Game Title: Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag

Genre: Action – Adventure, Stealth

ESRB Rating: M

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Wii U

Release Date: October 29, 2013

You’re in the car, and cradling the box in a fashion only describable as Gollum-like, almost to the point of drooling in hellish anticipation. Arriving at home, you claw the clear plastic wrap off of the box, open it, and remove your prize: a disc, containing one of the most anticipated games of the year. Popping the game into your console, you take about 5 minutes to set up your Uplay passport. Then, the time has finally come. Hoist the black flag, lads! It’s time for you to set sail in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag!

As fans of the Assassin’s Creed franchise know, the premise of the series is that you play as Desmond Miles, a modern-day member of the secret Brotherhood of the Assassins. Through the use of a highly complicated machine called the Animus, Desmond is allowed access to the genetic memories of his ancestors (Altair Ibn-La’Ahad, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and Conner “Ratonhnhaketon” Kenway), who were all Assassins before him.

Set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy, the game’s fictional protagonist is the Welsh Pirate Captain Edward Kenway (Matt Ryan), who joined the Assassin order later in his life. Kenway is the master and captain of his own ship, the Jackdaw, where he flies a black flag stylized with a white skull inside of an equally white Assassin’s symbol. Throughout the span of the story, Kenway runs into many real major historical figures, such as the infamous Captain Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch, Anne Bonny, Captain John “Calico Jack” Rackham, Charles Vane, and Captain Benjamin Hornigold, among others.

Be advised, there be spoilers ahead! If you have not finished the story in Assassin’s Creed 3, I suggest you stop reading right here.

At the end of Assassin’s Creed 3, we as players witness the tragic death of Desmond Miles, who martyrs himself by activating a device built by “The Ones Who Came Before” to prevent the total scorching of the surface of the planet at the hands of a massive solar flare. The problem, therefore, lies in Desmond’s death: who will a game franchise famous for being set in the past and the future use as a modern-day protagonist if the one with all of the more interesting ancestors has been fried crispy? The answer to that, though, is the player him/herself. Supposedly, before Desmond died, Abstergo, the game’s evil organization, managed to fully scan and map out his DNA, therefore having on record the genetic memories for every one of Desmond’s individual ancestors. The player is then brought in as a beta-tester for Abstergo Studios’s newest game, based on the life of the pirate Edward Kenway, as retrieved from Desmond’s DNA.

This game, like Assassin’s Creed 3, was developed using the AnvilNext game engine. AnvilNext, first tested by Assassin’s Creed 3, was actually created with next generation consoles (like the Xbox One and PS4) already in mind. Therefore, it only makes sense that Assassin’s Creed 4 be developed on the same engine as its predecessor. AnvilNext has highly advanced rendering capabilities and a chaos factor, allowing game developers to randomize certain events or enemy classes and locations as well as the standard improved visuals and Artificial Intelligence. In layman’s terms, AnvilNext allows the player to see much more and provides even more of a challenge than specific enemies on a set path that one can easily intercept and take down.

One of the most controversial topics among fans about this latest installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise is the modern-day element. The actual game-play has been drastically improved, with a new, far easier method to equip weapons or tools during a fight as well as a new free-aim feature for the available projectile weapons, a revamped fighting system based around the dual-cutlass fighting style of real, historical pirates, and the introduction of new side missions, like deep-sea diving and whaling.

In the spirit of keeping things simple, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag can be described as nothing less than freaking awesome. It is truly the best game in the entire franchise to date! If you’ve only been playing Assassin’s Creed 3 up to now, you’ve been wasting your time. AC4 is the way to go. Now, in the words of the good captain Kenway, “Take no quarter, lads. And give none either!’