For a long time, I've held firm that arguments about the necessity of video game remakes are largely boring and pointless. After all, what makes any video game necessary? Who gets to decide that?I still don't know the answers to those questions, but I do know that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the first time in a long time where I can't really think of a good reason why a remake should exist. That's not to say the work that Ubisoft has done to rebuild one of the best games in the series was shoddy; in fact, I've really enjoyed the handful of hours I've spent roaming the recreated world of 2013's Black Flag. But I think I'm largely enjoying it because it's built on such a solid foundation that it would be hard to screw up. Black Flag Resynced seems like a high-quality take on a game that isn't old or flawed enough to have needed it.
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Black Flag Resynced is an enjoyable throwback to Assassin's Creed's past
I haven't spent enough time with this new take on Black Flag to render a definitive verdict on it, but after having played enough to freely sail around the Caribbean in the boots of roguish pirate privateer, the best case I can make for the existence of Resynced is that it's a warm reminder of what Assassin's Creed used to be before the series took an RPG turn around a decade ago.There's no such thing, as far as I can tell, as an enemy who can resist being assassinated in Black Flag Resynced. If you sneak up behind a guy, he is dead. You're not spending a lot of time sifting through gear or agonizing over a skill tree in this game, and even as someone who generally really likes the four big RPG Assassin's Creed games, I cannot emphasize enough how nice it is to play one of these that doesn't revolve around that stuff. It's nice to be reassured that the old ways work just as well now as they did 13 years ago.It's fair to wonder, then, what exactly is different about Black Flag Resynced if Ubisoft didn't morph the game to conform to the franchise's modern design standards. You can read a substantive account of all the changes on Ubisoft's website, but in summary, the parkour system was subtly refined, traversal routes through the game's many tropical and urban environments were massaged to account for that, and mission design was reconsidered in order to give players a bit more latitude to succeed even if they "fail" to do something like tail an NPC for a story objective.
