Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced gives you every reason to go back to the Caribbean

Three hours isn't enough time to fall in love with a remake. It is, however, enough to know whether Ubisoft has phoned this one in. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is not phoned in. Whether that surprises you probably depends on how much faith you've kept in Ubisoft over the last few years. Mine had been running on fumes. Three hours later, the tank's not full, but it's definitely got something in it.

The thing I keep coming back to, days after the session ended, is how comfortable Resynced feels in its own skin. It isn't trying to be Shadows. It isn't trying to be a soulslike pirate sim. It isn't trying to apologise for the 2013 game, or improve on it so aggressively that the original becomes irrelevant. It's just Black Flag, with thirteen years of lessons baked in and a lot of fresh paint where the paint was peeling. There's a confidence to that approach that I wasn't expecting—and honestly, didn't think Ubisoft still had in them.

A drunk pirate sold me on the engine

The Anvil engine, the same tech behind last year's Shadows, has been turned loose on Edward Kenway's world, and it shows in the small things more than the big ones. Yes, Havana looks gorgeous. Yes, the sea behaves like an actual physical entity now instead of a textured rectangle. But what stuck with me was watching a drunk pirate weave between two pillars in a back alley like he had a personal vendetta against gravity. He didn't matter. No quest marker. No dialogue. Just background texture, doing background texture work, and doing it well enough that I stood there for a full minute watching him stagger. That's the kind of detail you can't fake—and it's the kind of detail the original Black Flag had no real budget for.

Underwater is the bigger flex, and Ubisoft knows it. A short dive near a reef was all I got, but it was enough to see what they're chasing here. Light fracturing down through the surface. Small fish drifting in and out of coral. The new dive-anywhere feature opens up a lot of seafloor that used to be off-limits, and Edward holds his breath longer than I remembered, which turns what used to be a panicked dash for the surface into something closer to wandering. I spent more of my dive looking at things than swimming towards them. That's new.

Character models hold up, mostly. Edward in particular looks fantastic in motion, all the easy swagger of a Welsh privateer who blundered into the Golden Age of Piracy and decided to stay for the rum. Background NPCs in Havana let things down a little. A couple of stiff dialogue animations carry over from Shadows, and a few faces hadn't quite finished cooking in the build I played. None of it killed the vibe—it's the kind of thing a polish pass usually catches, and Ubisoft has six weeks left to catch it.

Edward, brawler

Let me confess something. I bounced off Black Flag's combat back in 2013. Not because it was bad. Because it was so easy that it stopped meaning anything. You countered, you watched Edward execute someone with a lovely flourish, you moved on. After a while, my brain went somewhere else and my thumb just did the work. I think I finished the entire main story without ever consciously deciding to fight anyone. The game just sort of happened around me.

Resynced kills that loop dead, and I'm grateful.

Enemies have a defence meter now. You chip it down with strikes, kicks, leg sweeps, gunshots—whatever you've got handy. Once it's gone, you can chain up to four kills in a single sequence that feels properly cinematic. The big new wrinkle is the parry. Time your block right and the enemy staggers open for an instant takedown. It feels good. Maybe a touch too forgiving, honestly. A few of mine landed despite some timing that didn't deserve them. But after years of stiff Ubisoft combat, I'll take a generous parry window any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The guards, meanwhile, refuse to play along with my bad habits. I tried to bully a small group of them near a Havana plantation by spamming heavy attacks, the way you used to in the original. Worked on the first one. The second blocked me, the cheeky bastard. By the third, his friends had circled in from angles I hadn't bothered to check, and suddenly I was the one being bullied. So you actually have to think now. Rope dart pull here, pistol shot there, kick someone into a barrel of rum and finish them on the way down. Edward feels like a brawler with options—rather than a guy waiting for the next prompt to flash on screen.

While we're talking about the rope dart, can we talk about the rope dart? In the original you waited ages for it. Resynced drops it in your kit within the opening chapters, and it immediately becomes the most entertaining thing in there. Drag a sniper off a crow's nest. Yank a guard into a clothesline kick. Pull a soldier into the path of his own friend's sword and watch them sort it out between themselves. Every encounter has a small puzzle inside it now—and the rope dart is usually the punchline.

It isn't perfect, and there's no pretending otherwise. The lock-on drifted to the wrong target more than once. Dodging felt slow next to parrying, which made parrying the default by accident. Could be tuning. Could be me. Three hours isn't long enough to know, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

I got maybe twenty minutes at the wheel of the Jackdaw, and she still handles the way I remember her—which is the right call. Nimble. Weighty without being sluggish. Alive with crew chatter and the occasional shouted reload time. The new alt-fire options, heated shots, aimed swivel guns, that sort of thing, are the kind of additions I want a full game to judge rather than a slice of one. Nothing about the naval rewrite scared me, and that's about as much as I can promise honestly.

Lucy steals the demo, Adéwalé pays the price

There wasn't much room in three hours to get a proper read on the new content, but one mission found a way to stick. Lucy Baldwin, one of three new officers being added to the Jackdaw's crew, is a shipwright thrown in a brig for murder. You spring her, fight off some guards, and she joins up in exchange for help tracking down her grandfather's inheritance. Standard pirate-adjacent business.

The mechanical perk is fine, nothing to write home about. She lets you brace the Jackdaw before incoming hits to halve damage, which is useful in naval scraps. The writing is what landed for me. Lucy is sharp, suspicious, and refuses to swallow Edward's pirate-utopia patter at face value. There's a beat where she basically calls him out for romanticising Nassau—and Edward, to his credit, doesn't have an answer ready. He just sort of stands there. The whole mission runs maybe five minutes. I came out wanting more of her, which is more than I can say for most of the new characters Ubisoft has added to recent games.

The other two officers, Deadman Smith and a character called The Padre, weren't in the demo. Word is one of them gives you a double-volley broadside, the other lets the Jackdaw ram enemy ships. Both sound like exactly the right kind of fun. Whether their questlines are five-minute side memories or actual arcs is a question for July—and I hope it's the latter, because the bar Lucy set was higher than I expected.

The smaller quality-of-life stuff piled up across the rest of the session, and most of it falls into the "finally" category. Tailing missions no longer fail the second a target spots you, which alone is worth the boat fare. Get caught and the mission adapts into a chase or a fight rather than a checkpoint reset. There's a dedicated crouch button. Ziplines run through the cities. You can fast-travel back to the Jackdaw instead of swimming—lifted straight from Odyssey and immediately impossible to imagine going without. Thirteen years to add a crouch button. We got there in the end.

Two things are gone, and one of them bothers me more than I want to admit. The modern-day Abstergo material has been cut entirely, replaced with Animus Rifts focused on Edward's backstory and family. I didn't see one. Ubisoft has been deliberately vague about what they look like. I'll wait until I've played them before I weigh in. The Freedom Cry DLC, though, is just gone—and that's a real loss. Adéwalé's story was the most thematically interesting thing the original ever did. No version of "we wanted to focus on Edward" really softens that one. Edward had his time. Adéwalé deserved his shot at the remake too.

So, do I want more?

The build I played was openly a work in progress, and Ubisoft made no effort to hide it. Clothing textures that hadn't quite settled on a colour. A patrol that picked up my scent through what felt like half the map and wouldn't let it drop, even with me crouched behind a wall. The kind of physics hiccup where a body lands at an angle it has no business landing at. None of it felt catastrophic. All of it felt like the kind of thing a few weeks of bug-stomping should sort. I've seen worse from games that were supposedly finished.

A quick word on parkour before I close out, because it's quietly one of the best things in here. Smoother than the original, more responsive, with manual jump and crouch finally where they should have been from day one. Edward still occasionally takes a creative interpretation of where you wanted to go, but less often than before. The climb-anything fluidity of Shadows hasn't been bolted on so heavily that he loses the original's grounded weight either. He still looks for handholds. He still feels like a person, not a magnet. That balance is harder to strike than it sounds—and Ubisoft Singapore clearly knew it.

So, where do three hours land me?

Counting down to July, honestly. Resynced doesn't want to be a different game. It wants to be the version of Black Flag I remember playing rather than the version I actually played in 2013, and that distinction is doing a lot of work here. The colour pops harder. The combat asks more of me. Stealth has a crouch button thirteen years late. And the small additions—the early rope dart, the reworked tailing missions, Lucy and her two unseen crewmates, the seamless slip between city and sea—add up to a remake that's actually thought about what to change and what to leave alone. That used to be a given. It hasn't been for a while.

What three hours can't tell me is whether the endgame content lands, whether the rebuilt opening with a properly wounded Duncan Walpole flows into the rest of the game, or whether the Animus Rifts are a fair trade for what's been cut. Tasting menu. Not a meal.

But for those three hours, I forgot I was supposed to be doing a job. I just played. I chased pigeons across rooftops. I yanked a soldier off a pier with a rope dart. I let Lucy talk Edward down a peg. The shanties hit the way they always did.

Worse ways to spend an afternoon. Few better ones recently. Either way, the Caribbean's worth the trip back.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced releases on July 9 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.