Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Review – Reviving the Franchise’s Best Era, More than a Decade After its PS4 Debut

The Golden Age of Piracy was also home to one of the single best titles in the entire Assassin's Creed franchise. Once a launch title for Sony's fourth console generation, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag took players to the high seas of the 1700s Caribbean and set them in the role of a brash pirate whose knowledge of being an assassin was about as refined as his knowledge of being thrifty with his coin. Now, more than a decade removed from the original title's release, does Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced deserve another shanty sung in its honor, or should this have been locked away in Davy Jones' locker?

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced opens much like its predecessor, with Edward Kenway, still the captain of a smaller vessel that's shifted from privateering to pirating by pure chance, murdering a traitorous Master Assassin by the name of Duncan Walpole, taking his name and creed, and trying to balance this duplicitous act of being both an assassin and a pirate. It's here that Edward learns of the existence of The Observatory, a mythical lsu site where one could remotely surveil another human, provided you happened to have a vial of their blood. Assassin's Creed has always included this overarching tale of aliens and futuristic technology (far removed from the Animus project that the series' antagonists helped pioneer) that might come as a surprise for those expecting a game all about singing shanties, shanking Templars, and guzzling rum.

While the story beats from Sequence to Sequence match the original narrative being told in Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Resynced reworks the flow of the narrative to better suit a decade's worth of feedback from the original release. Many tailing missions have instead been turned into clue-hunting investigations, where Edward pokes around a given area to dig up bloodstains or clues about where a target might be headed next. The walk-and-talk segments let players automatically follow their conversation partner around, rather than trying to keep at that awkward gait where walking feels too slow and freerunning is too quick for their counterpart to keep up. For the tailing missions that still exist in Black Flag Resynced, losing your mark doesn't necessarily mean starting that section over; alternative fail states let players get into a Templar scuffle and pick up a note hinting at the next location. These are all done organically in the narrative to help it flow more naturally, and you might not even notice these thematic changes until you are intimately familiar with the PlayStation 4 launch title.

Edward Kenway's lack of experience with the Hidden Blade is still evident here in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, with the tool solely being limited to takedowns, either from the unseen vantage of a proper assassin or as a lethal finisher once you break an enemy's guard. I, for one, am pleased with the change here, as I was guilty of accidentally switching away from my dual cutlasses far too often in combat and feeling like the equivalent of matching up a butter knife versus a blunderbuss. The downside here is that combat quickly devolves into a rush to chain light and heavy attacks against an enemy, just to get their defenses down and open them up for a lethal takedown. If you find the combat to be boring and want to get through it as quickly as possible, a simple combo of launching the rope dart at an enemy and dragging them in, followed by a leg sweep (R2+X on PlayStation), leaves most enemies open for an instant takedown. For the more hearty/nimble enemies, bringing a pistol sword to battle and using its signature heavy attack for free shots at the enemy works just as well to break their guard.

Far from the definitive collection of The Jackdaw's greatest tales, Black Flag Resynced ditches not only the multiplayer experience of the original title but also the story content that came as part of its season pass, namely Adéwalé's adventure through Port-au-Prince in the Freedom Cry expansion, as well as Aveline's brief trip up to Rhode Island. Most lamentably, this means the current generation of gamers will miss out on Olivier Derivière's excellent work on the Freedom Cry soundtrack.

The other glaring omission in Black Flag Resynced's narrative lies in the way it tries to tell its modern-day story. Gone are the interludes between chapters and the opening moments when players step away from Edward's memories in The Animus to explore a modern-day Abstergo headquarters. In its place are corrupted sequences within Edward's story that would feel out of place for someone who might only know Black Flag Resynced as being a historical pirate adventure. These moments, where players venture into a rift known as the Dark Animus, provide only a brief look into the technologies that the Assassin's Creed series was known for in terms of diving into the memories of one's ancestors, and instead focus on the regrets and alternate choices Edward Kenway could have made. What if Edward actually returned to his wife, Caroline, rather than spending his days privateering and pirateing in the West Indies? Regrettably, these Dark Animus moments don't veer the story into unexpected territory if one is already familiar with Kenway's tale, and instead serve as an unsuitable replacement for story content that was otherwise discarded with the engine change.

One of the best uses of Ubisoft's Anvil Engine is in the technology that helps bring the Caribbean to life. Atmos, Anvil's weather simulation model, can change from a breezy summer gale to torrential rainfall at a moment's notice as Edward sails the high seas. Even the ocean itself feels more alive as waves crash and push the Jackdaw around. Everything from the engine to the assets in the rendering pipeline has been reworked (and resynced) to create a vision of the West Indies that matches the power of the current console generation.

Baked lighting helped create the distinctive look of the original Black Flag (and is in part why Unity holds up as one of the best-looking Assassin's Creed titles, at least stylistically) and has been completely overhauled here in favor of ray-traced global illumination. The PlayStation 5 Pro doesn't have to compromise much between Graphics and Performance modes, settling on an upscaled 2160P image across all three modes, with the biggest difference being the target frame rate of 30, 40, or 60 FPS. Ray tracing is the default option here on PlayStation 5 Pro and powers global illumination across the board.

For a detailed analysis of the PC version and its performance, check out our tuning guide from Hardware.

2 of 9

Historically, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag was my favorite Assassin's Creed title almost solely because it felt the least like an Assassin's Creed game in terms of structure and felt more like a pirate adventure in the West Indies. That much still holds true in 2026, even with other titles perhaps nailing that feel of being a pirate more naturally, whether it's Ubisoft's other title, Skull and Bones, or the unexpected Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Everything from the way story missions play out to the melee and ship combats feels like a natural evolution of what Ubisoft Montreal brought to the world more than a decade ago. If you aren't one to let the omission of Black Flag's adventures of Aveline and Adéwalé sour the experience, you'll find that Black Flag Resynced has aged like a fine Caribbean rum.

[Editor's Note: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Review code was provided by the publisher.]

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