As any Assassin’s Creed fan will tell you, Nothing is true. That’s why when rumours began to float around the web that a remake of Ubisoft’s fan-favourite title, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), was in the works, everyone assumed that it was just another falsified internet rumour, as after six years of the series moving to its more RPG-focused era with 2017’s Origins, reverting back to the classic action-adventure formula sounds too good to be true, right?
Nothing might be true, but let’s not forget the latter half of the mantra, Everything is permitted, and three years after the credible first hints of a remake’s existence popped up in 2023, the retelling of Edward Kenway’s legendary story is finally setting sail towards the modern gaming generation with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced.
It’s travelling at full sail too, as the remake is just under two months out and ahead of the release, Geek Culture was able to spend three hours with an early build of the title, where we were able to get a better understanding of just how much the game’s graphics have improved over the original, and more importantly, how the remake is balancing nostalgia with fresh content, thanks to its new gameplay tweaks and additions.
To help provide a well-rounded taste of what’s to come, the preview was split into three segments – the entire opening sequence of the game, which sees Edward facing off against Duncan Walpole, arguably the most useless Assassin in history (and a traitor), and meeting up with the ever-charming Stede Bonnet, a lengthy one-hour-long free-roam section where we could explore Havana and its surrounding waters freely. Finally, we closed off with a mid-game portion featuring both a new quest surrounding the recruitment of Lucy Baldwin, one of the three added naval officers in the remake, and a diving-focused mission with Edward Thatch, aka Blackbeard.
From the opening minutes of the preview, it was clear just how faithful a remake Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is, at least in terms of graphics and visual style. Watching Edward’s ship come under fire while in the pouring rain immediately transported us back to 2013, and this feeling would only intensify further once we were free to parkour our way through Cape Bonavista. Yes, everything had a shiny coat of paint slathered on with massively improved texture quality and environmental density, but it still feels like the same Black Flag from days past, with objects like fallen trees and makeshift wooden towers mostly in the exact places they were before.
Apart from being immediately hit with that wave of nostalgia, the game’s opening mission also provided the perfect opportunity to showcase the remake’s new facial animation technologies, giving a more photorealistic look to all its characters and upping the fidelity of cutscenes. Of course, a drastic change such as this will surely divide the community, as giving such iconic characters and an almost brand-new look might take some getting used to, especially Edward himself, who has seen the biggest change, so it will be interesting to see if fans can grow to love this refreshed design over the remake’s runtime.
Another thing that absolutely needs getting used to is the remake’s overhauled control scheme, which sees it adopt the movement controls from the franchise’s RPG era. In the original Black Flag, players would sprint and parkour by holding down the right trigger button, but in the remake, players now toggle sprint by pushing down the left stick, and parkour by further holding down the jump button. To be fair, those coming from more recent titles like Shadows (2025) would find it to be second nature, but this would undoubtedly be a sore point for franchise purists.
It’s not too long before the preview introduced us to Black Flag Resynced’s overhauled combat, too, and this time, the changes are much more pronounced, but arguably for the better. Players of the original game would know how mindless its combat would become after the first few hours, where every encounter basically devolved into them standing in place and waiting for their foes to attack, parrying the moment they see that red exclamation mark pop up over an enemy’s head, then spamming the attack button while targeting their next foe for a chain kill, rinse, and repeat.
This system has been kept somewhat intact, but the way to go about performing it has been drastically changed. First of all, players now attack by pressing the right shoulder button instead of the face button, a change once again introduced in the franchise’s RPG era, but the biggest difference lies in Black Flag Resynced’s new defence gauge system. Now, every enemy has a defence bar above their health, and so long as it’s there, they will block all of Edward’s basic strikes as it depletes with every hit, eventually breaking and allowing for actual damage.
Spamming light attacks is still a viable tactic, but not the most efficient one, and that’s where parries come in. Using the left bumper, players can parry enemy strikes by timing their button presses when their swords glint, which not only deflects said attacks, but also temporarily disables their defence bar, allowing for a few good hits before it reactivates. By timing their parries at the last second, Edward can now perform a perfect parry, which instantly opens up his foes for not just an immediate takedown, but also chain kills, which are performed by then approaching another foe and pressing the takedown button in a set amount of time.
This change might feel like just additional steps to achieve the same goal, but in action, this does ramp up the intensity of combat. For one, the added layers to parrying mean that players will now have to properly time their button presses and not just spam the button the moment they see a sword glint for the best results, but the parry window is now also much smaller than before, making overall combat notably more challenging, but more satisfying in the process.
This is just the changes made to basic combat, too, as once the preview opened up to its free-roam segment, players were now given access to Edwards’ near-complete arsenal, which further expands on his tactical opportunities in combat. The rope dart, which was previously a late-game weapon, will now be available much earlier in the game, and while the original tool was only used in stealth kills and chain takedowns, here, it’s a fully fledged ability in combat.
By holding down the right trigger and pressing a face button, players can now activate quick skills, one of which is the rope dart, which can now be used to pull enemies afar towards the player and channel one’s inner Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. In the preview, the rope dart was mostly used to close the distance between foes, so it will be interesting to see whether the full game will introduce special rope dart kills for long-ranged takedowns.
Apart from the rope dart, players have access to three other quick skills – a quick pistol shot, which feels similar to the system seen in the original, alongside two new ones consisting of a sweeping kick that trips enemies to the ground and a pseudo Spartan kick that can push foes back against a wall or over an edge, with both these moves opening them up for a takedown. These additions and changes further boost Edward’s combat flexibility and make the overall action feel more methodical.
And then there’s stealth, which has been kept mostly intact apart from one major change – a dedicated crouch button. It might be hard to believe, but the original game never had one, with Edward instead crouching automatically when he entered specific stealth zones like bushes. Now, stealth feels more akin to recent Assassin’s Creed titles, with another addition being a new visibility gauge à la Shadows, with things like player stance and distance to a light source affecting how quickly they can be spotted from afar, alongside an interesting hood toggle button, which allows Edward to raise and lower his hood at any time, with the benefit being not just looking cool, but also slightly reducing the visibility bar when hooded.
That’s just the on-foot experience, too, as a huge part of the Black Flag lies in its naval portion, which has seen some additions of its own. While not as game-changing as the reworked swordfights, the Jackdaw’s arsenal has seen a shakeup in the form of alternate firing modes for each weapon, which doesn’t overhaul ship combat but rather serves as added options to consider during encounters. The basic broadside (side-facing) cannons can now be switched to Double Shot mode on the fly, which fires a longer barrage of cannonballs in a wider arc at the expense of shorter range, while the back-facing fire barrels can now be turned into shrapnel barrels to destroy enemy ship sails. These new fire modes can also be individually upgraded, and although we weren’t able to test it out in the preview, the addition of more options means that players can now choose how to specialise their Jackdaw, and again, adds that extra layer of flexibility to combat encounters.
The biggest addition to naval warfare, however, comes in the new unlockable ship officers. In the preview, we were given a glimpse of one of them, Lucy Baldwin. This snarky firecracker is on a revenge mission of her own, one that Edward can choose to help with by playing through the remakes’ new missions, with each of the three newly added officers having their own narrative quests to follow. Apart from adding new bits of lore and story, these missions also grant Edward a new companion, with each officer adding a powerful buff to the Jackdaw. Lucy, for instance, grants the Perfect Brace ability, which allows a player to negate massive amounts of damage, provided they can time their brace properly. While the other two officers were not shown in the preview, the previously released trailer did tease that Tobias “Deadman” Smith, the other new officer, provides the ability for broadside cannons to fire twice per salvo, which does sound a little overpowered, but immensely useful.
Combat changes and graphics aside, the preview also offered a look at the additions to Black Flag Resynced’s open-world exploration. Traversing the world now feels more fluid thanks to improvements to the parkour system, which sees enhancements from 2023’s Mirage, such as free jumps alongside side and back ejects make their return, although don’t expect Edward to perform the same flips and flourishes as Naoe from Shadows.
While most of the optional world activities have been kept intact, such as assassination contracts, forts, harpooning mini-games, and diving bell locations, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced instead adds subtle changes that reward avid explorers. These include new hand-crafted islands that can be found on the open seas, each providing the potential for extra loot, alongside new Rifts, the remake’s new take on its modern-day component, with the old and arguably boring Abstergo office puzzle sequences now being replaced by unique areas Edward can stumble upon in his adventures, and although not showcased in the preview, these were something teased by director Richard Knight in our accompanying interview as alternate-universe “What if?” sequences which not just links to the modern Assassin/Templar conflict, but also offers a look at how Edward’s journey might have ended up if he had made different decisions.
With just a mere three hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, it’s clear to see that the team is aiming for something faithful instead of changing the game too much. Apart from the obvious graphical bump, the additions to things like combat and stealth feel like fixes and improvements rather than complete overhauls, and that’s exactly what fans want, considering this is a remake after all. The question now lies in the added officer campaign missions, which are completely new, and with the preview only giving us a brief snippet of what to expect on this front, it will be interesting to see how they play out in the full game, and whether they can fit well into Edward Kenway’s already legendary journey to become one of the greatest Master Assassins in franchise history.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will hoist the black flag once more on 9 July 2026 for the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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