All Hands On Deck: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Preview

Departing the Eastern Seaboard, Ubisoft have travelled down the coast of the United States and ended up in the Caribbean. Often the source of war and turmoil, with frequent wars between the European powers spilling halfway across the world and back again, it is perhaps more famous for piracy. The protagonist, Edward Kenway is a pirate.

Fairly quickly you will get a ship and a crew to call your own, the Jackdaw – a name with quite an amusing origin I won’t spoil – and be let loose to sail the high seas. It’s interesting to see just how jam-packed the waterways of the Caribbean are here, with plenty of ships and islands visible and nearby at all times.

Sailing out in practically any direction will give you things to do, from the tiniest point of tapping a button to pick up a stranded sailor and add them to your crew, to raiding trade ships or dropping a diving bell and exploring underwater wrecks for treasure.

It keeps you constantly active and engaged as you’re travelling from one location to another, but is just one aspect of what keeps the boat-play so fun. Navigation itself is as simple as can be, and you just your ship in the right direction and set the amount of sails you have open, from four levels. Switching between them is brilliantly quick, if a little unrealistic, so that you can go from a standstill to full tilt in a matter of seconds.

At full speed, the camera then pulls out from the third person view of Edward Kenway, to a view of the full ship, letting you take in how good the ship, waves, and surroundings all look. This is a pretty game on the PS4 and a wonderful environment to navigate, from the open waters to the hearts of cities, or the blazing sunlight to the quite impressively rendered tropical storms which can kick up.

Possibly the best twist to the boat handling makes itself apparent during combat. Shooting your various cannons is as simple as looking at them with the right stick, and lining up the cannonball arcs shown on screen, by turning the Jackdaw with the left stick. There’s no weapon selection and it just uses the appropriate weaponry, so that if you’re looking to the left then all the cannons on the left will fire, or straight ahead for the chain linked cannon shots, to rip through your prey’s sails.

Often you will be engaging in piracy, raiding the shipping lanes for supplies and loot. Though you can get some booty just from sinking ships, and grabbing the salvage which floats back up, there’s double the value for boarding and capturing a ship. You pull up alongside, fire grappling hooks and drag them closer, once you have disabled the ship to a sufficient degree. Then it’s time to leap to their ship and engage in combat alongside your crew.

Leading up to this, the gameplay is all incredibly fast paced, thanks to being able to switch from the fastest combat speed to no sails at all, and being effectively stationary, just by mashing the slow down button. For all intents and purposes, it lets you pull a handbrake turn in a boat and it is all the more brilliant for it!

This ability comes in particularly handy during the boat-stealth missions. Tasked with following a much larger ship through well patrolled waters, I had to stay in their blind spot to the rear with their lines of sight marked on the mini-map. This was a slight fly in the ointment, since I was then looking at the map in the bottom left corner of the screen much too often. Equally, it’s a silly game mechanic because a sailor could easily just look off the back of the boat, but I can forgive the lack of reality quite easily because of the ship’s handling allowing me to throw myself through the gaps in their lines of sight.

Heading to the city of Nassau on the island New Providence sees Kenway bumping into some piratical acquaintances, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach and Jack Rackham, helping them to free the settlement, declare it a pirate republic, and get a full crew for his ship. There’s quite a cast of famous pirates in this game, and a large chunk of the plot will revolve around Nassau and the retaliation from the British.

The on-land gameplay is much the same as it was before in the series. In the early sections of Nassau, I was clambering over buildings, taking out soldiers and rescuing pirates from imprisonment or death, to join my crew. A later mission saw me making my way through a dense, single-pathed jungle, hiding in the foliage and trees, and striking at the Spanish soldiers, on my way to their Galleon to take out their Captain. This stood in contrast to the typically open areas of Nassau or a sugar cane plantation which I wanted to raid.

At almost any point in the game, you can stop playing, take off your virtual reality Animus headset and wander around the office. There’s an intriguing over-world set in the Abstergo Industries, where you seem to be play testing the latest in a very successful line of games – Assassin’s Creed, funnily enough.

It takes part from the first person view, with a tablet screen taking up a small portion of the lower left part of the screen which also lets you interact with the world. Wandering around, you can listen in on a few discussions about the technology and the game, but you will also be able to hack into other people’s workstations and extract more nuggets of information about what is going on.

These might point back to what’s going on in the main game, as Edward Kenway isn’t solely focussed on Nassau and the collected pirates’ fight for freedom and independence from Britain, but also about unravelling what the Templars are up to in that part of the world. The over-world is certainly a side of the game which will let those that want to really dive into more of the lore and mysteries behind the AC franchise.

Coming out of my few hours with the game, there were only a handful of things which I found off-putting, and the main one of these is the number of collectables which will litter the map. There are song sheets to give your sailors more songs to sing, Animus data fragments, and Far Cry 3-style hunting for animal skins. Perfect for keeping the most compulsive of gamers busy, but I think it’s a little much to send me off after humpback whales or ocelots to make a second gun holster.

I’d much rather there were fewer collectables, and character upgrades were handled more traditionally or the way they are for the Jackdaw. There you can just buy new parts and upgrades using money and supplies you’ve looted, so that you can go toe-to-toe with the biggest warships the colonial powers might send your way.

Assassin’s Creed IV is shaping up to be a huge game, brimming with content and ways to keep you engaged. The land-based gameplay is bound to be familiar, but it’s a game of fighting out in the open seas and it really is a joy to play. Black Flag is exactly the kind of overhaul that the series needed to stay fresh and interesting.