There I was - finally finnished with all the Assassin's Creed games. Celebrating, thinking about making a list, ranking them somehow, maybe write a review or some key points - hm... could there be a service like trakt.tv, or letterboxd.com or goodreads.com, but for video games? Oh cool there is. Now where is this list of AC games...

...

Wait a minute. What's Freedom Cry? Why didn't I play this? Shit. I must have mixed it up with Liberation. Shoot. Okey, let's get into this - otherwise my completionist brain will bug me for the rest of my life.

That's how I came to play Freedom Cry, a DLC for Black Flag 2 years after finishing Black Flag, and right after playing Mirage. As such, I feel incapable to rate it fairly; as I am missing the context of what Black Flag was and how Freedom Cry felt in that context, and coming form that game.

What I can tell you though is how I felt playing this: The story features Adéwalé, former quartermaster of Edward Kenway, now on a mission for Templars on the Caribbean sea. One such Templar he suspects in one of the ships they are hunting. They manage to enter the ship kill everyone and retrieve a strange package that is heading for Port-au-Prince. However, more Templar ships arrive and sink the ship and Adéwalé has to build up a new crew, get a new ship and find out what's happening in Port-au-Prince.

Storywise this DLC makes hardly any sense - until the end the secret of what's in the package is not revealed; there are some theories on the internet, but the game won't tell me. What the game will tell me though is who this is meant for. We meet this person, but decide not to give here the package, even though we are sure she is probably no Templar. Instead we do some tasks for her, so that we can trust her(?) for which she expect us to hand over the package once we're done with the task(???) - but instead we do them, meet up with here, give her another: "Nope" and then we do a new task???????? Wait - what's happening here - what am I missing?

The other tasks all feel weird, too. On the one hand we always talk about leaving as soon as we can to do Assassin's work. On the other hand we start liberating slaves; but only if we are not asked to - if asked, we say that we cannot do any more and need to leave as soon as possible...

It's all weird, the dialogues and motivations of the people didn't make any sense at all, so let's rather talk about gameplay and mechanics:

I was feeling a familiarity and had good vibes as soon as I heard the loading screen and menu musics for Black Flag - then you get thrown into a naval mission and it's instantly fun and works as if you never left the game. Wow. I actually missed this. Coming on land - not so much. The parkour and climbing was horrible, fighting was too, but once I had the controls back for kills and counter-kills this became much easier. The different plantations where a "fun" addition, that made sense and was feeling good to play. Also liberating slave ships had some new aspects to naval fights to it. There was also hunting and whaling, but they didn't make any sense at all, as they where not needed for anything; and there was one underwater diving-mission which was fun to do as well. Missions had restrains that would give you the 100% and those where easy to meet. The town felt lively though also unconfortable with all the slave punishment, slave huntings and slave auctioning, but terrifyingly accurate for that time period where for every free man there where 3-4 times the number of slaves hold or marketed in Port-au-Prince.

And basically that's it - we sink a couple of ships, we upgrade our ship, we free a couple of slaves and do a couple of meaningless pick and place and tailing missions only to then kill the Gouvaneur. Storywise this is forgettable, but setting-wise it still felt somewhat important and a gruesome reminder of what was done to people at that time. So even if I felt able to rate it - this last point would heavily weigh on the plus side on a game that otherwise had only mediocre to minus points.

As a DLC directly played after Black Flag this might be nice for some additional playing hours (though Black Flag was long enough to be satisfying on its own); as a stand alone this would be a pure disappointment. Please don't pay any money for this!

And that's it: now I truely did it. All ACs played in crhological order! Now which series should I tackle next?