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STORY
So just in case you haven’t played AC4, spoiler warning. Alright, let 's go.
We play as Edward Kenway, a charismatic but self-serving pirate in the early 1700s during the Golden Age of Piracy. He's the grandfather of Connor from AC III, which I honestly didn’t know until making this video. After a shipwreck, Edward kills an Assassin and takes his robes, unintentionally getting involved in the centuries-old conflict between Assassins and Templars.
As he chases booty, Edward crosses paths with historical pirates like Blackbeard and Charles Vane, and gradually realizes the deeper consequences of the Templar-Assassin war. Over time, he matures from a reckless opportunist into someone with a stronger moral compass, eventually siding with the Assassins.
The story also involves a race to uncover the secrets of the Observatory, a First Civilization relic that can spy on anyone in the world. The Templars want it for control; the Assassins want to protect its power.
The game also has a present day story, in which we are a silent protagonist working at Abstergo Entertainment (so Templars with extra steps), helping dig through Edward’s memories—until things take a shady turn involving surveillance, Juno, and rogue Assassins.
I feel this take on a story, using a character who at the beginning of the game didn’t really give a rat’s ass about the assassin’s but eventually does care about not only the creed, but its work, is very refreshing.
The only assassin’s creed games I’ve played to death are Ezio’s trilogy, but I’ve also played Origins and 3 a bit, and in those games, we basically see the main protagonists take the creed very seriously almost from the get-go, and while initially to me it was a shock seeing Edward not really care about the assassin’s, trust me, there were so many points in the game I was genuinely pissed at Edward, like, “BRO, THE WORLD’S FREEDOM IS AT STAKE, GET A GRIP”, the payoff of seeing Edward fully become an assassin and actually care, was really gratifying!
OPEN WORLD
Alright, so this is the meat and potatoes of any assassin’s creed game. In this entry, we are presented with a TON of collectibles and a few side activities, literally, the entire map is full of them and among them we have
- MAYAN KEYS
- ANIMUS FRAGMENTS
- CHESTS
- SEA SHANTIES
- TEMPLAR HUNTS
- ASSASSIN CONTRACTS
- NAVAL CONTRACTS
- ART MANUSCRIPTS
- BURIED CHESTS
- LETTERS IN BOTTLES
- LEGENDARY SHIPS
I’ll be honest, I did not do the legendary ship battles, nor the buried chests and I’ll explain my reasoning.
For buried chests, some contain money, some contain elite plans for your ship, and others contain customization items for your ship. If you’re like me and you’re collecting every single chest there is, money won’t be much of an issue, and unless there’s a specific customization you’re after, there isn’t much of a point to go around chasing chests.
As for elite upgrades for the Jackdaw, if you just stick to battling random enemy ships on the ocean, just naturally upgrading your ship will be enough.
As for legendary ships, I googled beforehand if there were any cool rewards for battling them all, and honestly? Not really. You get a speed ram ability, but I rarely found myself ramming into enemy ships during combat.
Before we go over the stuff I actually did do, I have one tidbit of advice, don’t leave the collectibles for the very end, if anything, as you play, try to get as many as you can, because I left everything after finishing the story, and I didn’t have much use for all the money and stuff I collected.
Now, onto the collectibles.
Mayan keys, or stelae…stale? Stalin?. The mayan pillar things, they’re small puzzles in which you climb onto the top of a pillar, activate eagle vision, and try to line up the shape you see with the highlighted objects. The reward for getting them all is, the mayan armor, which is fucking BULLETPROOF. Now you see why I recommend doing collectibles AS YOU PLAY. While the puzzles themselves aren’t very complex, I feel it would’ve been cooler if you got to explore mayan temple ruins for them, kinda like the assassin tombs in AC2.
Animus fragments are this game’s version of korok seeds, but they grant you a cheat for the game called Deceased Crew, which turns your ship’s crew into skeletons, pretty neat! On the topic of cheats, and collectibles, this game also features challenges you can complete to unlock even more cheats! Some are simple, like toggling the day/night cycle but others are really cool, like the one that turns enemies into fucking rabbids. Honestly, games nowadays should include more funny unlockables like that. Now everything’s behind a paywall.
Anyway
Now. Chests. They’re really simple honestly. Scattered throughout the entire map, they give you money. Not much else to them!
Moving onto sea shanties, now these? These are cool! These are songs your crew…well…sings while you sail! They really add to the pirate atmosphere, and some are straight up bangers! Definitely recommend going after them, even if you don’t care very much for collectibles, the shanties add a lot of atmosphere to what otherwise would be just the sound of the ocean.
Templar hunts were my favorite side activity by far. There’s 5 of them, but each contain many side missions, with a small story each. Truly, these feel like full fledged side quests, instead of “go here, collect item”, and I love it! The reward for completion is a templar armor set in your pirate base, and while it looks cool, it unfortunately doesn’t offer benefits or gameplay modifiers.
Assassin contracts are very simple. Approach pigeon cage, grab pigeon, accept contract. Then, you go to a marked location and kill some dude. While each of them has a very very small story to them, after a while, you’ll notice they’re all a little same-y. Bad guy does bad thing, kill him. I would’ve preferred less contracts, but making them more dense in content, perhaps making them a little like the templar hunts, with varied missions, and more cutscenes that introduced characters.
On the same boat, naval contracts are assassin contracts, but on the water. Approach a dude in a fort, go to a place in the ocean, sink the marked ship. My opinion remains the same, it would’ve been nice to have denser missions, even if it means less of them.
The art manuscripts are a lot like the codex pages in AC2, they’re cool pictures you can get, such as pages of the voynich manuscript, or a map of the old world.
The letters in a bottle are a cool bit of lore, as they’re written by one of the incarnations of the sage, and they basically serve as a journal for that incarnation of him. Definitely recommend getting them as they add a bit more context to the precursor race.
PARKOUR AND COMBAT
Alright, so that’s that for the open world, what about navigating the world and combat? Well, the parkour system is a definite step up from earlier entries, and you can absolutely tell the parkour system in this game is the current one, but in its infancy. It flows very well, and feels natural most of the time.
There are a few occasions where Edward seemingly might just look down onto a ledge, instead of dropping from it or if you’re running into a wall close to its corner, instead of running up a wall, Edward leans into the wall which is a stealth mechanic, which is a perfect segway into combat.
So, open combat is simple, but fun. There are three enemy varieties:
- Tank
- Captain
- Swift soldier
- Regular soldier
They’re pretty self explanatory, the tank is a heavy dude with heavy weapons whom you can’t just whack endlessly, he’ll counter you, and you have to break his counters to beat him. If you get far away from him, he’ll throw grenades at you. The captain is the same, but instead of grenades he can shoot you. The swift soldier is like a regular one, but he does counter, and is faster than the other 3 enemy types. The regular soldiers are basically just walking punch bags, they don’t counter, and are very easily disposed of.
As for combat, it’s simplicity lies in the fact that it’s split up into 4 actions:
- Swing your sword
- Counter, which is divided into two actions, depending on the enemy type:
- finish off if it’s a regular soldier, or, break defense if it’s any of the other three enemy types.
While you absolutely can use your gear like pistols, smoke bombs and such, they’re very much not necessary. You can totally get by by just countering and swinging, which is why I consider it simple. But honestly? I love it. I love when a game lets you feel like an unstoppable killing machine.
Stealth in this game is good and simple. Like previously, you can hide in hay bales to kill any nearby enemies, but now you can also stalk enemies from bushes, and whistle to attract them. There’s also the mechanic I mentioned earlier, which involves getting close to a wall’s corner, and leaning into it. This is great for enemies that are walking around, and you can also whistle to attract them. My only complaint would be that it'd 've been nice if I could crouch, to be a bit more stealthy and hard to see, instead of having to literally run from bush to bush to avoid detection.
DLC
This game has two pieces of DLC, freedom cry, and aveline’s story. So for freedom cry, it’s very much an extension of AC4.
Freedom Cry follows Adéwalé, Edward Kenway’s former quartermaster, about 15 years after the events of the main game. Now a fully-fledged Assassin, Adéwalé finds himself shipwrecked in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), where he witnesses the brutal reality of slavery under French colonial rule.
Unlike Edward’s self-centered beginnings, Adéwalé is deeply driven by justice. He joins a resistance group called the Maroon rebels and begins freeing enslaved people, sabotaging slave ships, and striking back against the slavers and the Templars backing them.
The story explores themes of freedom, identity, and redemption, with Adéwalé questioning how best to serve the Assassin's cause while confronting a deeply personal connection to the suffering around him—being a former slave himself.
As for gameplay, it shares all of the mechanics of the main game with a twist. Instead of having to gather materials from hunting for upgrades and gear, you can liberate slaves, via plantations in which you have to clear enemies for slaves to flee, or through radiant events, such as sabotaging slave auctions, beatings, freeing slaves from cages, or from walking groups of enemies holding slaves hostage.
The more slaves you free, the more gear you can unlock. As expected, it’s a DLC, so it’s not very content heavy, but the story, plus the new gear Adewale uses, a machete and a shotgun, make it for a cool experience.
As for aveline’s dlc, it’s VERY short. Literally 3 missions long. Set after the events of Liberation, Aveline travels to Havana, Cuba, to investigate a Templar plot involving human trafficking and a mysterious woman named Madeleine de L'Isle (her stepmother and former mentor-turned-Templar).
The DLC includes three missions where Aveline:
- Infiltrates a Templar operation.
- Uncovers a plot to manipulate and exploit enslaved people.
- Faces off with key Templar figures tied to her past.
If anything, this DLC made me want to play Liberation! A 7/10 DLC.
SWITCH VERSION
I played the game on the switch, and the performance for it is really good! I don’t think it hits 60FPS, but it’s very playable, and stable. I did not experience a single crash nor frame dips. The graphics also look great! The game definitely holds up, even 11 years later. Minus sometimes face expressions, or random NPCs that tend to look funky if you look at them too long, but honestly nothing that takes away from the experience.
CONCLUSION
It's assassins creed, but with pirates, and I love it! Honestly, definitely recommend giving it a chance if you can. Unless you don’t like the Ubisoft AC formula. Keep in mind, this game is back from when these games were released every year, so the similarities to previous entries really show, and I know not everyone enjoys the formula in those games, so just keep that in mind.