I once dreamed of a day where I could look out upon the endless blue sea, chase down the great white moby dick and fight off all sorts of foul cur that you would find out there… Then Ubisoft made my dream come true and threw Assassins Creed IV Black Flag on my lap. Can you guess what I did straight away? Despite follow the story, kill the spanish guards and be that badass assassin that everyone strives to be. I got myself a boat… My boat… The Jackdaw… And I sailed the 11 seas… (Yeah, I know… Check the map when you get a chance!) and I laid waste to the Spanish and British navy… Forget the foul cur… Im taking out those who wish to stop me from plundering the merchants! But despite how this might look, this isnt actually going to be me talking about what I wanted to do and what I then went and did… Ok… It might be… So at first I found myself banging my head against the desk, simply for the fact that to even play this game it needed to install what seemed to be the entire Assassins Creed series to my playstation which left me with enough time to go and prepare some pirateish grub. By that I mean I came back with tea and a bacon sandwich because what else would a up and coming pirate want? So the game was installed and the first thing I noticed was that for once it drops you straight into a video that I didnt have the urge to skip… Maybe it was because of Blackbeard (Ed Thatch) or maybe it was because of the graphics that actually made me pause for a moment… Though when I think about it, it was because the setting of the video wasnt there to be a Look what your missing while you watch this! trailer like some games… But instead a This is only a small hint at what you will become! which dropped you into the question of who is the main character of this game, and how has he got the respect of one of the most famous pirates in history? (despite the fact hes a game character and not real!) So I jumped into the game and straight away it gifted me with custom skins for having played and completed all of the original games in the series, which was a pleasant surprise but not really that important to me as before I could really look and appreciate them it rushed me into the game. A fight, a battle for life and Edward Kenway… The main character… Being thrown into the water and made to look pretty much like a normal pirate… Nothing special, just that usual guy who falls in the water and drowns due to his inability to remember not to try and paddle his way to safety with his knife. So when the game actually gives you control your left swimming through the wreckage of your ship and there is fire everywhere, and dont forget that dramatic rain that makes the scene more dramatic. Dont forget the fact the sky is black, at the time I couldnt work out if it was due to the smoke or if it was night time. But just like that as I approach land the sun rose and the sky turned blue and the rain ceased to fall and as I turned around to look at the wreckage… I noticed that infect I was most likely sailing on a dingy and had probably been the victim of a low-flying seagull. Because considering how close I was to the shore of an island is a fairly good reason to believe that most of the ship should also be stuccoing out of the shallow water like an ugly protruding spot on a teenagers face but alas… It was gone and I felt slightly empty inside. Once I reach the shore no doubt he collapses and gasps, just like any dramatic blonde idiot who seems to have the devils luck dripping from the deep crevasse of his arse crack, but before he can wipe himself clean with the sand behind me comes a true assassin, who despite what we have been led to believe from the other games… Is actually a pretty boring character who seems to have the common sense of a member of a political party when confronted by a pissed off pirate… Thats right… Help me get to where im going and ill pay you! Think about it for a moment… Your a pirate and a guy who is injured says Help me and Ill pay you!. Now I know im not the only one who would instantly go Well you obviously have the money on you now so why dont I kill you and take it without helping you? And you wont believe how happy I was to see this lucky bastard had the same idea. Unfortunately the assassin although injured can still run off into the distance with a helpful marker over his head and a strange compulsion to stop and make sure im following him to his death. Now I want to bring up back a moment… Im a guy who got thrown off a boat when doing nothing… I struggled to make any sense of the situation and appear to have a brain more for money and rum than anything else… But as the assassin runs up walls, strides across thin branches and leaps from death inducing ledges without taking even a moment to recover from what I can only guess is a gun shot to his stomach, let alone the broken legs he must surely have… What does my drunken pirate do? Thats right… Follow him with more style and presence than hollywood trained hooker walking down a catwalk to receive her biggest pay check of the week. So with that, I kill an assassin, pickpocket him and then decide somewhere inside the pirate brain i have that its a good idea to also steal his clothes… Then again he had a really nice jacket and i know if given the chance… I would do the same! Now its off to climb down the next ledge and start fighting with the British… maybe they were Spanish… either way I wanted to kill them and by their stupidity, they obviously wanted to be killed. So it was in this first real moment that I noticed something about this game… The clunky feel that seemed to haunt Assassin Creed III like a bad odour was gone… This was smooth and fluid and for once I felt like i had gone from playing what was a game of pin my face to the floor as i miss a haystack, to a game of check out that girls arse while i simply running stab her boyfriend and his 57 friends without anyone realising. I couldnt and still cant really get over the fact that the actual gameplay while in the Animus is lovely and smooth and the detail theyve put into it takes this from being a simple pirate game to making you feel that you might in someway be seeing what the world would have been like. Then the game pulled me out of the animus and I found that Conner had managed to sneak his clunky, slow and dense movement and control into this game via force. To top it off… he also dragged my camera from its usual spot and stuck it to my sodding forehead, and stuck a cheap replica of what I think was supposed to be a blackberry tablet so my left hand and forced a sling around my arm so i couldnt get it to stop obscuring my sodding view! So I had been taken from a world that filled me with joy and the urge to be on an adventure of pillaging villages and sleeping with every bit of stuff I could get my pirate hook on… and had been thrown into a world that simply made me feel like i was having to walk around my own work place with what felt to be the guilt of calling conner a self obsessed dense little shit. This was the moment when i realised Ubisoft would never forgive us for hating that stupid idiot and his morgan freeman wannabe teacher! But stay tuned… The review isnt over… Instead this is just a taster of what is to come… Next time on Assassins Creed Black Flag… I might kill the person who thought a first person mode was a good idea?! Seriously though… This game is amazing and I have left out a lot of the content for the time being so i can give you a more in-depth feel with pictures, video footage and maybe even some spoilers… Out of 10 I would happily give it a 7, and might even push it to an 8. -={INK}=-
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 22:25:41 +0000
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