{"id":225,"date":"2026-08-14T08:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/?p=225"},"modified":"2026-08-14T08:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:41:07","slug":"black-flag-resynced-is-a-bad-remake-of-peak-assassins-creed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/black-flag-resynced-is-a-bad-remake-of-peak-assassins-creed\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Flag Resynced Is A Bad Remake Of Peak Assassin\u2019s Creed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve been conflicted about Assassin\u2019s Creed Black Flag Resynced<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having now played Resynced, I don\u2019t think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin\u2019s Creed series, and Resynced doesn\u2019t change so much that that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you asked me what Black Flag is, I\u2019d 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\u2019s life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward\u2019s 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\u2019s life in hopes of finding where it\u2019s hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t know what the Observatory really is or why you\u2019re looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars\u2013and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character\u2019s life to Edward\u2019s is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what\u2019s an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it\u2019s one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series\u2013only the first two Assassin\u2019s Creed games do it better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you\u2019re experiencing a simulation of Edward\u2019s life via the Animus but doesn\u2019t provide any reasoning up front as to why you\u2019re doing it. The original game\u2019s modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion<\/em>. But you won\u2019t get this framing if you just play Resynced\u2019s story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows, not Assassin\u2019s 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\u2013the 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\u2019s lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ego theorizes that if these three pirates\u2019 stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that\u2019s not easy to find because it\u2019s 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\u2019ve also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and Eagle are fighting Ego, who the Guide and Eagle even are (it is a whole <\/em>thing, let me tell you), and what it means for you to be one of the Travelers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This bizarre mishandling of the framing device for Resynced\u2019s story encapsulates the remake\u2019s failings. It does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn\u2019t use that cool stuff very effectively. It\u2019s so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I adore what Resynced does for Anne Bonny, for example, a character who takes on an important role in the final chapters of Black Flag but is largely absent for most of the story. Resynced has Anne introduced as soon as Edward returns to Nassau at the very beginning of the game, and she regularly pops up in the story after that in reimagined cutscenes and brand-new missions that further flesh out her importance to Edward. It makes all of the already-great scenes involving her in the later chapters hit even harder. The same is true for Ed Thatch and Stede Bonnet, both of whom also get more screen time and brand-new missions that continue their storylines after their departure from Black Flag\u2019s story and give them a more fulfilling end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So why then does Resynced bother to add brand-new characters who have very little screentime and unrewarding finales to their arcs that leaves them feeling separated from Edward\u2019s tale? The remake is fixing the problem of Black Flag\u2019s old characters and then adding new characters who have the flaws that were just fixed in the original characters, preserving one of the original problems of Black Flag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resynced\u2019s other issues aren\u2019t nearly as severe, but they all add up and needle at you throughout the experience. Most are a result of trying to fit Black Flag into a new game engine. What the various teams across Ubisoft have been able to accomplish with Ubisoft Anvil is to be commended (Mirage and Resynced feel so much better to play than Origins), but it\u2019s still clearly an engine designed for an action-RPG, not a stealth-driven action-adventure. Edward\u2019s freerunning is better than the likes of Origins\u2019 Bayek or Odyssey\u2019s Kassandra, but both the mechanical depth and the feeling of his freerunning still fall behind Unity\u2019s Arno and the protagonists who preceded him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And while combat does at times feel like a modern take on the counter-heavy combat of Black Flag, the use of pistols, the rope dart, the sweeping kick, and the forward kick is clearly just a cleverly hidden version of the battle abilities from the RPG-style Assassin\u2019s Creed games\u2013there\u2019s a bit more strategy to using these equipment and skills in Resynced, but not enough to keep combat exciting across a 30-hour story given the poor enemy variety. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new animations and voicelines are hit-or-miss too. Many of Edward\u2019s new lines add excellent insight to his character during scenes where there previously was none, while some of the new lines\u2013especially his extremely pro-Assassin, anti-Templar one-liners that he spouts with every Assassin Contract\u2013feel like a mischaracterization that makes him oddly heroic during a portion of the game where he has to be a scumbag for the story to work. Brand-new cutscenes add more story, but at the cost of poor facial animations that look like wooden puppets talking to each other. Some of the cutscenes that were in the original game are also somehow worse, with strange facial hiccups (at least on Xbox Series X) distorting the longing glances, winks, smirks, scowls, and contemplative sighs that carried so much narrative weight in the original Black Flag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Resynced also gives Edward the ability to quietly crouch walk and slink behind cover anywhere, not just stalker zones, and incorporates some of Shadows\u2019 uses of weather and darkness to add new considerations to stealth, but the remake\u2019s outright removal of all tailing missions (which, admittedly were a pain point in the original game) means these improvements don\u2019t have much use. Social stealth is also back in Resynced (great!) but almost every mission that relied on those mechanics has been removed or changed, meaning there\u2019s little chance to engage with it (bad!). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, when it comes to the mass deletion of all mandatory tailing missions and changing almost every social stealth mission so that they no longer rely on stealth mechanics, Resynced feels like too big of a swing in the other direction, recreating Black Flag into a game like the action-packed adventures of Kassandra or Eivor. And that makes sense\u2013all of these games are made in the same engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The issue is that, unlike those games, Resynced isn\u2019t an RPG\u2013there are no ways for Edward to talk his way through problems, disguise himself, or create clever opportunities. He can only engage through the action part of the action-RPG formula. So instead of having missions with a wide variety and breadth of structure, you\u2019re still mostly doing the same thing over and over. Resynced might have been a stronger experience if only half of the social stealth-driven tailing missions were removed, as changing pretty much all of them and moving Edward\u2019s story in a more action-oriented direction simply shifts one problem into another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weird camera cuts and dramatic perspective shifts during assassination takedowns and chain kills also make it irritatingly tricky to keep track of enemies in enclosed spaces, like caves or the decks of smaller ships\u2013it\u2019s totally fine to have this in the wide-open locales of Origins\u2019 Egypt or Odyssey\u2019s Greece, but it clashes with Black Flag\u2019s structure. The game hasn\u2019t changed enough to fit the new game engine, which leads me to wonder why this wasn\u2019t just a brand-new pirate adventure during this time period that followed a new protagonist. Edward meets so many other Assassins! We didn\u2019t need to stick to the rigidity of his story again if it doesn\u2019t really fit the mechanics of this new game engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I could go on but the point remains: There are plenty of great changes in Resynced, but equally a ton of pain points in trying to force the Black Flag structure to fit into an engine designed for a very different type of Assassin\u2019s Creed. This makes Resynced less of a new gold standard for Edward\u2019s adventure, and more of a bizzaro-world variation of the original Black Flag. If you haven\u2019t played Black Flag (or at least don\u2019t revisit it often), you should play Resynced, because even though it doesn\u2019t feel like a faithful remake to me, it is still remaking a game that\u2019s already critically acclaimed. But if you have <\/em>played Black Flag, I\u2019m not sure if Resynced will hit you as hard emotionally as you\u2019re hoping for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All said, I regard Resynced with the exact same sentiments as Mass Effect Legendary Edition<\/a>. Resynced goes beyond the scope of a traditional remaster and adjusts the content of Black Flag to make improvements to the experience (what you\u2019d expect for a remake). But the downside to these fixes is that it highlights problems that weren\u2019t fixed or, even worse, new problems that didn\u2019t even exist in the original game. Resynced is a half-step toward something truly fantastic. If you play it, you will see the strengths of Black Flag. You will see why the original game was the de facto pirate video game for years<\/em>. But you will also find a remake that doesn\u2019t manage to take the crown from the very game that it\u2019s remaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been conflicted about Assassin\u2019s 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\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}