Even taken on its own terms, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is an abject disappointment
by any rational criteria.
And proof positive that Ubisoft learned less than nothing from their Revolutionary War-era
teething difficulties, and further: Given that - bafflingly - the worst game in the
series inexplicably wound up setting sales records from here to Neptune...
it's hard to find fault with their analysis of basic economic cause and effect.
If The Beatles recorded a jazz record that outsold their other albums five-fold, you
can be damn sure they'd release another fuckin' jazz album.
It's capitalism, I understand, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
What I don't understand is Ubisoft's failure to correct basic problems that even the game's
proponents acknowledge!
Even the most in-the-bag, stamp-a-barcode-on-my-forehead-and-assign-me-a-name-with-a-decimal-point-in-it, bought the fuck OUT 'professional' reviewers
seemed to echo my criticism that if the third Assassin's Creed's introductory sequence were
any longer, Ron Jeremy would be sliding it down the throat of an underage Traci Lords.
Four hours in and your screen is still weathering an unyielding bombardment of insightful tutorial
snippets like 'hold forward to move forward' and 'move the right stick... to reposition
the fucking camera'!
Yeah.
And the cow says 'moo'.
Start the fuckin' game, already!
This ain't even a game, at this point.
You shoot this fuckin' thing in sepia and it'd be a Ken Burns documentary!
The ability to rate the quality of each individual chapter of the game is a welcome privilege,
even if we all know damn well those suggestion cards are more likely to be lining Jade Raymond's
parakeet cage... than taking up any space on Yves Guillemot's conference table.
In any event, I can only speculate as to the unique facial expression rorshach of shock,
dismay, and disappointment in the human race that donned the faceplate of Ubisoft Feedback
Drone #3301 when RazörFist's feedback slip wormed its way beneath the proverbial doorframe.
That shit had more zeroes than 4chan's userbase.
Though I'd hurry to point out that I didn't hate Black Flag right off-the-bat.
IN fact, when the game initially kicked off with the series' trademark parkour-cum-stabby-stab
formulae, I found myself teetering on the verge of a grudging recommendation.
...and then Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Keira Knightley swung in on a chandelier and
easily the most boring, procedural, incomprehensibly-repetitive piracy sim in the history of gaming staggered
through the doorway, fully nude, in a rum-cake-induced stupor.
I realize playing a game about pirates, then complaining when pirates show up is like eating
shit and complaining about the smell... but I didn't play a game about pirates...
I played a game about assassin's, so where the fuck are they?!
And even if you were making a game about pirates - which you fucking aren't - making a pirate
game, and then devoting half the Peter North-ian length to blithering tedium like repairing
your ship and recruiting your faceless crew... is like making a first-person shooter, and
then spending half the game watching the fuckin' guns be manufactured!
This game suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks!
And could we possibly make combat any easier, chief?
I think I may have actually had to burn 1/16th of a calorie depressing the 'B' button within
the prohibitively-brief time window of 5 entire hours to instantly counter and eviscerate
literally any enemy in the game!
I defy you to die even once - outside of ship combat - while playing Assassin's Creed IV!
It cannot be done!
The game's central flaw... the proverbial flaw from which all other flaws flow... (alliteration)...
is that Ubisoft Montréal... are about 50 times more interested in playing a pirate
game...
than any of their fuckin' audience is!
Even going so far as to antagonize Assassin's Creed fans in interviews... for daring to
suggest that the series finally set a game in feudal Japan or a locale that makes infinitely
more sense than this failed foray into masturbatory maritime mayhem.
See also: LITERALLY ANYWHERE.
It appears that the crux of their operative logic stems from a belief that - while skeptical
at first - fans would eventually be won over by the fact that capturing, recruiting or
sinking enemy vessels is innately fun.
And they're almost right!
Disabling and boarding enemy ships is fun!
About 10 fucking times!
Which is roughly 590 times fewer than you will be forced to engage in this ceaseless
monotony over the course of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.
And just what is it about Montréal that compels their game developer residents to reference,
and repeatedly glorify...
Montréal?
You don't see Obsidian setting all their games in fuckin' Irvine, CA.
Even though, culturally speaking, California is about 17,000 times more relevant to a given
socio-political event... thn goddamn Montréal!
Look, I'm a francophile, myself.
And a shameless one, at that.
But, shit, let's be real, here.
On its best possible day, Montréal... is Paris for hipsters.
And without your borderline illegal tax 'incentives' undercutting every other city in the world
thanks to WTO incompetence...
you wouldn't even be that!
So let's stop pretending, for example, that Montréal should have been in any way relevant
to the global conspiracy in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, shall we, Eidos?!
What the shit were the Illuminati after in Quebec, anyways?
A renewable source of alcoholism and bad manners?!
Abstergo being centered in Montréal is like General Electric being headquartered in Twiddle-Your-Testes,
NC, so fuckin' cool it with the self-glorification!
Or better yet, redirect that creative energy into writing a story where the entire 'Assassins
vs. Templars' subplot doesn't feel 100% crammed-the-fuck-in to a piracy story that was never once supposed
to have anything to do with it.
Gentlemen!
Brandish your shoehorns, because Al Bundy couldn't make this shit fit in a Assassin's
Creed game!
And it's almost as if Ubisoft know it, too, because they seem far more interested in resigning
Edward Kenway to menial bitchwork and repetitive ship-boarding than even peripherally tying
this character in with the main plot.
With Assassin's Creed 4, Ubisoft Montréal attempted to marry the two disparate genres
of stealth and piracy... and wound up monumentally failing at both in the process.
Your stealth game sucks because every stealth game that uses checkpoints sucks.
Every.
Single.
ONE.
And after Splinter Cell: Blacklist sold 5 copies worldwide with the same save system,
you should have fucking known better.
And your pirate game sucks because it's hamfisted and repetitive, and you spent all of a fuckin'
year to make the goddamn thing!
Of course it sucks!
Let's hope to Alien Precursor Christ that Ubisoft Montréal didn't lose Patrice Desilets'
number, because this series needs that man, and it needs him stat.
Assassin's Creed 3 may have set sales records, but this game sure as shit didn't.
And the deeper you wade into these waters, the angrier the seas fuckin' get.
Time for a course-correction.
I'm RazörFist.
God - fucking - SPEED!