Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag presents players with a fun and open world full of opportunities to explore as pirates. Black Flag has countless events and things to do throughout the game world, fixing the problems leftover from its predecessor. 

    Attacking ships and forts, exploring tropical islands, sailing across the open sea, finding new items and upgrading your ship allow for an incredibly fun experience that can last for 30 or more hours before the player even gets to the main story. After putting in many hours, the player will still find new places to explore and new targets to raid.

Black Flag takes place in 1715 and puts the player in the boots of the pirate Edward Kenway. The first great improvement in Black Flag is its disposal of the series’ love for long tutorials, putting the player right into combat at the start.

Black Flag’s story is more lighthearted than previous games, adding to the fun. Starting with how Kenway becomes involved in the assassin order, the story never takes itself seriously and manages to stay fairly coherent across the missions. 

Missions don’t drag on for the most part. However, tailing and eavesdropping types of missions are still an obvious low point out of all the story missions and slows down the general progression of missions.The stealth in Black Flag is the strongest it has ever been in the series and stealth missions are incredibly fun to play.

As this generation of game consoles approaches its end, Black Flag looks great as an Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 game. The game featured minimal lagging even in the larger battles. Its lush tropical environment graphics really stand out as the player sails across the sea.

Though the cities of Black Flag are smaller than cities in the previous games, they are designed incredibly well. The free running aspect, which has become a staple of the series, really shines in the major cities such as Havana. In Havana, the player can run across the rooftops, almost seamlessly leaping from house to house. 

Every city has a plethora of activities to, but these pale in comparison to what is available to the player on the open sea.

After completing a few story missions, the player gets his or her own ship and crew. Completing a few more missions opens up the ability to sail around the open sea and do whatever activities the player would like. Harpooning sharks, raiding islands and forts, stealing from cargo ships, and exploring smugglers’ dens are a few things players can do on the open seas.

The sheer variety of things to do on the open sea gives the player hours of fun and freedom. Black Flag affords the player an unprecedented amount of freedom as far as the Assassin’s Creed series is concerned.

Though Black Flag attempts to fix the shortcomings the series has experienced before, it is not enough in some areas. The combat is still far too easy and story missions – although more interesting – still drag on at times. The controls are much tighter than before, however, it can still feel as though the player’s inputs are over-exaggerated by Kenway.

Overall, Black Flag presents an amazing pirate simulator with the staples of the Assassin’s Creed series throughout