Just finished playing Assassn's Creed IV: Black Flag. This game was the most fun I've ever had playing an AC title - mostly because it gave me the freedom to ditch the retarded hood, forget all about Assassins going against Templars, and just go plundering wealthy British and Spanish gunboats, schooners, brigs, frigates, men o' war, and legendary ships. I liked the main character a lot, and the only annoying SJW angle was a plotline based around evil white men being defeated and killed for their wrongdoings by noble men/women/trannies of color. There's not a single villain in this game who isn't white, and not a single positive character aside from Edward Kenway himself who isn't either a Black man or a white woman.
The storyline was traditionally weaksauce megalomaniacal ravings about ancestors races and age-old conspiracies, and boiled down to yet another race after a magical artifact. The one aspect I did like about this title is the fact that a lot of positive and positive-neutral characters die due to various reasons - almost all of them Kenway's pirate buddies, and it plays a large role in the protagonist's psychological journey - at one point there's a trippy sequence where Kenway is being haunted by the memories of his dead friends while in a drunken stupor.
Templar conspirators were even thinner, more one-dimensional and obligatory than usual - they accomplish absolutely nothing in the entire span of the game, every single one of them is completely forgotten right after their introduction scene until it's time to assassinate them. It feels like whoever was writing this series was so mind-numbingly uninterested in the whole templar conspiracy angle, and ended up doing the bare minimum to satisfy the moronic executives running this show.
Combat was atrocious, no other word for it. I think the first AssCreed had more engaging combat than this, it's reduced to little more than pressing one button to insta-kill any enemy, pressing again to move to the next one, etc. Enemies sometimes use pistols and bombs, but they take about five hours preparing to shoot while standing completely still and defenseless. Meanwhile, Kenway can insta-kill up to four people with his pistols before having to reload. The player is, as usual, completely deprived of the ability to customize their inventory or have a unique combat style - swords only come in sets of identical twos, pistols only come in fours, hidden blades and swords are pretty much interchangeable with each other, and we get three different types of darts to spit on the enemies with the GIANT-ASS BLOWPIPE WOBBLING BEHIND THE BACK INCESSANTLY WITH NO CHANCE OF REMOVING IT EVER.
The monetary system is a bit more interesting than before - it's easy to make tens of thousands of dollars, but there's a lot of expensive items/upgrades to spend them on, so you regularly run out of cash and have to resort to piracy/side-missions to earn more. There's no regular source of income like Ezio's mansion, and most highly-profitable exploits are non-renewable, so you have to invest a bit of thought into how you want to earn and spend your money. There's also three additional resources - wood, metal and cloth - for ship upgrades, which can only be earned through plundering enemy ships.
AC4 is filled to the brim with multiple sets of collectables to fuel our collective OCD. Chests contain nominal amounts of money. Animus fragments are glowing pieces of crap that are never explained and amount to jack-shit when you gather them all. Secrets are either treasure maps useful for going on actual treasure hunts, bottle messages - pseudo-historical meta-plot drivel, or manuscripts which are screenshots of random historical documents (Voynich manuscript trololo) someone google imaged in one hour and plugged into the game for good measure. Shanties are new songs for our ship crew to sing, they run away when you approach so you have to be quick to catch them.
The game has some really good and authentic-sounding ship-crew songs and tavern songs, your crew singing "whiskey is the life of man" brings a lot of heart and memorability to the playing experience. The graphics are also really good, Caribbean seas, islands, jungles, docks, underwater caverns and towns are all a pleasure to traverse, ships are drawn with great attention to detail, pirates are portrayed a bit more authentically than the usual pirate pop-culture stereotype, drawing their characteristics more from their native cultures (English, Welsh, Irish, etc.) and status (battle-hardened sailors, wenches with a heart of gold, overambitious pricks) rather than a cartoonish 'pirate culture' where everyone wears eye-patches, walks on wooden legs, holds parrots on their shoulders, and talks like yarr shiver me timbers matey.
The game ended up being worth the effort of struggling through infuriating consoletard restrictions, and left me a bit sad/nostalgic when Kenway's days of piracy came to a close, and the end credits rolled. This is the first (and likely only) time I've ever had this reaction from playing an AC game (or any modern Ubisoft game for that matter), usually I'm just glad to be done with the ordeal and question myself on the compulsive need to play this shit. When AC Rogue comes out on PC, I'll give it a try and see if it lives up to its predecessor, as far as Unity and Victory - count me out, Renaissance Italy filled my life's share of virtual tourism.
