Assassin’s Creed IV

Assassin’s Creed IV is my first Assassin’s Creed game. Well, strictly that’s not true, as I’ve bought a couple of the others but never actually played them. It is the first one I have any experience with beyond seeing various pictures of Ezio and, no doubt, various others I couldn’t name. So the fact that it is apparently quite unlike the other games in the series, as well as a return-to-form for the series is possibly fortunate, but not the reason I got it. That reason, in truth, is that it looked like the PS4 launch title I would enjoy the most, with Knack looking to actually be clunky and uninteresting and the rest being the kind of pseudo-macho brainless FPS regurgitations that seem so in vogue but hold no interest whatever for me.

So how was Assassin’s Creed IV? Well, I’m not sure I would call it a good game, but I certainly enjoyed it. It was exceptionally well-presented, had a decent amount of depth, was enjoyable almost throughout and did a superb job with its angle on a very popular historical period – the years leading up to 1718 and the end of the Golden Era of Piracy. Yes, this is not a game of sneaking about crowded cities killing Templars, but of sailing the high seas, visiting early colonies in the New World and…well, sneaking into camps and mansions and killing some Templars.

Edward Kenway, who has no historical basis but I suppose has some bits and pieces in common with Walter Kennedy and, at least ultimately, with Long Ben. He is a well-spoken Welshman from a poor family who leaves his wife to seek riches on the high seas but ends up largely alone and impetuous. As a crewman on a pirate ship, he is washed ashore along with a mysterious man in what the player knows as an Assassin’s uniform. When the Assassin tries to kill him, Edward retaliates, hunting him down and taking his identity along with his life. Hoping to take on a ‘commission’ this Assassin mentioned, Edward goes to Havana, where he discovers that the man he is imitating was defecting to the Templar cause, and learns of a mysterious and ancient ‘observatory’ that houses the power to see through others’ eyes, just the sort of thing a hidden order wants in order to manipulate the world from behind the scenes. Of course, he doesn’t last long in his false ruse, and is clapped in irons, which of course were fairly easy to escape from, and the ship easy to capture to begin a true pirate career.

A chance encounter with the bumbling Stede Bonnet, just starting out on his quest to become the most middle-class pirate in history, makes it easier to join up with other pirates in Nassau, including Benjamin Hornigold, his one-time protégé Blackbeard and the apparent son of Captain Kidd (from whose mythos also comes a black quartermaster). Through Kidd, he learns more about the Assassins, and eventually of course is tangled up in their power struggle with the Templars and the race to the Observatory, which the ‘sage’ – an imposing Bartholomew Roberts with a wonderful Welsh accent – is key to operating.

Tied up with this is the modern-day storyline, apparently running through the games, of the struggle between Templars and Assassins continuing in now – or in the very near future. There is a company that can use a person’s DNA to view the memories of their ancestors, which they use to create interactive experiences – but of course the Templars want to use the technology to locate things like the Observatory, and to bring back the ghostly techno-organic creature called Juno…or something like that. It’s frankly horribly lame and the low point of the gameplay, with cringy ‘hacking’ minigames and a stupid subplot about getting manipulated by some nutcase from IT. The game would be far better without this guff.

But it does allow some things to make more sense. It makes more sense of some of the challenges – there’s no reason otherwise that a game should end if you fail to overhear an entire conversation of it you are spotted by people you can very easily dispatch anyway. The idea of ‘desynchronisation’ means some of this makes sense, as does limiting parts of the otherwise open-ended world so that you can’t go off exploring them too early. It also allows for some acknowledged historically inaccurate buildings and suchlike for the sake of an impressive setting, though the little email discussions included in the building descriptions also inspire some cringing. On the other hand, without introduction I didn’t know what on earth ‘synchronising’ did at the start of the game (lovely though it looks) and there never was any material point to collecting ‘animus fragments’, a miniature collection quest that pads out the things to do in any given (beautiful) location.

The main game is flawed but fun. Like so many similar games, it’s a stealth/action game in which you can quietly dispatch your adversaries, creep around them to your main target or just attempt to kill everyone at once, which frankly was usually the quickest and easiest option. Indeed, the game was sadly much too easy, never challenging and often with laughable AI, the very final task nothing more than timing when to climb and jump. Thankfully, the sailing is rather brilliant – it’s extremely satisfying to duel with other ships, cripple and board them for loot and repairs, and taking forts is even better. It’s also where things actually get challenging with the rather ridiculous legendary ships. Shanties were annoying and got shut off every time, but largely travelling from place to place was easy and the simplistic whaling minigame was also strangely addictive.

The story began very well, but fizzled out. The pirate fantasy is strong, and they do a brilliant job with making Blackbeard both fearsome and intelligent. Though it gets a little annoying when ‘James Kidd’ is supposed to be convincingly a young man, with all the characters failing to notice that this is very obviously a woman – made worse by the fact that (at least for 99% of it) this game only has adults, which would make ‘Kidd’ the only adolescent in the entire game universe. Nobody is surprised when she turns out to be Mary Read, with Ann Bonny and Calico Jack soon showing up too. The problem then is that Kenway sort of drifts, the Templar threat is very distant, and then all of a sudden, with a feeling of ‘there must be more to see’, it all ends.

There was a lot I didn’t do. I lost interest in getting the platinum when I saw multiplayer trophies were required. I only found a few buried treasures and a handful of alternate outfits (some of which mess up hood animations). But I bought the game to wow me until there were PS4 games I really wanted, and in that capacity, actually enjoyed it more than expected.