Last month, I spent a few hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in Paris, and even as a slightly skeptical mega fan of the series, I can safely say that the game is shaping up to be a wonderful remake of one of the best Assassin’s Creed games.
Lead studio Ubisoft Singapore has elegantly walked the tightrope between keeping the spirit of what made the original game so special while also offering enhancements, modernizations, and sprinklings of the most recent games in the series.
However, after reflecting on my time with the game, it’s not so much a huge, seismic remake that’s got one or two major offerings that it lives and dies on, but rather one that offers a whole host of smaller improvements that mean, overall, it delivers way more than the sum of its parts. This combination makes for an excellent new-but-familiar experience, and achieves that in a number of key ways.
Modern piracy
The glow up is, in short, tremendous. It’s wholesale, extensive, and reaches every corner of the game. However, overall looks and feels aside, this glow up, consisting of loads of individual enhancements and modernizations, manifests itself in a number of what I’d call smaller ways that amount to something greater.
Some of the largest modernizations are obvious and always would be: the game now appears in the Animus Hub startup screen, for example. You’ll be greeted with a new character model of Edward Kenway, and the game slots neatly into its chronological order in the system.
Other changes are less obvious, though. For example, I noticed the soundtrack, score, and audioscape of the game have changed subtly in terms of literally how it sounds, but it’s also being deployed in different ways and at different moments within the game. For the better, too, as deploying it in a new way helps to paint a refreshed picture wonderfully. It made moments feel fresh and new, yet still anchored in the original and familiar.
Right from the off in my demo, chasing down Duncan Walpole from the beach and through the tropical forest, it was obvious that Resynced is a proper feast for the eyes.
Parkour and stealth are vastly improved, as Ubisoft had declared when confirming Resynced, but both play very well in real time, too. Parkour is a hugely modernized version of the style we’ve come to know from more recent games and feels less ‘sticky’ and cumbersome than the classic style. It’s still not the Unity-esque leap or wholesale change that I’m still somewhat yearning for from the series, but as a reimagining of Kenway’s parkour, it’s slick.
Stealth is improved too, and among the wonderful social stealth opportunities, and even the ability to just crouch and hide behind smaller environmental assets like barrels, the insta-fail tailing missions are gone. In play, this means that those missions now have multiple ways of being completed and solved, depending on whether you get spotted or not; the reactivity of the non-player characters (NPCs) and what is demanded of you now in these situations just feels better.
But some of the biggest modernizations are in other key areas. Combat has been overhauled, the world has been skilfully revamped, ship combat is improved, and there’s even new content to engage with and experience. And these are all extremely well done, I’m happy to say.
The high seas never looked so good
I’m not sure an Assassin’s Creed world has ever looked this good — and that’s saying something considering the likes of 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an absolutely breathtaking environmental affair. Right from the off in my demo, chasing down Duncan Walpole from the beach and through the tropical forest, it was obvious that Resynced is a proper feast for the eyes.
Utilizing the latest version of Ubisoft’s Anvil engine, Resynced shows Black Flag in almost an entirely new light, giving it a glow-up that’s a real joy to experience, explore, and get lost in. Everything is more detailed, vibrant, lush, dense, realistic, and gorgeous. Black Flag was a looker back in 2013, but this is something else. As a lover of video game landscapes, plants, and environments, the detail in the vegetation, landscape features, and natural elements is something that I went out of my way to inspect and admire in my time with the game.
This goes for the settlements and cities, too. When I was freeroaming in Havana, there was more hustle and bustle, more citizens present to bring life to the streets and squares, every building had more character and color to it, and the way that ships gently rock on rolling waves, glistening and reflecting the sunlight from the Caribbean waters, is exquisite.
One of the clearest examples of this in my preview was the underwater parts of Resynced. Notably, you can now dive anywhere you want, which boosts the sense of exploration and freedom that the overhauled world has, but it also looks truly special. Coral reefs and wrecks are vividly reimagined, colorful, detailed, and crystal clear, and even the marine wildlife looks beautiful, elegantly swimming past Edward or through cracks in reefs and shipwrecks.
Classic combat meets modern moves
Edward Kenway’s piratical-cross-assassin combat was something that we all knew was getting a lot of attention in Resynced — and the changes are a huge boon to the action.
In theory and style, Ubisoft has ensured that the core character and feel of Kenway’s combat from the original game remains, but it has revamped it with, well, new touches, moves, finishes, fluidity, and features from more recent Creed games — and it really works.
In play, it feels more like Basim’s combat style from Assassin’s Creed Mirage has been injected into Edward Kenway’s combat, and the two have mixed to create something wonderfully stylish, slick, and satisfying.
Parries are weighty and feel impactful, with time slowing for a fraction after you implement a perfect block, making for a gratifying reward to deal more damage or killing blows to enemies. Working on enemies’ block or guard meters to wear them down adds a tactical layer to combat, too, and utilizing said parries as part of this makes for much more satisfying combat that requires some thought.
At one point, I got goosebumps as the music crescendos when you rush to join Blackbeard in a fight against some red coats on the shores of an island. Perfection.
Flowing from one move to the other, from one enemy to the other, and between weapons and tools is such a joy — I hugely enjoyed the extra environmental layer to combat too, and nothing was more swashbuckling than power kicking a foe into some empty rum crates and dealing a final blow, or polishing them off with pistols and seeing them stagger into a table behind and have it comically collapse beneath them.
This overhaul of combat that now feels like Mirage has elements of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but keeps the piratical style and flair of the original Kenway DNA at its core. It’s a joy, and one of the best things about Resynced that I experienced.
Eptomizing that was a moment in my preview where the combat, music, world, and overall action culminated in something incredible: at one point, I got goosebumps as the music crescendos when you rush to join Blackbeard in a fight against some red coats on the shores of an island. Perfection.
Taking the Jackdaw back to the high seas
As part of my preview, I, of course, got some hands at the helm of the Jackdaw. I had free run of a part of the Caribbean sea that fans will remember, and it was such a joy to be weaving between islands, sitting back with the travel camera and listening to the lads sing some classic sea shanties.
It’s hard to think how this simple experience from the original can be bettered, but the light touch improvements to visuals, music, vistas, and the ship itself make it just as special as it was all those years ago. Leave Her, Johnny, Bully in the Alley, and William Taylor are the best sea shanties in the game, by the way; no discussion.
I also got to man the Jackdaw in combat and took on one of the Caribbean’s forts. The ship combat initially felt very familiar; fire the mortars from distance, take sweeping routes in front of the fort to target each part, and so on. However, as well as feeling overall far more slick, intuitive, and immediate than I remember, the arrival of a few enemy ships out of the blue made things interesting — and a bit more tactical, balancing ship combat and fortification destruction while also remembering to brace to limit damage.
Ubisoft Singapore’s naval combat pedigree really shines here, generally, and the studio’s experience from Assassin’s Creed III’s ship action, as well as from Skull & Bones, is clearly on show with the enhanced Jackdaw experience on show in Resynced.
New treasures?
A good deal of the chatter around Black Flag Resynced has been about the new content added to the game. Some that sound like replacements of existing bits — animus glitches that concentrate on Edward rather than the modern day chapters in the original game — and some that sound brand new — we know that new scenes have been recorded and that there are additions to the ending and more with Edward’s wife.
However, my preview was pretty light on the new content, which was a shame. After all the chat about new Edward Kenway content, storylines, and chapters, all I got to play was most of one of the recruitment missions for the new officers. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the fact that these officers are more than just mute NPCs and there are stories to getting them on the Jackdaw and so on, but this was just a regular-feeling Black Flag mission with a small bit of cutscene conversation dotted throughout and after.
Given how highly the devs, Ubisoft, and Matt Ryan himself have spoken about the new scenes, the change to the modern-day alterations, and the expansions of Kenway’s story and ending, it was a shame not to see more of what they’ve actually done. However, I can also see them wanting to keep their powder dry on such additions. I’ll have to be as patient as any other Assassin’s Creed fan, and I look forward to seeing more on this when it releases.
A glimpse into the future — via the past?
All in all, it’s already clear how Ubisoft has approached this remake of one of its most popular games. This is no visual overhaul at the remaster end of the scale; it’s almost a reinterpretation or reimagining of Black Flag and what it can be. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is still the same excellent 13-year-old game underneath all the modernizations and improvements, but it strikes a perfect mix between the influence of those enhancements and that classic AC feel.
As Jack Sparrow said, “Not all treasures silver and gold, mate” – and it feels like that here too: the overall experience of playing Resynced and revisiting Black Flag in this new guise is much more than the updated aesthetics.
What struck me most is that while this isn’t just a new game, totally rewritten and re-presented, all of the small improvements in Resynced — better movement here, more intuitive controls there, enhanced art and environments over here, and improved exploration there — genuinely add up to the game being greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a remake of a classic 13-year-old game, yes, but it feels like, and plays like, something bigger and better.
If this is a first glimpse into the future of Ubisoft’s approach to the classic but slightly ageing games of its flagship franchise, then we could be in for a treat, should the likes of the original Assassin’s Creed, or the Ezio trilogy, and even Connor’s revolutionary adventure be next in line for the Resynced treatment.
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rob.dwiar@futurenet.com (Rob Dwiar)
