Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced review – it’ll all end in Privateers

Are you familiar with the Ship of Theseus? It is an ancient philosophical thought experiment about whether an object is the same thing once all of its constituent parts have been replaced. It is a paradox, a fun poke at themes of identity and continuity, and greater minds than mine have attempted to answer the riddle through philosophical, mathematical, and metaphysical lenses. But today, I am going to apply the question to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced.

Ubisoft itself says Resynced has been “rebuilt from the ground up on the latest version of the Anvil Engine”. Ergo, the original planks and woodwork that made up the PS3/Xbox 360 game have been stripped back and replaced with something completely different. That game was made in a very different iteration of the Anvil Engine called AnvilNext – we’ve seen two major updates to Ubisoft’s proprietary tech since then.

The result is weird. There are imprints of that original game inside Resynced still, but they’re obfuscated and marred by all these roughly-inserted new bits and bobs that feel awkward at best, and actively detract from the experience at worst. This oscillation of quality bleeds through into almost every single aspect of the game: the graphics, the sound design, the performance, the writing, the pacing. Sometimes, it’s excellent, and you can feel the ambition of Ubisoft Singapore: there’s clear love for the source material, and there’s a genuine yearning to recreate that magic for a 2026 audience. But then, there’s the reality of what we have here: the skeleton of an aging game crammed into the harried skin of something newer, tidier, and smarter.

The bones of Black Flag are 13 years old; a reminder of a Ubisoft that reveled in the delights of being the kings of the open world. Quest icons litter your Caribbean map as the developers gleefully sling story missions to and fro, absolutely thrilled that you’ll need to spend 15 minutes sailing from The Bahamas’ Nassau to, say, Mexico’s Tulum. I fear attention spans have slipped in the interceding decade-plus (I certainly struggled with some of the longer sailing sections), and I noticed I used fast travel a lot more in this version of the game than I ever did in my PS4 playthroughs. Similarly, a lot of the main game’s questing revolves around the ol’-faithful ‘go here, do this’ approach that was so prevalent in the 2010 era. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but next to the new missions injected into the experience, you can see how the older ones have aged.

Then there’s the combat overhaul. When it works, it works: protagonist Edward Kenway is a scrappy, dishonorable fighter – a pirate down to his salt-stained boots. You really feel that in Resynced: a rope dart can pull British redcoats off balance, you can take potshots at rogue vagabonds with your dual pistols, and a ‘Spartan Kick’ seemingly aped from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a gorgeous tool for knocking any straggling goons into the drink once you’ve boarded an enemy ship. Firing on all cylinders, it’s a delight.

But in order to be good at fighting as Edward, you need to know how to parry, how to lock-on to enemies and how to pop off clouds of shot in their direction. And when the lock-on mechanic is as buttery and awkward as it is here, you find yourself at the disagreeable end of a rapier or scimitar far more often than you’d like. I had to restart many fights, not because I lost to the gaggle of Spaniards that were threatening to overwhelm my ship, but because of a slippery lock-on that made me whiff a parry and take an axe to the chest when facing the wrong combatant, or because I somehow glued myself to a musketman on the roof which left me open to a potshot to the teeth from a conquistador at melee range. “You are desyncronised,” the game teases. No kidding.

There’s a lot of new writing in the game; approximately 12,000 new lines, I was told at a preview event a few months back. Unsurprisingly, the quality here follows that same helix present in the rest of the game: some of it is, I think, better than moments in the original game. The rest of it, though, struggles to justify its existence at all. You can recruit four new named characters for your ship, the interminable Jackdaw (upgrading and customising your tub, by the way, remains a highlight across the entire 50-60 hour experience). Each of these new recruits has a questline, and each questline is a couple of missions long. I won’t ruin anything here, but one recruit – The Padre – has a quick line of quests that is emotive, engaging, empowering, and emblematic of Assassin’s Creed writing at its best; slightly sentimental with a human edge that is smart and pokes at your empathy glands.

But here comes that undulation. For every new questline that makes you raise your eyebrows and say ‘wow, OK!’, there’s another that makes you roll your eyes and say, with markedly less enthusiasm, ‘wow, ok.’ Take the fate of one Stede Bonnet, a highlight of the original game whose story was left to fizzle out and go limp in the name of historical accuracy. Here, we get a proper send-off to the gentleman pirate, only, it’s just as limp. With Stede’s closure, the sentiment turns saccharine, and I find myself watching the events on-screen (many delivered through soulless letters, no less) with a level of dejection. Kenway, in some of these new moments, feels remarkably un-Kenway.

The connective tissue that flexes and tenses between all these moments is great, at least. The Caribbean is no less enthralling as it was 13 years ago. Little splashes of colour and personality have been added here and there, too, making even the most cursory stopover on some unnamed atoll feel inspiring and motivational. Diving sections have been added (you can choose to engage with exactly one for story reasons, if you’d like) adding more variety to your sea-faring escapades. Exploration and parkour are a bit weird, though; I would need more than two hands to count how many times Kenway leapt from some random ledge, or decided to grab something he shouldn’t, provoking a spontaneous street brawl or keelhauling me into the drink. Maybe it’s because he’s a drunken rogue, maybe it’s because I mismanaged my inputs, but mostly it’s because – I think – the Anvil Engine is being stretched in awkward ways to stretch it over the bones of this Ubisoft relic.

This is also evident in the new cutscenes, or in some of the new cinematography you’ll see pasted over the old game’s cinematics. Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, and Shadows all opted for a simpler, more streamlined RPG-style approach. Very over-the-shoulder, cut back-and-forth stuff: I talk, you talk, I talk, you talk. In many cases, it’s less dynamic than what you’d see in the older games. In the middle of an RPG teeming with characters, sub-plots and everything else, it’s fine. But in Resynced, where there has been a lot of otherwise mo-capped material, these scenes jar: conversations are static, and somewhat lifeless. You can go from cutscenes with lots of dynamism, to something robotic and stiff. It feels more Bethesda than Ubisoft. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but it’s one of the most obvious places you can see the old struggle against the new: something that defines Resynced in many ways.

Kenway’s story is somewhat timeless: the moral tale of a man forsaking his previous life and identity in search of gold and glory. I’m not sure it will ever get old. But I can’t help but think of the background tragedy of his life being something of a mirror for Ubisoft here in 2026. Restless, agitated, unable to let a legacy rest, striking out in search of something greater: a retread of a highest ebb, a victory lap after a finest hour. Black Flag is a great modern video game, and that history is proudly on show in this remake, which is – when all’s said and done – a perfectly fine way of experiencing this tale. I enjoyed reliving it. But the additions Resynced tries so hard to cram into the experience are not universally positive, and as a result it leaves the original feeling misshapen, wonky, a bit rogue. Maybe that’s fitting for a tale about a man pretending to be something he’s not, but it makes Resynced something of a vainglorious expedition: there’s no plunder to be had here, we’re just plotting a course we’ve sailed before.