When I first created this site it was my intention to do full and complete reviews of any games or shows that I have played. The review below is of the first game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise but as time has gone on it has become obvious that it is sometimes difficult to say new things about games or shows that are pretty similar to one another.

Now in certain circumstances I will look at each addition to a series, the Dead Space games spring to mind, but that is not becoming the norm simply because there are so many franchises out there which spawn game after game after game that I don’t have the time or the inclination to play them all. That is basically what happened with Assassin’s Creed. I played the first game, then II, Brotherhood and Revelations but started to lose interest in the franchise after that.

I have done a full review of Assassin’s Creed and after that is the article which shares it’s title with this section in which I take a look at what happened to the franchise as the games continued.

So below is:

Assassin’s Creed

The Rise and Fall of Assassin’s Creed

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag

If you have played the other games and I am in fact mistaken in my opinion then feel free to let me know, and who knows I might take your advice and check them out for myself.

Date Posted: 26/01/15

Not surprisingly this is first installment in the questionably historically accurate Assassin's Creed franchise. It stars demoted assassin Altair as he hunts down and assassinates various historical figures.

Now I understand that by today's standards the ability to go anywhere and climb pretty much anything is the norm, however, it was games like Assassin's Creed that really started the whole see-as-far-as-you-can sandbox game.

This game franchise gives you, the player, the ability to sneak around stealth killing people and living those assassination fantasies that come so naturally to us all...or do they just come naturally to me??

Probably best not to answer that question - anyway, moving on...

Here is the premise of all the Assassin's Creed games, you take the role of a protagonist in the future who is in a machine that allows a chap called Desmond to relive the genetic memories of an ancestor (don’t ask how that works), so you spend most of the game playing as Altair an assassin so that Desmond (in the future) can learn something relevant which may help him in the future...clear?? Excellent.

Even though it began in 2007, Assassin’s Creed franchise is still going strong and whilst it has had its ups and downs, generally it continues to delight fans of the free roaming and assassin genre. Well, when I say fans, I mean of course me. So for this review let’s check out the first of the Assassin’s Creed series...er...Assassin’s Creed. The game was developed by Eidos, the team behind the Hitman series and it seems that they have taken key elements from that series and put them in a new setting which gives a far greater freedom to the player than previous games.

The Jerusalem setting has been very carefully designed, with the scenery being viewed simultaneously as you swivel the camera. This was one of the first next-gen games which showed you everything surrounding you, instead of it popping-up as you get nearer and vanishing when you were far away. All of the major cities of the Holy land are an easy horse ride away from one another but such things are just minor details and that historically inaccurate fact should not get in the way of enjoying the game.

You can go almost anywhere, Altair can climb buildings with an ease which would put Spiderman to shame; there are many ways of hiding in plain sight. You can blend in with robed monks wandering the holy land, or hide in haystacks or rooftop gardens. The reason for this is that you have the chance of rescuing innocent civilians or picking pockets in order to gain more information about your target. There are added advantages of helping out the little people getting picked on by unsympathetic guards, if you rescue them successfully, mobs of vigilantes start roaming the streets. They trip over guards and anyone chasing you which gives you an opportunity to get out of their line of sight and hide.

On the downside, the missions revolve around Altair trying to redeem himself for breaking the Creed, the rules that he, and his fellow assassins, are supposed to live by. He gets sent to a section of Jerusalem and has the option of doing side-missions before being allowed a shot at the target. Regrettably this is where the game gets a little repetitive because even the most skilled assassin seems unable to creep up to the target and kill them in a way which doesn’t alert every guard in the Holy land. You will probably find yourself charging through the streets like a madman with your sword in hand trying to kill a man running for his life with all your careful years of training to be a stealthy assassin disappearing as you slice your way through armies of guards before running your target down.

Altair also cannot swim as this causes the machine Desmond is in to break down so treat water like the “floor is lava” and do not go anywhere near it or you will have to reload a checkpoint.

The other real negative is the voice-overs. After spending so much time making the movements of the characters flow seamlessly, and creating a magnificent environment, admittedly with deadly water that you cannot go near, to play in, you would think that Eidos would also have spent as much time with the voice-overs. Now Altair and those in his Creed are all fine, but the game really loses points with the extra voices. Beggars in particular only have two lines which they repeat over and over as they attempt to get money from you as you wander around, this gets very irritating very quickly, still on the plus side you can always kill them if they wind you up enough. You will lose points off your own health bar if you take an innocent life, but honestly, sometimes it is worth it.

So the final verdict is this a Thumbs Up or a Thumbs Down?? Honestly, by today’s standards when there are tonnes of free roaming games, and characters can perch atop high places and see for miles this game will seem incredibly dated, however, it is because of games like this that now we do have games where you can perch on top of things and see for miles.

Assassin’s Creed therefore gets a Thumbs Up for, in my humble opinion, helping to pioneer a genre.

6/10 – Yes it has dated in the last 7 years but it is still a good game and worth playing although just don’t bother to try and figure out exactly what is going on.

Date Posted: 25/02/18

One of the first reviews for this site was of Assassin’s Creed, and depending on when you are reading this, that review will either be in the TAC Reviews…Games section or above this article. Now at the time I had played the first game, enjoyed it and proceeded to play through Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood and Revelations. Each game added stuff and each game seemed to expand the world of the assassins that little bit more.

The second game introduced new series protagonist Ezio Alditore de Firenze, a young man who learns of his family’s legacy when his father, and brothers are murdered by Templars. In my opinion Ezio was a more interesting protagonist that Altair simply because he was learning how to become an assassin and we learned with him. He mastered his skills over the course of the game eventually becoming a Master Assassin. The backdrop to Ezio’s life was Renaissance Italy and he crossed paths with non-other than Leonardo Da Vinci who invented a lot of the tools that made Ezio a more skilled assassin. Whether the game makers were always intending to make more games centred around Ezio I don’t know, but it seems likely as in the final battle Ezio chooses not to kill the man responsible for basically all the bad happening across Italy during the game.

Coupled with the weak ending, the game was also not without some niggles, at Ezio’s home base you could reopen stores and collect feathers for your mother…I know highly exciting stuff…but these served as little side things to do if you wanted to do them. It also gave you something to do with the money that you gathered as you played through.

Keen to see more of Ezio’s life (and judging by the lame ending of the last game) Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood also featured Ezio. This time a little older and following a crushing defeat at the hands of his enemies (you know the one he should have killed at the end of II) he is forced to relocate to Rome and build his own assassin order.

To that end it became possible in this game to recruit others to join your order and level them up. This could be done by calling them to your aid during battles, or alternatively, by sending them out on missions all over the world. The harder the mission the more xp they would earn and the faster they would level up, but the greater the risk to them. I did get cocky a couple of times and as a result sometimes my assassins didn’t always come back. I quickly learned that the best way to level them up was to send low-level assassins on missions with higher levels, if the mission had a 100% success rate your assassins would always return so the recruits could level up faster. I remember thinking at the time it was a bit of a shame the missions weren’t more tailored to different assassin’s strengths. For example the mission in which your assassin had to seduce someone in order to get closest to their target, it didn’t matter if you sent a man or a woman to do it, nor did it matter if you sent Prince Charming or Quasimodo. If the stats said 100% they would succeed. The benefit of sending out recruits is to earn money but also to have a team of Master Assassins at your beck and call whenever you need them. Like I said they could leap into to battle at your side or rain down a storm of arrows that would kill any guard in the area who had the nerve to look at you funny.

The game was good fun and was the best I’d played because you were playing Ezio in his prime. It also seemed to open up a lot faster than II because I like to go off and unlock everything I possibly can as quickly as I can so I get to use upgrades during the game. However, there were areas locked out until later in the game which were annoying but were locked for story reasons which is fair enough I guess.

The rebuilding mini-game was also built upon in Brotherhood with Ezio able to buy and restore various shops, but also historical landmarks too. There is not real point to restoring landmarks other than the liberation of Rome and you do it to spend the money you’ve earned during the game.

Another issue was that once you sell something in a shop you cannot get it back, in order to unlock the final piece of the game’s best armour you need two Shrunken Heads, one you find early in the game and another in an Assassin’s vault (or something like that). Thing is if you don’t know you need it for the armour and sell one of them then there is no way to get it back again which means you cannot get the armour. Which meant that you did need to be a bit more careful with selling items you collected from chests.

Of the Assassin’s Creed games Brotherhood was the one I played the most because it was my favourite.

We once again joined Ezio, now much older in Revelations where he is on the trail of Altair who has some great secret that Ezio needs to find…that is kind-of it from what I can recall. This time you are in Constantinople and once again Ezio has lost all of his equipment and needs to unlock new tools but perhaps by this time I was starting to get a little bored of the Assassin’s Creed games.

The backdrop of all of these games was that Desmond Miles was looking through the memories of his ancestors in order to learn something of use in the present, he got to go out and about a bit in Brotherhood but is in a coma by Revelations. Apparently the only way to preserve his mind is to delve into Ezio’s life once again but the Desmond sections were always a tad dull that took you away from the more interesting core game as you’d much rather be playing as Ezio.

I finished the game and it did link the Assassins through the ages together which was good.

The adventures of Ezio were obviously popular enough for Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection to get a PS4 release, as of yet I haven’t played them on that console, but sooner or later I might pick them up.

Like I said Revelations wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be, the recruitment of people to become assassins and the mission you could send them on had gotten more complicated. There was also a siege mode that involved waves of Templars attacking strongholds and you having to do a tower defence game to stop them. This addition could be stopped if you placed a Master Assassin at each stronghold so not having to do this new feature is considered a reward.

I did intend to play Assassin’s Creed III  but for one reason or another I did not get round to it. I heard that it was actually pretty shit. It was set around the American Revolution or Civil War (I forget which) with Conner (?) I think that was his name somehow having everything to do with the success of the side the Assassins were on.

Can you tell I have very little knowledge of this game??

Basically in the end I did not bother with it and the general consensus from many fans of the franchise was that it had peaked with Ezio’s adventures and the game makers were grasping at straws to keep the games going.

Apparently Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag was really good, with you getting to roam the seas during a Pirates of the Caribbean style adventure. From what I’ve heard you got to go whaling, dive for buried treasure, have ship-to-ship battles and upgrade your vessel. It sounded really interesting but for whatever reason I haven’t picked it up. I think it is partially because I like to play games in order so I know what is happening, and as I cannot be asked to play through III that may be why I haven’t got IV yet. I don’t know.

Anyway after Black Flag we had Assassin’s Creed Rogue then Assassin’s Creed Unity before moving to Victorian England in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in which you can play as a woman for the first time in the franchise’s canon. These three games I know very little about and I have no intention of playing through them nor the most recent game Assassin’s Creed Origins. Hell until I did a quick internet search I had completely forgotten that Rogue and Unity even existed which demonstrates how little an impact they had on my attention span.

For a franchise that went from strength to strength from Assassin’s Creed to Brotherhood it miss-stepped a little with Revelations then wandered off a cliff with Assassin’s Creed III. Before managing to get things back on track with Black Flag before dropping off again with Rogue, Unity, Syndicate and Origins.

Personally I assumed that Desmond Miles framing device was going to actually give way to a game in which we played as Desmond in a modern world, but that didn’t happen. From what I understand Desmond died in Assassin’s Creed III to be replaced with a nameless protagonist so what was the point of including him?? Yes, Desmond had the personality of a piece of wood but as the games went on he seemed to be learning the skills to make him a Master Assassin allowing him to take centre stage in a game of his own. Unfortunately it seems that idea was scrapped in favour of just making game, after game, after game in order to keep the franchise going as long as possible. But that will be the nail in its coffin. There is no purpose to these games aside from messing around in different historical eras and obviously keeping them going to make more money.

I might pick up Black Flag at some point but for me the Assassin’s Creed games have lost the spark that made them so much fun to play. Ezio was a great character and his back drop of parkour through Renaissance Italy was a joy, however as things have gone on the games seem to have gotten weaker. They are punctuated by the occasional good game like Black Flag but on the whole they just exist to keep a franchise that needs to die going.

I might play Black Flag in the future but for the moment I have completely lost interest in this franchise because the games just seem to be mediocre now when they used to be really good fun.

Perhaps I shouldn't give the games a Thumb rating because I haven't played, now the majority, of the Assassin's Creed games. For the ones I have played I would have given them a Thumbs Up, but considering that the later games are apparently not very good I would have likely given them a Thumbs Down. I think I will give the overall Assassin's Creed games my meh rating and leave my Thumb Horizontal for the entire franchise.

5/10 – Again maybe I couldn’t give the franchise a rating without having played all of the games it has to offer, however, it seems that for every good game in this franchise there seem to be at least a couple that are mediocre at best. The games that centered around Ezio were my favourite of the franchise, but I lost interest in them after the settings changed and the protagonists became less interesting. I might play Black Flag at some point but for the moment I have got other games that I am going to play through first.

Date Posted: 21/07/19

The fourth game in the Assassin’s Creed series, was released in 2013 and one that managed to restore the series to its former fun and glory, following the lacklustre Assassin’s Creed III. The game is basically a pirate adventure set in the 1700s in which your character Edward Kenway runs into various famous pirates including Blackbeard whilst trying to hunt down a mysterious place known as the Observatory.

If you’ve read my article Rise and Fall of Assassin’s Creed above then you’ll know that whilst I initially started playing the games and looking forward to each new instalment, my interest was lost when we jumped from Ezio to some Native American-assassin wannabe named Connor. I’d heard the game was crap but as I’m someone that likes to have the context in my games when Black Flag came out, I put off playing it as I wanted to play III so I’d have the right context on the fourth instalment in the series. Before I could catch up another Assassin’s Creed came out, then another, and another, and another so before I knew it there were so many games out that I pretty much abandoned the series because I doubted I’d have the time to play them all.

Cut to a few years later when Black Flag was on sale on the PSN so I figured I’d get it.

If you’ve never played an Assassin’s Creed game before then let me give you the gist, you play a guy in the future, previously named Desmond, who is hooked into a machine that allows them to relive the genetic memories of an ancestor. But this is basically just a framing device for a story set in different historical periods, in this case the Golden Age of Piracy. As I said you are playing the game as Edward Kenway, a pirate that washes up on a desert island with another man. The other man is an assassin and Kenway kills him, steals his clothes and manages to bluff his way onto a ship.

Using his disguise he is able to infiltrate a Templar meeting in which he learns they are searching for something called the Observatory. The Assassin’s and the Templars have basically been at war with each other for centuries, the Assassins being the good guys and the Templars the bad seeking to control the world through manipulation and subjugation. His disguise is blown and he is captured. But whilst onboard a ship which is part of a convoy he is able to overwhelm the crew, free prisoners and sail the vessel through a hurricane in order to escape.

Deciding to keep the ship, he rechristen’s it the Jackdaw and sets about plundering the Caribbean, searching for treasures, and his fortune whilst trying to uncover the truth about the Observatory, something both the Assassins and Templars are also seeking.

First off, context is not really important. The future narrative is basically just a framing device and honestly I paid very little attention to what was going on. Apparently Desmond, the future guy from Assassin’s Creed, II, Brotherhood, Revelations and III died during the events of III. A computer company has managed to use his brain or something to search through more of his genetic memories under the guise of creating computer games when they are in reality also searching for the Observatory. You are a mute computer guy who is going through the memories capturing footage for them to use in their video game.

Basically this game has everything that I like about a game. When you start off the Jackdaw has the defensive capability of an egg in a tumble dryer and the offensive ability of a startled field mouse. However, you can upgrade every part of the ship, from its hull damage resistance, its cannon number, its firepower, to the amount of crew it can hold. There are cosmetic stuff too that helps to make the ship a bit more unique. The game also allows you to basically go anywhere you want from the get-go, with the exception of places that are story focussed.

You take control of the ship so steer, controls weapons, defences and as the game progresses you are even able to capture ships sending them to join your own fleet. Initially I was only doing the story missions in order to unlock the next upgrade for the Jackdaw, I think by the time that I’d finished Sequence 3 I’d unlocked enough to be able to sail the seas going where I wanted.

In order to upgrade you ship, materials like wood or metal are required, plus a fair amount of money. Your telescope (or spyglass as the game calls it) basically becomes your best friend as when you look through it you can see what a ship is carrying in terms of cargo, and money. I spent so much time looking through that telescope, spotting different ships and deciding to attack them if they had resources I needed for that next upgrade. Once they are down to minimum health then you can board, the small ships require you to kill 5 crew and as the ships get bigger you have to overpower more of their crew, potentially kill scouts or officers, before the remaining crew surrender and you are given three options regarding what to do with the ship. Repair the Jackdaw, lower your wanted level, or Send to Kenway’s fleet.

As I sailed I quickly discovered that there were Forts around the map, and if you managed to destroy their defences, then kill their commanding officers, not only did you get to see new areas of the map, but they become places you can dock or fast travel to.

The map is massive and it feels like you are sailing between islands, you can encounter floating loot or ship wreaked sailors that can be added to your crew if you have the space. The more places you travel to, and the more viewpoints you synchronise, the more places you can potentially fast track to if you don’t fancy sailing. The thing is that the sailing doesn’t really stop being fun and if you spy a convoy or a powerful ship on the horizon then you can go after them should you want to.

Island have various booty on them, you can find treasure maps to lead you to loot or upgrades, and there is a diving bell that you can use to salvage plans from sunken vessels around the map.

You can go whaling, or shark fishing. From your whaling boat you harpoon a monster of the deep and must chip away at its health before it can sink your ship. It is even possible to taken on the fearsome White Whale. These aquatic animals are not the only ones you can hunt, numerous land based creatures are also useful in crafting new pouches or outfits to increase armour or health.

The world is beautifully rich and colourful with you having to face violent storms and pirate hunters that will come after you should your notoriety level get too high.

Sadly there are some elements that did annoy me a tad.

So whilst you can explore underwater wrecks to find treasures, you have absolutely zero defensive capabilities whilst you are down there. I understand not being able to use guns, but why doesn’t Edward take a harpoon with him?? You get attacked by sharks, eels and can be damaged by sea urchins and jellyfish. A sharp steel pointed tip spear would still work underwater so why doesn’t Edward taken one?? As a result there is nothing you can really do to escape sharks short of hiding in wrecks or seaweed. Sadly you need to be in open water a lot of the time so you will get attacked by sharks frequently. I also once tried to bolt to the surface but the game wouldn’t let me, so basically I had to swim through shark infested waters to get back to the diving bell to return to the surface.

Now when you start boarding ships your crew will leap onto the ship to help you kill the crew, unfortunately they are not decent fighters and will get killed left, right and centre. I had numerous encounters in the game when I was taking on over a dozen soldiers and winning, but when boarding ships I kept getting lost in the crowd. I’d be poised to kill someone and one of my pirates would attack them, throwing off my attack, or someone in the crowd would swing a sword and take off my health. It would have been nice if you could have upgraded your pirates with armour or combat missions or something to make them harder to kill when boarding other ships. Either that or have a command that tells them to remain onboard the Jackdaw whilst I boarded the ship alone to take it over. It is worth boarding enemy ships because if you do that you get their entire cargo plus new members for your crew, if you destroy them you only pick up half their cargo and possibly a single floating survivor

Initially I was of the opinion that combat is terrible and that Kenway wasn’t worthy to lick Ezio’s boots in the combat side of things. Yes, he’s a good pirate but a shit fighter. Basic enemies can block attacks and in the heat of battle it becomes a bit of a cluster fuck trying to see what is happening as a result button mashing won’t work. The combat is a little more involved that it first appears. Basically you need to counter, and when the moment is right go in for the kill. Rather infuriatingly the Counter button is also mapped to the Sheath swords command so I frequently found myself in combat with Edward having put his swords away and I lost precious moments getting him to draw them again whilst some enemy sliced off chunks of my health bar.

Now when I first started capturing ships I was excited. In Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Revelations it was possible to recruit civilians training them to become Assassins. Those recruits could be sent out on missions to boost their xp and skills or called to your aid in battle if you were getting overwhelmed. I will admit that I did enjoy capturing ships and when I spotted one called the HMS Enterprise I was very happy that I could have the Enterprise as part of my fleet. I thought that bringing in these ships I was capturing to help in more difficult battles would be really cool. Sadly you are only able to send them on missions. Most of the time for money but getting money was relatively easy if you boarded ships rather than sinking them. Plus if you go to Taverns you can get intelligence which can lead you to Royal Convoys which will grant large rewards in terms of money and resources. The problem with these fleet missions is not that they really only give you money, it’s the timescale, some missions can last 24 hours. That is TWENTY-FOUR real time hours for a ship to do a single mission. Yes I get that they are technically sailing to Europe or wherever from the Caribbean but the money rewards are so small that it isn’t really worth doing them. There is nowhere in-game where you can go to view your captured fleet and like I said you cannot call on any of the ships to aid you in battle so the whole feature is kind of pointless.

Unlike the previous Assassin’s Creed games that I played, especially Brotherhood in particular, I was expecting there to be some kind of passive income mechanic. Upgrades are expensive so it would have been nice to have some ability to gain money from the islands or the home base that you fully upgrade to a pirate paradise.

Honestly all of the above points are niggles, features that it would have been nice if they’d been a bit further developed.

However, the game has a massive drawback...

It’s an Assassin’s Creed game.

Now that might not be something that would count against it, but the problem is that most of the Story missions involve you following someone, where you are almost instantly detected if so much as a toe appears outside cover, then killing them once they’ve walked to some arbitrary location. Engaging with fleets of ships on the high seas is brought to a screeching halt every time you are forced back to land to do one of the same boring, repetitive follow and assassinate missions. The previous Assassin’s Creed games never seemed to be this dull in terms of missions as I never got bored playing as Ezio but Kenway’s tasks were so generic, and so repetitive that they just were not fun

Basically being a pirate is fun, being an assassin in boring

Plus in previous games the Assassins themselves are seasoned bad-asses that had been trained to the point of almost superhuman ability. In this game they seem to die if someone so much as coughs in their direction. Plus Edward is not an assassin, nor is he a Templar, and yet he keeps getting pulled into the conflict between the two regardless of how much he tries to keep out of it. In truth I really started to loath doing the story missions because I knew it would be one boring stealth follow mission after another, and whilst that might have been what anlot of the previous games had been about, here it doesn’t work alongside the swash-buckling fun of being a pirate.

My eyes also kept rolling whenever I was taken out of the Animus (the machine you use to re-live these memories) to undertake dull first-person perspective missions in the real world. These included tedious hacking mini-games and whenever they happened I was sleepwalking through them just so I could get back to the pirate adventure.

Edward trying to find the Observatory leads to some conflict between him and his crew, again that fell rather flat because by the time I actually decided to finish the story (for the purpose of this review) I had over 150,000 of whatever the currency is in my back pocket, a fully upgraded island hideout, and had promoted numerous members of my crew to captains of their own captured vessels...so why are my men unhappy??

Game play reasons...ah right.

The fact that it is an Assassin’s Creed game also means that it is a work of fiction based on characters that may have existed in the past. As a result whilst you can hunt whales and sharks, there is no risk of running into a kraken when travelling around the world.

When the game was being a pirate adventure on the high seas, I loved it and spent hours taking on the forts to unlock more of the map, seeking out buried treasure, and hunting other vessels in order to upgrade the Jackdaw fully. But when it was being an Assassin’s Creed game I found it really frustrating, tedious and made me long to be back on my ship going wherever my fancy took me.

What this game has done is make me want a good pirate game.

I don’t honestly see what it would be so hard to do...think about it. Wash up on a beach somewhere, steal some small ship, attack other ships to upgrade your vessel, capture others and then either bringing them into your fleet or taking them as your flag ship. In this game, characters describe Man O’ War class vessels as floating fortresses so why not give you the ability to command and fully upgrade one should you so desire. Unleash you in a massive sandbox world with hidden treasures to find, wrecks to explore and fantastical mythical monsters for you to battle as you search for some ancient pirate treasure. Black Flag could almost serve as the template for such a game, just strip out all the Assassin bullshit and the real-world crap and there is so much for potential for a truly great game.

By the way I am aware there is a game called Sea of Thieves which is X-Box One exclusive (which is why I haven’t played it) but I have heard from several reviewers that it is boring, and basically has you fighting skeletons, or recovering animals which doesn’t sound much fun when Black Flag exists.

I don’t really care about the Assassin’s Creed franchise any longer, the future narrative doesn’t interested me, and there are so many instalments in the series that I am never going to get round to playing them. Plus I don’t really want to. Black Flag seems to be a peak in the franchise and none of the other settings can ever be as much fun as the Golden Age of Piracy.

The game gets a Thumbs Up because the pirate adventure is really fun, yes the Assassin stuff hangs off it like an elephant sitting on the wing of a light aircraft and more often than not serves to grind the pace to a screeching halt. However, the pirate part of the game is enough to carry the boring elements that being an Assassin’s Creed title the game cannot shake off.

8/10 – The pirate element of the game really shines and makes this a standout title that gives the player a great adventure on the high seas against the beautiful backdrop of the Caribbean in the Golden Age of Piracy. Sadly the game is an Assassin’s Creed title so if you play it expect that side of the plot to be yanking on the choke-chain throughout the proceedings.