Black Flag Resynced Is A Bad Remake Of Peak Assassin’s Creed

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I've been conflicted about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced since it was announced. The original 2013 pirate action-adventure is one of my favorite games ever, so my immediate reaction to hearing it was getting a remake for current-era consoles was excitement. In that very first announcement video, Ubisoft said that Resynced would not reinvent protagonist Edward Kenway's tale, but that there would be large changes to combat, parkour, stealth, and the structure of the overall story. And while changes like that fall within the framework of what a remake is, I couldn't tell if these adjustments would mean Resynced still felt faithful to the original game. And regardless of whether or not it was, there was also the bigger question of if this remake would be better than Black Flag. Having now played Resynced, I don't think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed series, and Resynced doesn't change so much that that's no longer the case. The issue is that for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem. If you asked me what Black Flag is, I'd tell you it was a treasure hunt. You play as a normal employee of an entertainment company in the 21st century who is scrubbing through the memories of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate trying to make his fortune in the 18th century, via a machine called an Animus. Your mission is initially just to capture footage of Edward's life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward's memories draws the attention of your bosses. Turns out, Edward stumbled across someone who knew of a site called the Observatory during this period of his life, and your bosses want to know whether Edward ever found it himself. They task you with spending more and more time reliving Edward's life in hopes of finding where it's hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. You don't know what the Observatory really is or why you're looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars--and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character's life to Edward's is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what's an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it's one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series--only the first two Assassin's Creed games do it better. Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you're experiencing a simulation of Edward's life via the Animus but doesn't provide any reasoning up front as to why you're doing it. The original game's modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt. Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion. But you won't get this framing if you just play Resynced's story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional. Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin's Creed Shadows, not Assassin's Creed III like the original Black Flag. It continues the story of Animus users who have awakened as Travelers to fight against Ego, an artificial intelligence created by the Templars that is now training itself to become the perfect overlord of the human race. If you go out of your way to find them (like really out of your way--the game does not make it easy for you), you can find rifts that allow you to temporarily enter what I can only surmise is the Black Room, where Ego shows you how it would use details of Edward, Blackbeard, and Mary Read's lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. Ego theorizes that if these three pirates' stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king's pardon, and an Assassin who left the Brotherhood, and all three were ultimately rewarded with wealth and happiness for choosing to live as good little sheep, then perhaps more Animus users like you would be inspired to fall in line rather than embrace a chaotic life and seek out personal fame, fortune, and freedom. In Ego's eyes, the best way to guide humanity into a better future is if the ugliness of the past is erased and replaced with something that is safe and sober, but robbed of all reason and sapped of all spirit. This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that's not easy to find because it's not even marked on the in-game map. You just have to know where to look for these four rifts or spend hours scouring every corner of the Caribbean. And hopefully you've also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and

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Author

J

Published

July 8, 2026