---
title: 'Assassin''s Creed IV Black Flag Remake Review: 100% Completion First Playthrough'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=BdFWravCxd0'
video_id: 'BdFWravCxd0'
date: 2026-07-11
duration_sec: 1683
---

# Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag Remake Review: 100% Completion First Playthrough

> Source: [Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag Remake Review: 100% Completion First Playthrough](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BdFWravCxd0)

## Summary

A first-time player's review of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Remake after achieving 100% completion. The reviewer praises the pirate gameplay and exploration while criticizing the forced Assassin elements and repetitive combat.

### Key Points

- **First-Time Experience** [00:08] — The reviewer played the Black Flag Remake for the first time, achieving 100% completion. A review key was provided via Ubisoft Connect.
- **Assassin Elements Feel Forced** [01:45] — The game feels like a great pirate game with Assassin elements tacked on at the end. The Assassin part is borderline pointless and adds little to the story.
- **Exploration is Fun** [02:12] — Unlike typical Ubisoft games, exploration in Black Flag is enjoyable. Sailing, pillaging, and exploring unmarked islands are highlights.
- **Technical Issues and Fix** [03:08] — Initial rough frame rates in cities were caused by a corrupted graphics driver. After fixing the driver, the game ran smoothly.
- **Difficulty Options** [04:14] — Three difficulty sliders: combat, stealth, and exploration. Stealth and combat affect enemy difficulty; exploration affects ocean diving and similar activities.
- **Story and Character Arc** [05:09] — The story spans ~7 years of Edward Kenway's life, from a gold-obsessed sailor to a changed man. The ending is well-done with a memorable song.
- **Modern-Day Sections Removed** [07:35] — Modern-day Animus sections are replaced with optional rifts that provide lore without mandatory engagement.
- **Progression Systems** [08:26] — Multiple progression paths: character weapons/upgrades, Jackdaw ship upgrades, three new officers with unique abilities, and a hideout with fleet management.
- **Stealth is Optional and Slower** [11:32] — Stealth is completely optional and slower than direct combat. The remake removed fail states, allowing players to choose their approach.
- **World Design** [12:15] — Three main cities (Havana, Kingston, Nassau) with traditional Ubisoft checklists. More interesting are wilderness locations, plantations, and unmarked islands.
- **Ship Combat and Piracy** [14:26] — Players can attack most ships, board them, and choose to send to fleet, salvage, or release. Ship combat involves cannons, mortars, and rams.
- **Dynamic Weather Issues** [18:42] — Storms occur too frequently, forcing slow sailing and constant attention. They can become tedious.
- **Ground Combat Mechanics** [19:24] — Combat involves breaking enemy defense bars, perfect parries, and chain takedowns. Pistols and stealth can bypass defenses.
- **Legendary Ship Fights** [22:55] — Legendary ship battles provide a good challenge and require mastery of positioning and upgrades.
- **Combat Gets Stale** [25:48] — Despite added depth, combat becomes repetitive. Stealth tools are slower and unnecessary, making combat feel basic over time.

### Conclusion

The Black Flag Remake is a great pirate game with excellent exploration and story, but the Assassin elements feel tacked on and combat becomes repetitive. Recommended for fans of pirate adventures.

## Transcript

This time bringing you my review after 100% for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Reynct. The remake of course to a very popular title that being Black Flag. But this was my first time getting to experience it at all. So keep that in
mind as we move through this. But before we do just that, I do in fact need to inform you of a few things. I'm sure most people are aware about the 100% by link below covering everything I go over and my Steam profile is public and
particular case, that won't be super helpful because I was provided a review how I'm bringing you this review the day of its release. But that review key was
provided through Ubisoft Connect. And while you can see on screen here that I point out that uh one of the collectibles, the new portraits that throughout the game, I wound up searching for for like 30 hours. Now,
I've uh checked, there's already guides up for it now, but that one and the art collection one were uh the worst of them. But otherwise, it's mostly pretty content, do all the things. Although, coincidentally, in regards to this
looking specifically for that collectible, though admittedly that was stuff happened in the background, which we'll get to, I did actually grow to have a greater appreciation of the world that they have crafted here. And outside
great experience. And so, let's dive in and talk about just that. If I were to played it for the first time, I would say it kind of feels like somebody made a great pirate game and then right at the end of that development cycle,
"Hey, wasn't this supposed to be about assassins or something?" And then they added some of that in there because the assassin part of this is uh borderline pointless. It adds honestly not that much to the story, which is especially
interesting given just how good the rest of it is. Like something that I don't typically love from Ubisoft games is often the exploration. Like they do times they aren't super fun to explore. And yet here, I had a ton of fun going
around sailing the high seas, pillaging everybody in sight, exploring unmarked actually do the assassin stuff, it just kind of felt a little forced, which is an odd way to uh see a game like this, I would guess. But to give a little more
background to that even um last year when Assassin's Creed Shadows released, I wound up playing and reviewing that game. And yet that was actually the in quite some time. I had not played one since Assassin's Creed 2, actually. And
so I wanted to go back through and just check out some of the older games. And not too long after that, it seemed like a no-brainer, especially given how much people had recommended this one when I talked about playing some more of them.
With that exact thing in mind, let's go ahead and talk about the rest of it. So, let's start with the technical state. How was this game running? So, I did issue that was not the game's fault, but rather on my end personally. So, when
with a driver recommendation that I downloaded and used to play the game, but I was still getting uh rough frame rates in the city areas in particular. Now, at first I thought maybe this was just an optimization issue because I
which is linked in the about section and the game wasn't unplayable, but again I in the cities uh specifically. And towards the end of my run with this game in dealing with a separate computer issue, I actually discovered that the
driver was corrupted, the graphics driver. So I had to get that fixed, of course. Once I got that sorted out, the game played buttery smooth. So keep that you have any issues like that, you may well want to check your driver, I
suppose, cuz I did run into that problem myself. Beyond that, uh, the game only across, I think it was like 75, 80 hours. They provided this review key several weeks ago. And what's more, there are plenty of, uh, various options
for you to tweak and adjust in the settings, including uh, the specifics of how some of parkour works, exact difficulty settings, some of the UI, etc. So, there's plenty of stuff to get in there and mess around and toggle,
options are, in fact, difficulty options. The game has uh three big difficulty sliders you can mess around with. These being combat, stealth, and So, on the stealth side of things, this is basically what you'd expect, how easy
You can make that easier or harder. Combat is much the same, how difficult you'll find enemies, how easy it is to deal with them. outside of stealth. Of course, though, with the uh one hit kill takedowns in much of combat, it's not
that difficult no matter what. The other one, exploration affects things like everything when you are doing the ocean diving and whatnot. So, there are plenty of options to mess around with there.
But, let's then talk about the story setup and my thoughts on it. As truth be told, the story of this game is one of the better parts of it. And with this people will be jumping into this for the first time. And so I don't really want
to spoil much here. So we're going to talk in slightly more broad terms. With that in mind, this game takes place over about seven or so years of the life of about seven or so years of the life of Edward Kenway. During the golden age of
piracy, think Blackbeard, etc. Basically like 1710 from 1720 roughly in that period. And Edward Kenway joined the life of piracy, trying to earn a good living and actually be someone of note in his homeland of Wales, where he left
behind his wife. Edward here was more or less obsessed with gold, trying to get his hands on as much as possible simply because he knew this would give him the wealth and status that he was after in order to live a life of freedom compared
to working for extremely low wages, no matter how happy his wife was with that more simple life. So he left for years, became a pirate, and that's where the story kicks off. In a bit of a chance encounter, Edward Kenway comes face tof
face with a member of the assassin order turned traitor, Duncan. After killing the guy for purely uh, let's say, materialistic reasons, we find a note on him that then leads us into contact with the Templar and gets us embroiled in a
bit of a situation that, truth be told, takes a very long time to play out. The of about seven years and the assassin part of it doesn't come up much. Much of the game is actually revolved around you taking part in various big moments of
piracy and committing some acts of piracy yourself and then just coincidentally tracking down and dealing with uh members of the Templar order as they cross your path and just generally kind of get in your way as you try to
interesting there, and that's about as much as I want to say setup-wise, is that it's really great to see Kenway's growth over the course of the game because it takes place over so much time. There's a really good character
arc over the course of the entire story there. You go from, of course, sort of a green sailor who's just trying to earn as much money as he can to a pirate money he can at the expense of basically
everything all the way to by the end of the tale seeing some real growth and change in a man who's been affected by his journey having seen the effect it particular, I loved the ending. Didn't
was very well done. There's this song that gets sung over the course of it and nonetheless, when it comes to talking about the story of this game, you may well have questions about the sort of real life portions, if you will, where
you would actually come out of the Animus of the Assassin's Creed franchise and take place in discussions in the modern day. And you may well be interested to know then that those are just straight up not here. So, those
portions have been cut pretty much entirely and replaced with these rifts. So there are four rifts which pop up at certain points in the story that are completely optional, but if you choose to do them, give you, I would say, an
the Animus and that sort of more modern-day plotline. But again, you don't have to engage with that at all. Overall though, a surprisingly great story, worth experiencing, and I can tell just from this why people enjoyed
it's definitely one of the best things the game has going for it. But we're hardly done there because next up, we are talking progression. So, there are throughout this game, dealing with, of
Jack Daw, and even your hideout. Starting with our base character, however, we are over the course of the game going to find a variety of weapons, be that cutlesses, rapiers, pistols, or accessories, and all of those are going
to upgrade Edward's capability. There are several different weapon types, again, cutlesses, rapers, that kind of thing. each of which offering a unique number of chain takedowns which we'll talk about as well as say a heavy
have extra effects like not using bullets from concealment, that sort of with a wide variety of effects that you can wear two of as well. And if that wasn't enough, you also get other upgrades to things like your health by
finding and tracking down animals to hunt and kill for their body parts and pelts. though there is actually a way through a side quest to get a bunch of hunting. So even then you get those upgrades one way or another. Then there
is your jackaw. Now this is a part of the game that I know saw a substantial upgrade in the form of officers. So you could upgrade the ship in the original and you can upgrade it here which includes things like better cannons, a
better hull to make ship combat easier. But by far the biggest upgrade you're going to get is by recruiting the three new officers. There are three of them story that I do not want to spoil for you. So, not only are they new, but they
associated with them as well, which gives a bit of characterization to the people you'll be calling your crew, which often explains why they are in the life of piracy to begin with. Most of those were really well done, but
because they uh usually unlock alternative fire modes for your weapons or just extra abilities for your ship in general. Like for instance, the ability to shoot two rounds of cannons before they go on cooldown. And then naturally
portion as well as we all want to look the part. But then there is your hideout. So they expanded the hideout here. We get a sort of pirate cove to act as our base of operations. And when we get that pirate cove, we get access
to a fleet. Uh the ships that we pirates and command can be sent back to our headquarters and then used to take on more piracy missions. You'll basically command a fleet of up to 10 ships who can then perform tasks for you, which I
get a lot of the art pieces that you're going to need to fill out the art collection at your hideout, which was by far the most annoying achievement if you were curious. But even beyond that stuff, you can also upgrade and expand
the hideout to do things like upgrade uh various types of shops, uh give you piece together uh broken up treasure maps for you in addition to the regular find. Or you can upgrade the shop for
better and better upgrades for the jackd, which is where you're going to uh new here, upgrade a wararf, which gives you extra animal parts from doing whales, etc., which is also pretty useful for progression, of course.
looking at, however. And then let's move on to the game play and world a little saying one of the more curious things about this game is that despite being an assassin's game, you don't really have to do stealth at all at this point. So,
one of the things about the remake here is that they took out the sort of understand. So, where you would fail stealth and then have to retry continues on. And in some cases, my understanding is they just changed them
approach. But the interesting thing about this that I think is fine, honestly, no real complaint out of me is that uh the stealth approach is completely optional. You just don't have to do that. You can rush in and attack
want. And in many cases, that's just straight up faster because stealth is by And once you get your upgrades in particular, you're more than capable of just walking in and wiping everybody out completely action adventure style. So,
it's a little curious that stealth is absolutely present and viable, but completely unnecessary and slower most of the time. But a little more functionally speaking, uh this game is comprised of three main cities, Havana,
Kingston, and Nasau alongside various other locations that are a little more there's also the open ocean, as well as a whole bunch of unmarked islands that you can explore and find some extra loot in. Talking about these cities in
particular, so these are a little more traditional in their approach as far as traditional viewpoints. These unlock that you can then go around and hoover up. And occasionally, there's extra
their own mini games, as well as the ability to buy tips about convoys on the open ocean. But in many ways, I would say the cities just feel like more of Ubisoft overall, which is just again that sort of traditional checklist style
nature where the game gets much more interesting to me is everywhere else. Now, your marked locations are places they expect you to explore. They are marked as such. These also have a checklist of things to do, but thanks to
their nature, the wilderness, the animals that can spawn there, etc., it approach. And while functionally yes, very similar to the cities in terms of approach, I personally found exploring these parts more interesting by
comparison usually uh you know various combat experiences, people getting up to find around. All sorts of equipment and loot to be found and just all sorts of parkour you can do to get around. And that's before we even start talking
about the variety of these locations. Like some of them are plantations which have warehouses that if you go through the effort of finding the key to you can plunder and pirate your way through which can give you access to some unique
stuff but notably uh the resources you're going to need to spend on various upgrades and things across all of them. You can often hunt animals as I which all have different behavior of course and then there are just like
little towns that don't necessarily amount to a city but have some things to take on of course side quests like the naval contracts. So, there's plenty of done because then there's the open ocean that you'll be sailing across. Now, one
of the big things you can do in the pirate game is, of course, be a pirate. You can attack basically every ship you see. The game doesn't like you attacking be told, there's really not many of those to attack to begin with. Everyone
else is pretty much open game as long as your ship is strong enough to actually do the job. and you can uh incapacitate them basically and then choose to board them and then take over their ship and then choose to either send it back to
your fleet, salvage it for repairs or let them go to lower your wanted level. level goes up and pirate hunters will for that. On more than one occasion, I had them show up at a less than
opportune time for me. But all of that is going to allow you to engage in the shipto- ship combat which is primarily done by of course outfitting your ship as the very first thing but then in the uh lower ship mode. So there's sailing
in a slightly tighter control of the ship which is where combat takes place and by pointing the camera in the direction that you are looking. You then activate the weapon on that side of the ship and then you can use that of course
to attack. You also get access to a ram, a mortar, as well as the ability to do incoming damage and things like that. And overall, it's a pretty fun system enough, while you're sailing, uh, you can get your crew to sing sea shanties.
Johnny is my favorite one by far. I loved that one. But outside of piracy on the open ocean, you can also do things like find floating loot, pick up floating uh people in order to staff your crew, which does have to be managed
to have. Later on in the game, you also get access to a diving bell, which is going to allow you to uh go and explore shipwrecks. These will see you uh usually evading something like a shark of some description as you try to track
down all the treasure at the bottom of the sea. By the way, there's an achievement for reaching the lowest point of the ocean. It is in fact in one more specific, it is in the one called the Black Trench in case you have to
way I did. And if all of that still wasn't enough, then we have the unmarked islands. So, if you actually look at the world map and zoom in, there's a ton of islands that are not a part of anything. There's no reason to go there. And in
can even like park your ship at and go explore cuz they're just not something you can access. However, if you look at the map, there are islands that are not explore. You can usually at the world map actually see buildings on them if
you zoom in. And these offer all sorts of stuff. Usually just kind of showing island. And then Edward will have some words about it. But there's usually loot kind of thing. One of them actually has a special vendor on it that has some
very unique uh merchandise, let's say. Very cool stuff overall. And then last section is the hideout and your fleet and in particular the fleet. So outside of uh giving you access to a whole bunch of general services, your hideout gives
also access this from the captain's cabin of your ship, by the way. But you can send your fleet out on various piracy missions. You'll probably want to clear the forts and the individual zone you are in ahead of time to make things
pretty fun, by the way. Each of them usually has a unique mechanic and they sometimes ships will sail in to help them while you're fighting them and it But once you've cleared the forts and all that and you have a fleet together,
you can start sending those fleets out on timed missions. Basically, your ship just needs to have the health and be the right type of ship to be sent on the mission and you will auto succeed when it finishes. These take time that is
the game. While this was happening is when I spent that 30 hours running through looking for that one collectible I missed. And this was mainly because some of these fleet missions give you art collection pieces, which was the
only way I could find enough to fill out the art collection for that achievement. I got to be honest with you. Um outside of that uh art collection, there doesn't seem to be a ton of reason to do these fleet missions unless you're just really
can provide, but I also just didn't find that necessary. So, do you, I suppose. And then uh just one little quick note before we move on to combat. Uh they added a dynamic weather system this time around. So weather is dynamic and this
mainly means storms on the open ocean. And I got to tell you, I think the game could stand to tone it down. There were times where I would exit a storm only to about 10 seconds later uh enter another storm. And this affects various things.
you then have to angle your ship uh towards so you don't get hit by them. have to avoid which can tear your ship to pieces. And the thing is you can't uh sail quickly while this is happen. You also can't leave the helm while this is
happening either. And it just gets to be a lot after a while. Like they are just constant it felt like. But otherwise, let's move on to combat. So combat can basically be divided into ground combat versus ship combat. So we're going to
talk about each one individually. The ground combat is a relatively simple adventure, you'll probably get the gist of it pretty fast, but there are a few key things to be aware of for sure. So, every enemy has a defense bar. Your job
uh through one means or another is to bypass that defense bar. If you hit them enough, it will break, leaving them open to a takedown, which is an instant kill. You can also reduce their health at that point, but the takedown is faster. Some
abilities will bypass this defense bar immediately, like a pistol shot. A you have time to aim, will kill them outright. You can use quick shots in combat to simply break their defense, but this requires ammunition, which can
you'll likely run out of if you are in a lot of combat. Now, another way you can bypass this defense is, of course, a stealth assassination. You can even double assassinate enemies, but the catch is because this requires the
slower by default. If anything, it's usually much faster to run in and attack enemies straight up because with your pistol, as well as the new perfect parry system, it's pretty easy to chain a bunch of takedowns. So, one of your main
forms of defense on ground is the parry. And if you perfectly parry and attack, that enemy is then opened up to a takedown and then sets off a chain takedown. So based on your main weapon, you get a maximum number of takedowns
for a chain after a perfect parry from two to four, meaning that you can perfectly parry, instantly take that enemy down, and then chain that takedown to other enemies, taking down a bunch of them at once. So far so good. But from
details of things like enemy types as well as the weapon types and tools you are using. So on your end, there are different weapon types. There are different types of like say rapeers, cutlesses, etc. Each of them has like a
amount of chain takedowns they can perform in combat. So find something you like and kind of go with that. Of course, enemy types, however, make There are about six of them in total. Uh
brutes in particular are usually the ones to look out for because they will uh not allow you to bypass their defense quite as easily and you have to resort to a pistol usually to do it quickly outside of a stealth assassination. Now,
enemies also have guns, of course, but you can uh luckily grab enemies and use them as a human shield, which is really funny when it happens, to be honest. And then there's stealth. Most of your tools are geared towards a stealth style of
gameplay, but you get access to things like a smoke bomb, uh various types of darts, sleeping, and berserk to affect enemies with. Then there's all your typical standard assassination types, etc. from various angles. Uh you can use
rope darts to hang enemies. But again, stealth is not required at all. and is usually slower. Then there's the ship combat. Ship combat is down to the upgrades and the officers as I mentioned. So upgrades are pretty
effective once you have them. The officers provide their gigantic passive bonuses to your combat capabilities. And from there, you basically just look at the uh direction of the weapon you want to use on your ship and then you know
then you have things like the mortar and the ram which require positioning. And when you are often facing more than one ship, positioning becomes really, really important. And trying to understand the ways at which an enemy could attack you
and how best to mitigate that damage while also dealing maximum damage to them. There's a surprising bit of nuance to it. And once you've mastered it and want to take on the legendary ship fights, which are honestly pretty
difficult. Those were a good challenge. Once you've incapacitated a ship, however, you then have two choices. Come up alongside it and board it, or sink it. Sinking it gives you much less of a reward than boarding it does. Boarding
it requires you to actually fight the crew and then reduce their morale to the point you have some options I've already talked about. But bringing all of that together, I will say that combat makes you feel like a pirate more than
anything else. I did not really run through this game ever feeling like an assassin, but I felt like a very cool pirate, which is one of the several feel like they just kind of tacked on the Assassin stuff at the end when they
tried to find a franchise for this to fit into. In fact, I think this game is usually at its weakest when it's trying to conform to the Assassin's Creed stuff specifically because the rest of it is awesome, which is interesting cuz it's
franchise that is literally on the box, which is funny. But, uh, from there, and then wrap this thing up. So, on the Steam Deck side of things, I unfortunately did not test this one. I know a lot of people watch my reviews
that it is verified on Steam, but the reason I did not test it is because I had to go through Ubisoft Connect and this game is coming to Steam. To do this on Steam Deck, I would have used uh the Ubisoft Connect from the desktop mode,
you're going to buy this and play it on the Steam Deck, you're likely to do that would be using the Steam function of the Steam Deck, and that's just simply going didn't want to go through all that testing and it just, you know, behave
differently at the end of the day. I will say that again, it is supposed to be verified. So, theoretically, it should play well there. And then the minimum system specs are a little bit higher than what the Steam Deck is
possible they optimized for it specifically. So, that's about all I could realistically say to you guys. But positive side of things, exploration and the piracy portions, this really is just a great pirate game. I loved exploring
sort of inadvertently even some of the like unmarked stuff. Spending all of that time looking for that collectible wound up really making me appreciate the journey in a lot of ways. But sailing the open sea, diving into shipwrecks,
exploring unmarked islands, that kind of thing. This game does that pretty well, surprisingly so. Even on top of that, all the piracy stuff is great. attacking know, stealing all of their stuff, as it were, using that to then upgrade and add
to your fleet, etc., to perform more piracy. There's a really good little pirate game at the heart of this that feels like it has absolutely nothing to do with being an assassin. On top of that, the story was surprisingly pretty
solid. Uh, they gave a really good character arc to Edward Kinway here. be hit with that unexpected end towards the finale of the game was a really enjoyable experience for me. I had a
good time with it. And yet, nonetheless, there were some negatives. For a couple of things, I will say combat does wind up getting stale over the course of the thing. You can tell that they tried to add depth to it, but it's just uh super
basic at a lot of points. and I think it's fine for the type of game it is. It's ultimately a little underwhelming because uh they've added a bunch of all. Like there's no reason to use them. And in fact, they're slower and clunkier
everything to death after you've perfectly parried. Now, I will say I the story, it won't be nearly as bad, especially when they start doing like But when you're trying to do everything and combat doesn't really evolve or
change over the course of the entire thing and they provide some options here pointless. Like for instance the game stealth which to me just felt slow and unnecessary when again you can walk in and just demolish everything made it get
again just a little old over the course of the thing which was my main gripe with it. But otherwise that brings us to our conclusion and honestly I can see it. I mostly had a fantastic time with it. And while a remake like this is
inherently never going to please everybody, I'm glad that the first time I got to play this game was this way because again, I just had a ton of fun. So, with that in mind, uh this game is releasing for $60 US, which I'll admit
is a tiny bit more than I would have liked to have seen a remake, but given they made and everything, I'm actually good with that. I'm going to go ahead and give this one a buy because while the uh game doesn't exactly live up to
its namesake of an Assassin's, there's a great pirate game under here that I had pretty much it for this particular review. Certainly hope you enjoyed it. Let me know how you feel about this one down in the comment section below, which
subscribe, all that YouTube jazz. But thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. May you wander in do appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.