I'm surprised by how much more I like this than AC3 and Black Flag. It has mostly the same systems and a less developed plot and characters but there feels like there's more confidence in its design. The world design and level design is really great here. I'm a completionist and this might be the most fun I've had going for 100% in an Assassin's Creed game. The myriad of collectibles and side objectives throughout the areas have a real nice flow between them that makes running through them feel very satisfying. The game is mostly side content due to the shorter story so it's good that I enjoyed that part.

The mechanics may be almost the exact same from Black Flag but I do appreciate the variety in locales in Rogue. There is a big city area with New York (which admittedly is just taken from AC3 and wasn't that great to begin with) and there are two different areas to sail around in River Valley and the North Atlantic. There's slightly more thought to sailing around in the River Valley since it's a bit tighter and the land areas there remind me of the Frontier from AC3 which I really liked. The North Atlantic is oddly beautiful in its icy starkness. It feel weird to say I prefer the cold North Atlantic to the gorgeous vistas of the Bahamas in Black Flag but I did. The great design of the land areas compared to those in Black Flag help too.

You are mostly doing the same stuff as you may be well used to in these games. There's a lot of naval combat, sneaking up and stabbing dudes and clearing out outposts which people may be tired of at this point. There's a few new weapons here and you get hunted by Assassins which is more annoying than anything. Seeing one of these games from the Templar perspective could have been interesting but it is pretty simplistic in its approach by making the Assassins awful and the main Templar guy the nicest guy in the world. They could have done more with the protaganist Shay Cormac but I'll mostly just remember the bad Irish accent. The game does feature Haytham Kenway who is one of the bect characters in this series so the story has that going for it. It provides a connective tissue for the Kenway Saga or whatever you want to call this era of Assassin's Creed and somewhat of a conclusion to lead into the next era. The narrative may not be particularly satisfying but they got the best of what made this era of Assassin's Creed fun to play.

If you want more Black flag, this gives you a little more of it to do. It doesn't really add much outside of a new story for Adewale who is likeable. The city and few little islands aren't distinctive from anything in the main game and you'll be doing most of the same activities. Perhaps that is not surprising since it is a DLC but it feels rote. The only real new feature is the freeing slaves mechanic. It actually is pretty interesting that there are always more slaves despite how many you free showing the endless horror of the slave trade. I don't know if that was intentional or if they just wanted to have a recurring thing to do but it's something to note.