“Memories of another time entirely….like another life I’ve already led.”
When 22-year-old me first heard this line—uttered by Black Bart to the game’s confused pirate hero—back in 2013 while playing the original Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on my Xbox 360, it hinted at Bart’s importance and his connection to the past. In 2026, playing the remake of Black Flag on PS5 Pro, it was impossible for me not to hear that quote about memories of a long-ago life already led and connect it instead to how I’m feeling about this new remake, out July 9 on PC, Xbox, and PS5.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is Ubisoft’s first remake of a previously released game in the long-running stealth-focused historical open world franchise. Being many fans’ favorite entry in the series and one which even non-AC fans still flock to a decade later, it makes sense that Black Flag is getting a complete, ground-up remake before any other installment.
While I mostly enjoyed my time with the remake, those memories of the past kept nagging me and reminding me that this new game wasn’t really all that new.
A Remake, Not A Replica
Built using the same tech that powered Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Black Flag Resynced is a surprisingly faithful remake, but don’t expect a perfect 1:1 carbon copy of what came before.
This isn’t an RPG like more recent AC titles. Instead, like the OG game, Resynced is a more straightforward action-adventure game set in a large open world. Across the 35 hours it took me to complete the main campaign and a good chunk of side activities, I never had to manage piles of loot, spend skill points in various trees, or worry that enemies were too high a level for me. The closest Black Flag gets to being an RPG is that, like in the original, you can collect some resources from attacking ships and killing animals and use those to upgrade your pirate ship or pirate gear, letting you hold more bullets or flintlock pistols.
As a result, Black Flag Resynced feels far more streamlined and less bloated than other Assassin’s Creed games. It’s the kind of open-world game that most people will finish in a week or so instead of grinding away at it for weeks or months. This is a good thing.
The smaller scale not only makes the remake less intimidating to take on, but it also lets Black Flag’s story about Edward Kenway, an Englishman desperate to escape poverty and become a rich, powerful pirate, move along at a better pace than what you often find in 50-to 150-hour open-world games. I didn’t run into the problem of trying to remember a character and their motivations between 40 hours of gameplay and missions. It also helps that Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, and the other pirates and characters that populate Black Flag are memorable and each offer a unique perspective on the Golden Age of Piracy.
And as Kennway begins to lose some of these close allies and friends through tragic means, it reinforces another part of Black Flag I greatly appreciate: The way the game makes it clear that being a pirate was a short-lived, brutal, sometimes lonely, and always dangerous way of life. Few escape the grim reaper or a jail cell, even if they became romanticized legends we still talk about to this day.
Black Flag does make one massive change that greatly affects the story, and that’s the complete removal of the modern-day segments found in the original game. Here, they aren’t really replaced with…anything. This means that the various segments of Edward’s story, which are separated by occasional time jumps of a few months or years and which, in the original Black Flag, were often broken up by these modern-day segments, feel less separate here, and as a result I found Black Flag Resynced’s story to move faster than I remember in a way that made Kenway and company’s adventure feel a bit less grand in scale.
While the complete ditching of modern-day moments didn’t quite work for me, many of the other changes Black Flag Resynced makes did.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
The most obvious change when looking at screenshots of Black Flag Resynced is, of course, the huge visual upgrade of the remake. While some might suggest the remake gives up style for realism, I found nearly every corner and bit of Resynced to be not only gorgeous, but also artistically crafted. Sunsets on small islands look as jaw-dropping as the stormy seas near important enemy forts or the sun-soaked beaches of main hub areas.
Playing on PS5 Pro, the game’s raytraced reflections and other lighting touches added even more detail to the world. And it ran at a nearly locked 60fps via performance mode while still looking like one of the best open-world games this year.
I took a lot of screenshots, is what I’m saying. But how could I not when encountering crystal clear blue waters filled with jellyfish and other sea creatures? I ain’t going on vacation to the Bahamas anytime soon, so Resynced’s more detailed and livelier digital recreation of a tropical paradise is the next best thing.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced
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BACK-OF-THE-BOX QUOTE
“Yar, it be fun being pirate when I ain’t drowning under me own memories of what have come before.”
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DEVELOPER
Ubisoft Singapore
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TYPE OF GAME
Third-person open-world action-adventure pirate simulator.
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LIKED
Gorgeous visuals, smart changes, snappy combat, naval gameplay, and new epilogue.
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DISLIKED
Removed modern-day segments, repetitive side activities, and some parkour jank.
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PLATFORMS
Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 (Played), and PC.
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RELEASE DATE
July 9, 2026
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PLAYED
I played nearly 40 hours of Black Flag Resynced on PS5 Pro and completed the main story, epilogue and officer quests. I also did around about half of the available side content and fully upgraded my character’s gear.
Another area in which the remake greatly improves over the original is how it feels moment-to-moment to play Black Flag.
As someone who recently replayed the opening hours of the original game, it is harder than ever to go back to those clunky controls. The Black Flag remake, in comparison, controls like a treat. Running around empty tropical islands or climbing across the rickety shanty city of Nassau feels fantastic. So does combat, which seeks to emulate the simpler parry and strike swordplay found in the original Black Flag, but adds more animations and tighter controls.
This is still an Assassin’s Creed game, though, which means that I still found Edward sometimes jumping off of a surface when I wanted to go up or running into a wall that I wanted to climb. Parkour overall feels smooth and responsive, but there’s still some classic AC jank in this remake.
Other changes I appreciated included the addition of an epilogue that ties up a few story threads involving Blackbeard, the fact that you can now manage Edward’s fleet of stolen ships without using a mobile app, the ability to fast travel back to your boat, and the inclusion of some new sea shanties to rock out to while out exploring the ocean.
My Life, My Lover, My Lady Is The Sea
The open ocean and getting to explore it via your own upgradeable pirate ship is still the thing that makes Black Flag distinct from other Assassin’s Creed games all these years later. And Ubisoft smartly made very few changes to how Black Flag Resynced’s naval combat and exploration control or operate in the remake.
Instead, the devs just made smaller tweaks, like making swivel guns feel a bit more skill-based by forcing you to aim them to hit weak points or sprinkling in secondary fire modes for your ship’s various cannons and mortars. A larger addition is new weather conditions, like water spouts and bigger storms, that add a bit more spice to long sessions of exploring the ocean.
None of these changes, nor the visual upgrades, made it any less fun or freeing to cruise across the ocean in Black Flag in my own Jackdaw, using a spyglass to spot potential target ships to engage in combat and perhaps board for booty. All those years ago, Ubisoft hit on a wonderful way to control a pirate ship and all its guns—having your aim contextually dictate which weapon you could fire—and it still works wonderfully in 2026.
Taking on larger ships and massive forts is as thrilling as ever. I still felt panic grip me when a ship would catch me off guard and pelt me with a volley of cannonballs. I’ve played a lot of Windrose and other pirate games, and Black Flag Resynced is leagues above them in capturing the thrill and fear of being in control of a massive wooden ship filled with cannons and desperate to take out the other wooden vessels trying to blast you to bits.
Outside of combat, the ship is also used to explore Black Flag’s large, but not overly massive, open world. Out here you’ll find a lot of the same side activities featured in the original game, like ship convoys, the chance to dive underwater using a diving bell, and whales to harpoon for materials.
Sadly, as I did more of these activities, they got repetitive fast. There’s only so many times I can sit in a boat, toss spears at a whale, and then watch its carcass get lifted out of the water before I start mashing the skip cutscene button. There are only so many times I can sneak in bushes to take out yet one more assassin target or dive around underwater shipwrecks before losing interest in it all. And Black Flag crosses that point and then some with its open-world activities.
There Are Places I Remember
There are two Zacks inside me right now. One who looks at Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced as the next big entry in the series. And the other who can’t forget this is a remake.
Both Zacks really liked Resynced and how it made smart changes to an excellent game to create a swashbuckling adventure that overcomes some story pacing issues as well as the omission of modern-day segments and some copy-pasted open world content to deliver one of the best pirate games around.
And yet one Zack, the one who can’t shake those memories of the game he played all those years ago, can’t help but feel sad that the big new Assassin’s Creed is a remake of an Xbox 360-era game. He looks at those incredibly detailed visuals and all the newly animated cutscenes and doesn’t think, “Wow, that looks great!” but instead, “Damn, I wonder what kind of new game could have been developed using these resources?” He’s the same Zack that looks at the future and how it is so focused on the past and worries about what that means, not just for Ubisoft, but for the video game industry as a whole.
The other Zack, well, he’s too busy exploring all of Black Flag Resynced and its 4K pirate sandbox to care about those concerns. This is the game we got, and it’s really good, right? Sure, something new would have been nice, but this is nice, too, you know? And think about how many people have never played Black Flag. The majority of the population has never played that 2013 Assassin’s Creed game. Heck, many gamers today might not have been into video games back then; were too young to play Black Flag, or weren’t even born yet. For them, Black Flag isn’t a remake. It’s a new Assassin’s Creed that features pirates.
Ultimately, both Zacks are right. (And yes, I guess I’m a third meta-Zack observing all of this…)
I do indeed think Black Flag Resynced is a sign that the video game industry is becoming more risk-averse and nostalgia-focused as the people with money look for safe bets to fund. But I also think that this remake is a perfect example of how to go back to an old game, dust it off, fix it up, and make something that is both faithful and fresh. Not an easy task to complete, but one which Ubisoft nailed with this remake.
For most, that’s all that will matter. Is Black Flag Resynced good? Yes, very good. Does it indicate a good future for Ubisoft or the video game industry? No. How you handle that reality, assuming you already like pirates and Assassin’s Creed, will truly determine if you enjoy Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced or not.
