Played: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
This is three games, of wildly varying quality. The first is a very enjoyable (but also very silly) linear story about a Welsh pirate called Ed who kills a lot of people and is friends with Blackbeard and also stumbles across an ages-old conflict between the order of Assassins and a rival group called the Templars, but doesn’t really care about either (though he tends to be more aligned with the Assassins because they’re into the freedom to do shit, rather than the Templar-advocated freedom from the Big Bad Cruel World, and did I mention that he’s a pirate). There’s some personal growth in there, and it feeds weirdly into the events of Assassin’s Creed III, which took place a few decades later and had a much duller protagonist (and a Templar colonist villain who was the son of Ed). Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, Ed is actually just a memory being lived out by a software developer at a modern-day video game company called Abstergo Entertainment, which is actually just a front for the Templars/Ubisoft, who are still hell-bent on taking down the Assassins in the Year Of Luigi, 2013.
There are also Greek gods, a precursor race, and an immortal being called the Sage, who tries to kill the modern-day you (after Ed encounters him 300 years ago). If this all sounds hopelessly convoluted, it’s because it is. Over seven full titles (including, as you should, the two standalone expansions to Assassin’s Creed II and the HD port of the incredibly shonky Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, the only game so far with a female protagonist), the Assassin’s Creed mythos has eschewed a neat narrative in favor of a grotesque behemoth of a franchise, with at least three distinct layers of conspiracy, and little evolution in the core gameplay. Sort of. We’ll get to that. Regardless of context, though, Assassin’s Creed IV is still a killing simulator at heart.
This brings us onto the second game that AC IV is, and that’s a huge open world with dozens of contracts to fulfil, ships to sink, whales to harpoon and shipwrecks to explore. The main plot lasts a good ten hours, but it’s once that’s out of the way that the game really shines. The big iteration that AC IV introduces is naval combat, and it’s utterly thrilling; in fact, it’s the first game that’s prompted me to physically move my body in response to the on-screen action. The kinetic momentum is just intoxicating. Also, sea shanties. There are a lot of sea shanties. When the game opens up like this, it’s magnificent - there is a little too much pulling you back to the core plot to begin with, but once it’s over there’s still a lot of fun left.
And then. Well. Then, once you’ve had around thirty hours of swashbuckling fun, you can open up the in-game map and see that you have dozens of craftable upgrades, literally hundreds of collectible items, and an entirely pointless strategy minigame that relies on your online friends to really work properly. And it all starts to feel like a chore. This isn’t the first Assassin’s Creed game to do this - it’s a trend that’s escalated since the second instalment - but there are only so many times that you can hear the same NPC bark from someone who looks identical to another NPC seven miles away, or so many times that you can watch the same animation of Edward uncorking a message in a bottle, pulling out the parchment and pocketing it without reading it, or so many times that you can watch an animation of him kicking a treasure chest in the (always completely successful) hope that the lock is rusted enough that it’ll crack right off. Even if you pay close attention right from the first breath of this game, there’d still be a substantial amount of this padding to bore you to death.
There are minor rewards that actually change the game, of course - after completing the game, given that Edward is just a simulated memory, the option of hacking the simulation appears as you complete challenges (read: achievements). So if you collect all of the (never explained) “Animus fragments”, you might unlock the ability to control the in-game weather or time of day. Kill and skin enough monkeys, and you can turn all of the enemy characters into the Rabbids from Rayman. They’re usually purely cosmetic rewards - nothing that provides further exposition - but they somehow still hook you in. You’re still playing the same dumb hide and seek game, 70 hours in, because you might get the chance to helm a crew of skeletons.
Is this game worth playing? Absolutely, yes, even if it becomes downright necessary to ignore the percentage-complete meter after about thirty hours of playing (once you get to about 75%, the fun part of the game is over). It’s delightful to play, and innovative, and actually funny for once - there’s a modicum of levity to this game that’s noticeably absent from its predecessors. But don’t hold out for that skeleton crew. Pirates of the Carribbean will get you to that point a lot faster, and they have Geoffrey Rush.