Black Flag attempts to mesh the Assassin's Creed formula with a pirate adventure which, despite some of the jank that always comes with this series, is done fairly well. Both the stealth and the naval combat are improved over the previous entry. That said, as much as I liked the naval mission in AC3 as side content, it being the core content in Black Flag eventually wears out its welcome. As beautiful as its rendering of the Caribbean in the 18th century is, the cities here lack the splendour and fun traversal of the Ezio games and none of the rural or jungle areas are as interesting as the frontier from AC3. There's mostly just small isolated islands which makes sense for the setting but they ultimately don't stand out as anything memorable. There is a good amount of fun side content that fit the character such as spear hunting and undersea exploration.

I feel somewhat mixed with the story. On one hand, there is some wonderful highs in the writing and it has a delightful cast of characters but there's a lack of flow between the story beats. I wouldn't say there story feels rushed but there is perhaps some problems in fitting the pirate narrative into the typical Assassin/Templar conflict of the series. I can imagine that some people greatly prefer this game's story for that reason though. I also never particularly warmed to Edward. I'm certainly appreciative of them not doing another revenge driven motivation but it feels like the developers fell back on the puckish rogue character archetype after people rejected the, in my opinion more interesting, serious and naive Connor. Edward's character development is more pronounced here than his grandson's however.