It feels like someone at Ubisoft wanted to make a pirate game, but the only way they could get funding is if they figured out how to bolt it to an already established franchise, and the result is a really good pirate game that forces you to stop and play bits of a mediocre at best Assassin's Creed game to progress. Since it's essentially two games, I'll talk about them separately.

Piratey good time - This is largely a modern take on Sid Meier's old Pirates game, if you've ever played that. You go around taking territory, attacking ships, looking for treasure, and pretty much what you'd expect for a game about pirates. The sailing manages to control well despite the fact that you're controlling a large ship with a huge amount of momentum. This seems like something that would be easy to fuck up, but it feels just right. The ship to ship and ship to fortress combat is great. It's not the deepest thing ever, but you have a good selection of options in combat and a sensible upgrade system that doesn't seem to have anything useless. The hand to hand combat isn't great, but since you only really do that to finish off the capture of a ship or fort, that's fine. It's not what this part of the game focuses on, and it does its job. The story is basically just pirates acting like pirates, but that's fine by me, and the writing is good enough for that, even if it's nothing particularly special. Overall, this section gets an 8/10.

Sneaky snore fest - Because forced stealth missions totally make sense for a swashbuckling pirate. What's really frustrating about that is that direct combat is almost always much more effective than being sneaky when the game doesn't force you to be. You'll just be told you failed a mission when a bunch of guys you could easily take out in a moment spot you. Not that the combat is all that much fun. It's basically a disguised quicktime event. Hit circle when there's an exclamation point over someone's head, then hit square. Hit x if it's a special guy with an axe or something, then hit square. That's really about it, and it never feels like you have much control over it, since Edward just does whatever attack move he feels like, rarely doing the fast kills when you want him to. The free running usually works OK, but there will be times when it takes you in exactly the wrong place at the wrong moment. The puzzles are just dumb, with one literally just being "There's a red, green, and blue block, and there are red, green, and blue indentations shaped like those blocks. What do you do?" The worst part, however, is the writing. The whole AC metanarrative is just terrible. Assassin's Creed II at least took some time to build up to the crazy bits, but here, you pretty much immediately find the Templars trying to get a magic whosiwhatsit that would let them spy on all people all the time. I was literally more interested in the previous mission where you try to find some stolen cargo than this contrived, out of place bullshit. Worse still are the modern sections. And you know what? That's basically a third game that's completely tacked on. 4/10

Modern stuff - It's a first person section where you're hired to explore genetic memories for an entertainment company to make games and movies out of. And then you're forced to hack things by some guy who then berates you for helping him. It's that stupid, and it doesn't even control like the rest of the game. And you hack by playing Frogger. Really. You can tell they spent a lot of money on these parts, but I'm completely baffled as to why. They are stupid, boring, and clash with both of the other games this is made up of even more than those two clash with each other. If they made a version of this game that simply skipped these parts, you'd miss literally nothing. 1/10


This game is beautiful, and when it works, it really works. I just wish I could have seen the pirate game this should have been without all of the Assassin's Creed stuff bogging it down, because just about everything brought in from the rest of the franchise worsens the experience significantly. I'm still having fun with it, but it's just so frustrating that this game keeps pulling you from the fun stuff to do stupid, tedious bullshit. Overall 6/10.