There's no sign of the gleaming Abstergo Industries office that once served as the modern day framing for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but playing this game for the first time in 12 years feels a bit like time travel anyway. Before Ubisoft dropped Assassin's Creed's sci-fi conceit, each game was meant to be a strikingly immersive VR recreation of some past place and time, just as your character's ancestor would remember it.
Except, well, this time the ancestor is me circa 2014, and Black Flag Resynced has recreated the best Assassin's Creed just as I remember it.
My memory, it turns out, is about as accurate to the original game as Ezio Auditore da Firenze's battle with the Pope was to real 15th century Italian history. Before I sit down to play Black Flag, Ubisoft highlights everything that it's upgraded. Combat is totally reworked, with much punchier animations and perfect parries and dodges. Loading between cities and the open ocean? Gone now. Weather's dynamic, pirate-turned-assassin Edward Kenway has a crouch button, and you better believe that lighting is ray traced now.
But it still feels intimately familiar as I step aboard the Jackdaw or go parkouring across a lush ...
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