sounds crazy even saying it. This is an Assassin's Creed game that holds up right from the start. It's a very different take on the series. Instead of a long-drawn-out intro, Black Flag just gets straight into a short tutorial that introduces you to the game's protagonist, Edward Kenway. By this point, the series had fallen into a bit of a predictable rhythm with its prologues: you play as an outsider, experience their life up to a certain point, and then you stumble into some kind of misfortune through circumstances and you have to join the Brotherhood of Assassins along the way. We get some platitudes about how 'nothing is true, everything is permitted' and some strange justification for why sneaking up behind somebody and stabbing them is the best solution. Usually, this means sitting through a bunch of drawn-out cutscenes before getting into the actual meat and potatoes of the game, and Assassin's Creed 3 effectively did this twice, so something had to change with number four. Black Flag skips all of that. You're just a random pirate and your ship crashes without knowing what's going on. 

You kill an assassin, you steal his clothes, and you pretend to be him. That's how you get access to the hidden blade, and they explain away all of the parkour by you being a pirate who worked the riggings of your ship monkeying around precarious platforms. That's just a thing that pirates do, I think. Acceptable, certainly different at least, um, and that was appreciated at the time. It's a fantastic way to start the game cuz things get going real quick. You're learning things at the same time Edward is, and it makes the opening of the game quite a bit of fun. You eventually find out that the Assassin you're impersonating is a turncoat. He joined up with the eternal enemies of the Assassins, the Templars. Edward gets found out, and the game progresses from there. The Assassins versus Templar fight takes a refreshing backseat for most of this game, instead putting its focus on the creation and eventual dissolution of the pirate utopia of Nassau and the many famous pirates who were involved like Jack Rackham, Charles Vane, Black Bart, and Blackbeard, among many others. The Assassin's Creed games often struggle with how they present history, but at least to me, Black Flag is probably one of the most successful. It's got a wide range of interesting historical figures who are both recognizable but also fairly complex compared to the sometimes real black-and-white villains and heroes you get in the series. They're whitewashing some stuff cuz they were all pretty much despicable killers, but this game has that anti-authority tone that works in its favor. It's not a dry presentation of history that sometimes does happen in the series. It's entertaining and legitimately interesting."

Gameplay Mechanics and Features

"The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting, to be fair. It's set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of piracy in and around Cuba, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. It's one of the most beautiful locations of all time in an Assassin's Creed game, and it's a place that's just a joy to be in because it's almost always picturesque in some way. The game is split between your standard Assassin's Creed stuff where you're climbing buildings, sneaking around, dispatching enemies, and engaging in horribly one-sided fights, mostly the same as the previous games, with a few new things to mix it up like being able to equip multiple pistols at once. The part that makes Black Flag unique is when you take the wheel of your ship. It's that it's the naval parts of Assassin's Creed 3 blown up into a full game where you can sail around, rob shipping vessels, attack forts, or just explore and listen to a few sea shanties. It's all really impressive looking even now. Yeah, the waves don't quite compare to Sea of Thieves, but they do look really good, and the ability to just stop a ship, get off the wheel, and suddenly you're free to just walk around is kind of mind-blowing. Sailing into any major city like Havana or Port-a-Prince still forces you to sit through a loading screen, but any little settlements you stop at let you transition from sailing to walking around on foot totally and seamlessly. 

It's honestly like magic when it happens and also only a few years prior would have been completely impossible. The difference between piloting a ship and walking on foot is just too extreme. They're like completely different modules in any game before this, but this game lets you switch whenever and it's perfect. The naval combat stuff is also really good. You can tell they were heavily inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates because it pretty much plays out the same way. It's just the presentation is way more dynamic. The game makes it feel like you're commanding this giant behemoth of a ship. It takes a long time to turn, it can only fire its main battery of cannon from the port and starboard or left and right if you're not hip to the naval lingo. It adds a layer of tactical depth to the combat cuz positioning is key. You have to be at the right spot and angle to hit your enemy, and if you miss, it's going to take a while to reload. So firing at the moment you get the perfect shot, it's essential. There are a few things as satisfying as letting loose an entire broadside of cannon fire into an enemy ship with perfect accuracy. Like just feels great. Along with the regular cannons, there are also mortars, swivel guns, for targeting weak points, chain shots for destroying sails, and a ram for, well, ramming. It's a relatively simple system all told. There's not a lot else to it, but it's just so much damn fun."

Gameplay Variety and Immersion

"It's the little things that make this game feel special. Like when you board a ship, they could have easily just made it a cutscene but they put in that little extra bit of effort. It made it the grapple a ship in-game, and then you're free to get on the enemy ship any way you want. If you want to grab a rope and swing over, you can. If you'd rather climb on the rigging and sneak on from above, you can do that too. The combination of stealth action and ship combat made Black Flag one of the most varied Assassin's Creed games. You're never stuck doing any one thing for too long, and it keeps things from getting stale. This is pre-Unity AC, though, so the sneaking can be a little awkward, but the game does make the stealth a little less annoying by putting tall grass all over the place and making most stealth areas relatively open-ended. You're spending a lot of this game in sneakier parts, moving through jungles and plantations, so there's at least a lot of cover, which solves a lot of the problems the older games in the series had with sneaking. If there's one thing that doesn't hold up about the game though, it is the trailing missions. There are too many of them, and they are front-loaded. When you get to Havana early in the game, you're pretty much stuck in the city for a while, and it's easily the least interesting part of the game from a gameplay perspective. It feels like Assassin's Creed on autopilot, just a long mission where you follow a guy around without being spotted, and then more of that mission, you follow another guy without being spotted, and another guy. A lot of guys are following in this part. It's not great, but once you're out of Havana, the game opens up and it gets a lot better."

Reflection on Modern-Day Segments

"Another part of the game that is kind of a drag is the modern-day segments. They try to do something different with these by making you a game tester at Abstergo Entertainment. The little insider jokes about game development and the whole meta-joke where you're playing a game about playing a game, it's kind of interesting, but these parts go on for too long. They can't be skipped, and they just drag the game down, especially on replays. There's not a lot of it; you spend about 2 hours in the modern day compared to the Animus simulation, but it's 2 hours too long. I know complaining about the modern-day segments in Assassin's Creed games is a little cliché, but there's a reason everybody does it. It was bad back then when it felt like there might be a point to all these segments, but it's especially bad now that we know there isn't one. None of the modern-day stuff goes anywhere. All this stuff about the Sage and the Instruments of the First Will goes nowhere. Sure, the Assassins versus Templar story ends up being the same old stuff, but at least in the past, there are characters to care about. Edward is easily one of the best protagonists in this series, and the hidden bad guy is one of the best antagonists, even if he's tragically underutilized. At the end of the day, Black Flag is another kind of nothing story for the series, but as a pirate power fantasy, it does not get any better than this."

Reflection on the Scope and Content

"I've only just scratched the surface of stuff you can do here too. Outside of combat, you can hunt animals for resources, search for buried treasure, explore underwater shipwrecks, do your best Ahab impression, and harpoon yourself a white whale away. There's also an entire hideout that's your base, and it can be upgraded in various ways, it's not the worst thing in the world. It's a game jam-packed with content, but it's not overwhelming like the later AC games. It's just about the perfect length for a game like this. It's not short, but it doesn't go on way past the point where it starts to get repetitive. It helps that if you want, you can basically ignore the main story and just sail around, upgrade your ship, and do pirate stuff. When it gets to the Assassin's Creed lore, the game does lose a little bit of its luster, but that's honestly only a small portion of the game, so it's not a huge deal. It's all just a lot of fun to play, but it's the atmosphere that keeps me coming back. Wandering on a colony, listening to parrots, and the sound of ships at the port while drunks are singing songs at the local tavern, is just a fun one-world to be in. 

Even now, the game is just regularly stunning to look at. The virtual tourism aspect of the game is top-notch, as is the music. If you're doing a pirate game, you've got to have that proper Pirates of the Caribbean sound, and this game knows its audience. It knows what the people want: sea shanties. Man, they are good. Anytime I hit up a town, I'm always on the lookout for more music sheets to get new songs for my crew to sing. It's kind of collectible I can get behind. It's just a great game all around, and it takes all the positive parts of Assassin's Creed games and just throws in some groundbreaking naval combat. All this is on top of one of the best settings this series has ever seen, period. Yeah, some things don't hold up to the best, but for the most part, it is a fantastic game that just stands right up there with the best games of the series. While we're talking about it, we might as well bring up the forgotten little brother of this game, Assassin's Creed Rogue. It's smaller in scope and doesn't have the tropical beauty of Black Flag, but as a game that's more Black Flag, it's pretty solid. Instead of the Bahamas, you get the North Atlantic and the Hudson River Valley. And if we're talking about visuals, the river valley cannot be beaten. It's a more congested place than anything in Black Flag, but those autumn vibes are just off the charts. 

The story is interesting too because you play as a Templar for once, and they're not portrayed as cartoonish villains. They're relatively sympathetic for most of the story. It's overall a lesser game than Black Flag, but it still holds up even if it's a lot less pirates. That's all that matters here anyway. The thing about pirate games is that there is no genre. There's nothing that binds these games together or makes them the same. Sid Meier made a simulation game that's a pirate game. The Monkey Island games, they're adventures. Skies of Arcadia, it's a pirate game that's an RPG. And hell, so is Pillars of Eternity 2. The former is JRPG, and the latter is not, but both are RPGs. Very different games even within the same genre. Technically, there's no hard and fast definition of these games. It's one of those 'know it when you see it' type situations. Though in my mind, there's no other game that is as much of a pirate game as Black Flag is. It's got everything you could want from a pirate experience and some Assassin's Creed stuff tacked on too, but that doesn't detract from the experience. It probably would have been a better pirate game without some of the Assassin's Creed stuff, and that's not a dunk on Assassin's Creed. 

I say that as a fan of the series. But this is the reason why, at least as a concept, Skull and Bones had so much potential. Imagine if they just did the thing everyone wanted and made the next Pirate game that was essentially Black Flag without the Assassin's Creed baggage. It could have been the pirate game to beat all pirate games. Instead, we got this dumb live service slop. It's a strict downgrade from Black Flag in nearly every way. Even the ship combat isn't as good. How did they screw that up? These are the guys who created it. But rather than mourn what Skull and Bones could have been, it's probably a lot better to just celebrate what Black Flag is. It's the best pirate game ever. Out of every Assassin's Creed game, it's the one I go back to the most because of its impeccable sense of place, the gorgeous setting, and the amazing sailing. Even as old as it is, every time I step up to the wheel to pilot the ship and it zooms back to show me controlling this giant boat with tons of sailors running around on it, I'm like, 'Yeah, a pirate's life for me.' Maybe I'm just easily impressed. I don't know, but this game still just blows me away."

Outro

"And that's all for today. Leave us a comment, and let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time right here on Speed Tool."