When the high sun filters through the undergrowth and lights up the water just right, or the low moon illuminates the creeping mist on the surface of a foggy bayou, Black Flag Resynced’s Caribbean is gorgeous beyond words. I’m sure Digital Foundry could produce a list of numbers that objectively prove I have terrible idiot eyes, but from where I sit, these moments are as good as any game world ever has, or ever needs, to look.
The Witcher 3’s Velen is unmatched in its decaying sunsets and grimmer-than-Grimm’s fairytale marshes, and Elden Ring may never see an equal to the painterly framing of its fantasy vistas, but no game aiming for Black Flag’s realism has caused me to so often stop, stare, and swear like a sailor in stunned disbelief.
At times when I did manage to pull myself away from it all, I found myself thinking about how much any of this does, or should, actually matter to me. The dreaded, impossibly loaded question of necessity. Did Black Flag need a remake? There’s a good month of awful discourse there for everyone who’s not Ubisoft, for whom the answer is very easy: yes, Black Flag needed a remake. People liked Black Flag, and with good reason. We need to remake Black Flag because people will definitely buy it, which’d be great, because we’re rapidly running out of money.
My answer’s pretty simple, too. Yes, it matters to me that Black Flag Resynced is an absurdly beautiful videogame. It matters each time I’m forced back in my seat from apocalyptic cannon flare; from the salty headbutt of two colliding ships. It matters when a yolk orange sunrise peeks through palm leaves and the water glitters like stolen doubloons. It matters because what made Black Flag special was always how well it captured the thrilling adolescent fantasy of buccaneering virtual tourism, and Resynced’s gorgeous world is that much more inviting to play pretend as a pirate in.
As our story opens in 1715, at the beginning of the post-Spanish Succession period of the Golden Age of Piracy, Edward Kenway has two defining characteristics. He’s Welsh (a point of pride), and skint (very much the opposite), so sets out to find his fortune as a privateer with the Royal Navy, eventually succumbing to the allure of piracy and ditching the King George for the (objectively much cooler) Skull and Crossbones. Intent on providing a better life for himself and wife Caroline by way of The Big Score, Kenway’s napkin-dense motivation is one of Black Flag’s neatest and simplest tricks. Here’s a man that wants no more than the player does: some ship upgrades, a full crew, high adventure, a decent brace of pistols, and a hold bursting with shinies. “I’m off to stab people and nick their stuff, Caroline, and you can’t stop me”, Kenway practically declares. Pure uncut ludonarrative. That’s exactly what I was going to make him do anyway.
The story offers up plenty of swashbuckling theatre and comic piratey menace with Blackbeard and co, but also quieter moments of surprising poignancy. In one flashback scene we find him grinning, schoolboy-proud, at his restraint in saving up beer money to buy Caroline hot chocolate. Kenway’s drive to improve his lot is never captured more powerfully than in his crestfallen look upon learning that it’s far from her first time trying it. Her father’s a merchant, after all.
The Assassin’s Creed of it all comes into play almost immediately, with Kenway stumbling into a secret meeting of the series’ Illuminati-esque bad lads, the Templars, before the end of the tutorial. Kenway will, of course, eventually have to ask himself if he holds any wider code of morality outside his piratical leanings, but that’ll take a while. His hesitancy to concern himself with the Creed is yet another bit of baked-in cleverness to the whole set up. Again, it’s that ludonarrative playfulness this series has always been fond of. Edward is constantly lectured to by representatives of the wider series’ lore, just to tell them, repeatedly, to piss off so he can have fun playing pirates. There are ships to sink, forts to capture, treasure maps to follow, and sharks to hunt. The Creed and its mandatory cutscenes can wait.
Resynced’s most significant change — save the environmental overhaul — is to combat. Fights now hew closer to more recent games in the series, which is to say a standardised third person clunk-em’up: light and heavy attacks, lock-ons, a handful of cool down timer abilities, dodges, and parries. Fortunately, concessions have been made to Kenway’s former lethality, and with no RPG systems, you won’t have to worry about grinding skill points before your hidden blade is sharp enough to cut an apple. You can break an enemy’s guard (signaled, amusingly, by their hat falling off) with a few cutlass swipes or a pistol shot for an instant kill opportunity, and bonus chances for takedowns appear if you kick someone into a wall, or trip them. And, yes, the smoke bomb triple kill cheese platter is very much back on the menu.
It’s a system that feels fine one-on-one, but stiff and stilted against groups. Attacks don’t cancel into parries cleanly, parry timing itself is unintuitive, and several of the canned execution animations last just that moment too long, gumming up the rhythm with brief but noticeable halts. The original Black Flag’s fights were served by their effortless flow and simplicity since they were, and are here, just one activity among many. It didn’t take long back then to become so accustomed to fights that they practically played themselves, and that’s true here too, even if the odd timings mean it takes a bit longer. All that’s left at that point is the spectacle and flow, and while the executions still look great, the flow suffers.
It can still be satisfying, but with weapon pick-ups and the hidden blade weapon removed, it’s less improvisational, and just plain less swashbuckling overall. It feels like a system designed to tick off boxes to reach some nebulous idea of standardised quality, rather than something with its own character. Black Flag’s original combat served its piratical fantasy. All this combat serves as is a reminder that, yes, I’m definitely playing a videogame from 2026.
All the extra bits for stealth and parkour are very welcome, however. For all this series’ bloat and repetition over the years, the graceful shankman reverie of hopping between rooftops in the rain, taking out a few snipers, then landing blade-first in a plantation owner’s neck is still a singular thrill, and breaking off to play the free-form, bite sized assassin contract side missions you’ll find scattered around the map is a constant temptation.
Resynced’s other marquee feature is the new missions, mostly centered around three new recruitable officers, each one of them interesting in concept but dull in execution, starring in a series of quests with some exciting set pieces and lovely new music, but brought down by stiff and occasionally bizarre dialogue with precious little of the original game’s wit and creativity. Kenway, especially, seems somewhat lobotomised in these new quests, displaying little of his steely drive, nor rogueish energy, nor playful use of period language, although Matt Ryan does a fine, if oddly chipper, job with the weaker script.
Playing through Black Flag’s main story again, it’s easy to appreciate just how much urgency and life there is in every short cutscene. Conversely, new exchanges feel lifeless, slow and repetitive. “He’s also holding captive a master gunner of some note,” Kenway addresses his officers in the cabin. “A master gunner? Maybe we could convince him to join us,” replies Ann Bonny. “We could do with a master gunner. No offence to the crew,” adds new shipwright Lucy. Listening feels like sailing in circles. At least the actual rewards are fun: a powerful mortar, a timed brace for extra damage reduction, rapid-fire cannons, and a speedy ram ability that sweeps the camera down to port side for a cracking view of the impact.
Frequently stunning though it might be, Resynced isn’t free of visual issues. Many of them would be easier to overlook if they weren’t so jarring compared to the beauty found elsewhere — and if prettiness wasn’t basically what you’re paying for here. Much of it is down to the weather. The ocean winds are capricious, and it’s a crapshoot scene-to-scene whether character models are going to look fantastic or washed out. Elsewhere, geometry flickers in and out of reality, ships in the distance occasionally lose the plot completely, and cutscene framerates are uneven.
All that said, you can free a monkey from captivity and have them sit chirping by your ship’s wheel while you sail the oceans. And although I haven’t found the collectable yet, it does seem like your crew can learn to sing The Wellerman. And gosh, do these towns feel alive. Sure, I’m still shaking my head at the pub goer who, in an early cutscene, says to Kenway “fancy meeting a Welshman deep in dago country! I’m English myself” in the Welshiest accent I’ve ever heard, but the additional dialogue and crowd behavior in populated areas really does liven things up. Havana’s centre is built-up and bustling; its edges rural and run-down. I could write verbosely and at length about how much all this new verisimilitude and architectural modelling uplifts so much of Black Flag beside the purely visual, but suffice it to say that you naturally climb on a lot of things as an Assassin, so it’s very nice that those things look more like the things they’re meant to. Enough to make you break off mid-mission just for the chance at a new high place, and a new view.
What is there to say about Black Flag’s ship combat that hasn’t already been said? Assassin’s Creed seemed to invent the wheel out of nowhere, so it’s no loss that Resynced leaves, mostly. well alone. This is what you’re here for, really. That moment when a fusillade from your broadside of 24-pounder death trumpets rips a honking chunk out of a brig stuffed with wailing redcoats, and you climb the rigging, hop over, and rain red-hot shot down from your brace of pistols, before leaping blade-first and slamming some powder-wigged prick’s stiff upper lip straight into his freshly-swabbed deck.
And it’s still good here, just for different reasons. Your ship feels weightier, more believable as a creaking tub aloft by the grace of Poseidon and the winds, but less agile. Like the lubber fights, there’s something just that touch more laborious about ship combat now. Take any individual high seas showdown in isolation, and it’s undeniably more impressive. But returning to 2013’s Freedom Cry expansion for a quick comparison, I noticed just how moreish naval combat was there, while I tended to get burnt out on Resynced’s a lot quicker.
Altogether, Black Flag Resynced has left me feeling quite strange. Cursed treasure, is what I’d call it. There’s a lot here I feel was more enjoyable thirteen years ago. Even the much-maligned tailing missions at least offered some challenging stealth that isn’t present in Resynced. But this remake is, again, so unbelievably pretty that it’s going to be hard to return to a game that, all accounted for, I think is the better option. If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor, and all that. I still find myself feeling pretty enthusiastic about Resynced, and to write off the best of what Ubisoft Singapore and co have achieved as simply “nicer graphics” would be a cheap undersell. There’s real, noticeable artistry in what they’ve done here, but all in all, it feels like trading the crossbones for a more menacing skull. Eye-catching, certainly, but it’s not the same Flag.
