Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced

The best Assassin's Creed nobody could stop loving is getting the full rebuild treatment. Black Flag Resynced is a ground-up remake of 2013's Assassin's Creed IV, rebuilt on the latest Anvil engine, with ray-traced lighting, 60 frames per second console options, reworked parry-driven combat, enhanced stealth, new naval weapons, a new Officers system for the Jackdaw, dynamic weather and ten new sea shanties. On paper, for pirate fans, it is a lot to love.

The catch is the calendar and the price tag. Ubisoft itself frames this as arriving thirteen years after the original, a faithful recreation, sold at a standard sixty dollars with a Deluxe at seventy and a Collector's edition at two hundred. So a game many people still own and play is being resold at full modern price, complete with the tiered edition ladder, as Ubisoft leans ever harder on remakes and remasters to fill its calendar.

And then there is Resynced, the branding that exists purely so nobody has to decide whether this is a remake or a remaster. Under the lore it is cute, an Animus resyncing a memory. In the store it is a very expensive way of saying we polished an old favorite and would like sixty dollars again. If the combat and the ships hold up, it will be worth it. Sally just wishes the honesty came standard.