Black Flag Resynced has finally launched, and with it, a reprisal of the eternal debate surrounding the different stripes of Assassin’s Creed combat. As Morgan notes in our review, Resynced ultimately “loses more than it gains” thanks to its wide-ranging changes masquerading as quality of life, and I’m inclined to agree.
For me, the most glaring offender here are the fights. Now don’t get me wrong, Black Flag’s combat was a bit of a joke, an almost cinematic experience of watching an endless array of beautifully brutal finisher animations play out before your eyes, as Edward terminated his fifth ship crew that day. It was cakewalk combat, and it’s even easier to see that if you return to Black Flag after playing Resynced.
The counter window is absurdly long and you only have to kill one enemy to chain finisher everyone else around you. But what Black Flag did have was choice. You could whip out your hidden blades and decimate enemies in a more low profile manner, pick up a massive axe and swing it about your head, or even carry and reload a musket, and each weapon had its own bespoke melee animations. I remember being amazed the first time I killed a fella with a musket in Black Flag that they’d even made animations for it.
Resynced, by comparison, only lets you use boring old cutlasses, and I struggle to see how removing a vast swathe of situational weaponry is an upgrade. For my part, I almost exclusively used hidden blades, throwing knives, and the occasional musket in the original—I literally would’ve unequipped my cutlasses if I could have. So playing through Black Flag Resynced in its entirety with them didn’t really feel like the same game to me.
Not to say that Resynced doesn’t have some decent ideas combat wise. Its kicks-on-demand are fun, and it’s certainly a tad more challenging than Black Flag ever was, but what I struggle to understand is why that increase in difficulty couldn’t have combined with the original’s weapon choice? All Black Flag’s combat really needed to be better was removing the endless chain finishers and reducing the counter window—that alone would’ve made a huge difference.
I feel like the removal of temporary weapons also fundamentally misunderstands that combat isn’t their only use. Having a musket, for instance, lets you take out troublesome sharpshooters in towers or on ship tops—the only way to do that now is get close and hope your pistol has the range, or climb up and kick them off. Throwing knives let you quickly kill enemies that spot you at a distance, so are useful in stealth, but also slick as hell.
These were never only weapons for pure combat, but tools that changed how you approached situations, which is the core premise of Assassin’s Creed, and something you kind of needed before Resynced removed fail conditions for stealth missions. The saddest part is that we have a new enemy with a blunderbuss. I feel like that would have been an incredible temporary weapon to pick up and use. What did we get instead? A rope dart.
Resynced’s combat is certainly passable, it just isn’t Black Flag combat. You can’t remove viable playstyles from a game and then claim it’s a true remake. If I can’t play a remake the same way I played the original, it’s something else entirely. But that’s ultimately my issue with Black Flag Resynced—it may be beautiful and have better ship combat, but its myriad changes mean it doesn’t retain the feel of the original, something I realised when I went back and played Black Flag after finishing Resynced.