Quick Verdict
I played the original Assassin’s Creed back when it launched and loved it, but somehow I never returned to the franchise. Part of that was World of Warcraft eating my life during the early Assassin’s Creed era, and part of it was that I’ve never truly been a huge fan of massive open-world games. Black Flag was always the one that nagged at me, though, because there really aren’t many well-done pirate games out there. So when Ubisoft confirmed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, I knew it was finally time to experience Edward Kenway’s story for myself. It didn’t let me down.
With about 40 hours played on a PlayStation 5 Pro, roughly 20 to roll credits on the main story and another 20 spent on side quests and general pirating around the seas, I can say Resynced is a great experience, even if a few blemishes stop it short of the heights of single-player story-driven games like The Last of Us. The comparison that kept popping into my head while playing was Ghost of Yōtei and Ghost of Tsushima, except instead of being a samurai, you’re a pirate. If that sounds appealing, this is an easy recommendation.
Parrot Talk
You know, over the years, Ubisoft has become a bit of a meme in certain gaming communities. The games are full of open-world bloat, “Ubisoft bugs,” and so on, or at least that’s how the story goes. I’ll admit that part of those discussions kept me away from Ubisoft games outside of The Division, a franchise I love, and it doesn’t help that Assassin’s Creed games come so frequently that it’s hard to keep track of what’s what. Since Star Wars Outlaws mostly let me down, I expected the worst going into Black Flag. I assumed it wouldn’t be my type of game and that I’d walk away calling it a pretty mediocre experience.
The reality is that a lot of the online discourse around Ubisoft feels like bandwagon riders parroting the same lines over and over. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is an extremely polished remake, and it rarely feels like a cynical nostalgia play. There are some minor bugs here and there, but outside of one major one I’ll get into later, it was pretty much smooth sailing across 40 hours. All of this is to say that people seem to be unnecessarily harsh toward Ubisoft these days, and I’m not entirely sure it’s justified.
Kenway or the Highway
Going into the game completely blind, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Edward doesn’t even start off as a real Assassin. He’s a privateer-turned-pirate chasing gold and glory, and there’s real growth for him throughout the story, the kind that feels organic and makes sense rather than something the plot forces on him. Watching that arc play out over 40 hours is what carried me through, and I loved the characters and the story, even if the storytelling isn’t quite 10 out of 10.
The supporting cast around Edward is just as strong, with different personalities and stories that fit the theme. Blackbeard and Charles Vane were my favorites, the latter helped considerably by Ralph Ineson’s voice work, and James Kidd and Anne Bonny round out a crew I genuinely wanted to spend time with. The voice acting is strong across the board, and I appreciated how deeply Ubisoft tapped into real-life pirate lore, weaving actual figures from the Golden Age of Piracy into Edward’s story.
Fresh Off the Boat
Since I never played the original, I honestly can’t tell you which scenes are from 2013 and which are new to the remake, and that includes the expanded storylines for Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet that Ubisoft has been talking up. The modern-day Abstergo sections from the original are also gone, replaced with optional Rift quests, though I can’t speak to how that change lands for returning fans. For me, it was all one seamless pirate tale, and it’s a good one.
My recommendation for anyone picking this up is to actually engage with the side content, because a lot of it introduces some very memorable characters and helps flesh everything out for the main campaign. The Templar Hunts in particular were pretty fun and brought in some interesting characters I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I was surprised to find out that Resynced isn’t the kind of open-world checklist filler I usually bounce off of. The side stories feed the main story, and skipping them means missing part of what makes the cast work.
Scene and Not Heard
My biggest complaint with the game, and what really separates it from great Sony first-party story games, is how some cutscenes and dialogue feel like they got cut short. Some scenes just end abruptly, where they could have benefited from a second or two of silence to let a moment breathe. Certain beats throughout the game should hit harder than they do, but the dialogue pacing feels off. It’s hard to describe without spoiling anything, but sometimes it just felt like something was slightly wrong with the editing.
To me, this is the difference between perfect storytelling and great storytelling. I do think that with better editing and production work on the cinematic side, Black Flag Resynced could rival some of the greatest single-player story adventures ever created. It stops short because of some awkward writing and cutscene pacing, and that’s a frustrating thing to say when the characters themselves are this good.
Swashbuckle Up
Combat in Resynced has been rebuilt around a parry and dodge system driven by color cues, with golden flashes marking attacks you can parry and red telling you to get out of the way instead. It’s a system that feels all too familiar in 2026, but it keeps the game engaging, and once you get used to everything and it starts to flow, combat feels pretty good. I didn’t play Assassin’s Creed Shadows, so I can’t compare the two, but I can say the parry timing is pretty generous. Don’t expect Sekiro levels of precision here. The only time combat truly stumped me was one boss that took me longer than I care to admit to figure out, where it really felt like the game threw me a curveball and I was missing something with the mechanic until I realized what it was.
As for stealth, I’ll be honest: I generally dislike stealth games because I don’t have the patience for them. Resynced really gives you the choice of going in guns blazing and sword swinging or taking the quiet approach, and I did run some missions the sneaky way. I’d say it’s much more forgiving than your typical stealth game, and you can get away with quite a bit in this one. For reference, I played on Normal across the board, though the game lets you tune combat, stealth, naval, and activity difficulty separately if you want a different balance.
Climb and Punishment
Exploration is where the remake surprised me most, and a lot of that comes down to how alive the entire world feels whether you’re on land or on water. I was mostly free to climb anywhere I wanted, and the exceptions that did exist made sense. Each main location I visited throughout the story felt unique, while the smaller islands you stop at to complete quests made for a fun side activity. Not all of those islands are particularly engaging, but none stood out as outright disappointing either, and the game strikes a great balance between exploration and combat throughout.
Sailing the open seas and island hopping feels a bit like web-swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, where fast travel exists but not using it is actually more fun. The game really opens up once you claim Edward’s Hideout on Great Inagua, which now grows alongside your fortunes with upgradeable buildings, a change we covered when Ubisoft detailed the Hideout in June. I only did some underwater exploration beyond the mandatory sequences, but it’s impressive how much of this world can be explored, and I could easily see myself sinking dozens more hours into it if I had the time.
Board Meeting
Naval combat, on the other hand, took a bit to click with me, and honestly, ship-to-ship fighting still felt a little clunky no matter how many hours I put in. Figuring out how to target and attack with a controller, trying to navigate the ship while rotating the camera to fire off the specific cannons I wanted, never became second nature the way ground combat did. The learning curve on the water is steeper than anything on land, and it never fully flattens out, at least for me.
Boarding is where all that frustration pays off, because the experience of swinging onto an enemy deck and fighting the crew hand to hand is intact and genuinely fun. Once a ship surrenders, you choose what to do with it: send it to Kenway’s Fleet to run missions for passive loot and income, use its materials to repair the Jackdaw, or lower your Wanted Level to keep Pirate Hunters off your tail. Engaging with ship upgrades is pretty important too, because some of the later mandatory ship fights will chew you up in a stock Jackdaw. There are also new officers you can recruit who grant naval perks, though I’ll keep the details vague since their quests are worth experiencing fresh.
Ship Shape
On the technical side, I tested all three graphics modes on the PlayStation 5 Pro and stuck with Performance mode, which targets 60 FPS. The game looks absolutely stunning even in Performance mode, and I couldn’t help myself from taking a ton of screenshots during my playthrough, which you can see in the gallery below. The giant open world is pretty much seamless, and when loading screens do appear, they’re short.
I did run into one major bug that’s worth mentioning, even though it’s possibly fixed by the day one patch. During a tailing mission, an NPC wouldn’t proceed to their destination no matter what I tried, and I ultimately had to close the game entirely and restart it to get things moving again. That was the only hard wall I hit in 40 hours, and to be fair, the tailing and eavesdropping missions never otherwise frustrated me. My other gripe is that clicking both sticks toggles photo mode, which I triggered accidentally several times in the middle of combat, and I wish Ubisoft had mapped it somewhere else.
Shanty Town
Now for my hot take, and I know this borders on sacrilege for Black Flag fans: I wasn’t a fan of the sea shanties. They were fun and novel at first, but after a few hours of sailing I found myself turning them off entirely and just listening to the general soundtrack instead. If anything, it speaks to how many options Ubisoft baked in, accessibility included, so you can tune the experience around what you actually enjoy.
As for the actual score, it’s pretty good overall, with a couple of memorable tunes that stuck with me between sessions. It felt a little too Pirates of the Caribbean to me, though, for better or worse. Depending on how you feel about those films, that’s either a selling point or a mild annoyance, but either way it does a much better job setting the mood of the Caribbean for me than the shanties ever did.
Port of Entry
I believe Ubisoft chose to remake Black Flag because it’s widely considered one of the most beloved, and often one of the best, entries in the Assassin’s Creed series. The goal here seems obvious: get people like me into the franchise, or back into it, in hopes that we’ll check out other entries in the series, or at the very least the most recent Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The modern additions really do make the whole game feel like it was designed for a 2026 audience, so as far as I’m concerned, the pitch works. I think this will land with newcomers and send some of them digging through the back catalog.
The part I can’t answer is whether Resynced sets an unrealistic expectation for how other Assassin’s Creed games play, since I haven’t touched any other modern entry in the series. What I can say is that if you skipped Black Flag the first time around like I did, Resynced is the way to finally live the pirate life. And honestly, if Assassin’s Creed Shadows is anywhere near this good, I might have to take that leap too.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on July 9, 2026 on PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S, and PC. This review is based on an early access code provided by Ubisoft, played on a PlayStation 5 Pro. While FullCleared has affiliate partnerships, these do not influence our editorial content.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Review Gallery
