Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced review roundup: Remake fatigue has set in
Overview & Key Takeaways
Critics love Black Flag, but are divided on the quality of Ubisoft's new version of the classic game, and debate whether we need another remake
Critics are unanimous: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, first released in 2013, is a great game, one of the very best in Ubisoft's massively popular series. And most of them are happy to have it back in a new remake, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. But they're divided on the quality of the remake, and increasingly questioning why release schedules are dominated by so many remakes in the first place.
Despite this angst, the quality of the original game's pirate-adventure experience shines through in aggregate review ratings. Metacritic pegs the game at a very solid 84, while OpenCritic has it at an almost-great 87. In summary: good.
For some, Resynced's visual and other improvements only make a classic game better. In a five-star review, Dexerto's Jessica Filby calls it "a remake so perfect that it somehow makes one of the best Assassin’s Creed games even better" and "how all remakes should be done and arguably the most essential since Final Fantasy 7." Filby hails the new side quests, Officers, endgame, and the refined combat as improvements, only bemoaning the omission of the original's sequence challenges.
Not everyone agrees. For Gamespot's Jordan Ramée, Resynced is "a bad remake of peak Assassin's Creed." In a 7/10 review, Ramée says that "for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem." Ramée feels the way Resynced completely discards Black Flag's modern-day framing device and replaces it with another, optional, hidden side-story detracts from the story and wastes the potential it does have. Resynced "does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn’t use that cool stuff very effectively," Ramée writes. "It’s so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled."
PC Gamer's Morgan Park also thinks Resynced goes too far in its revisions. "A cleaned-up remaster might have been better than what Ubisoft has done here," Park writes in a 75% review, saying that "fundamental changes to combat, stealth, and encounter design reveal that this is essentially Black Flag stuffed inside Assassin's Creed Shadows." For Park, this approach "takes away more than it adds."
Beneath these questions of faithfulness to the original, there's a general sense of growing unease about the game industry's reliance on nostalgic remakes of past hits. Polygon's own Josh Broadwell is less moved either way by Resynced's changes, finding it to be a mostly surface-level remake whose main virtue is its "absolutely gorgeous" visual makeover. "I couldn't escape a feeling of cabin fever, though," Broadwell writes. "This old ship might not be dead in the water, but it isn't going anywhere, either."
This remake fatigue is most clearly articulated by Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen. Zwiezen likes most of Resynced's changes, but "can’t help but feel sad that the big new Assassin’s Creed is a remake of an Xbox 360-era game." Zwiezen expresses an existential worry "about what that means, not just for Ubisoft, but for the video game industry as a whole."
"Is Black Flag Resynced good? Yes, very good," Zwiezen concludes. "Does it indicate a good future for Ubisoft or the video game industry? No."
