Ubisoft's Best Game in 13 Years Is One It Already Made
The scoreboard says Ubisoft just shipped its best game since 2013. The asterisk says that game came out in 2013. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launched July 9 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC and posted an 84 on Metacritic across more than 75 reviews, the highest series mark since the original Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag hit 88 thirteen years ago. Mirage got a 76. Rogue managed 72. Players called it before the critics did: preorders alone pushed Resynced to number four on Steam's weekly top sellers by revenue in the week before launch.
Ubisoft Singapore rebuilt Edward Kenway's Caribbean on an updated Anvil Engine, and the additions are the kind fans have wanted for a decade. Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet get storylines of their own. An epilogue carries Kenway past the 2013 ending. Fleet management now lives inside the game, retiring the old companion app that once asked you to run a shipping empire from your phone. Ray-traced lighting turns the golden-hour Caribbean into the project's best sales pitch.
So which is it, stewardship or surrender? The case for stewardship is right there on the screen: a beloved game, handled with care, improved where it creaked. The case against is just as plain. Ubisoft's proudest release in over a decade required no new setting, no new hero, no new risk. Kotaku slid the needle in gently: "if you remake a game people already liked and do a good job of it, the outcome is likely to be another well-reviewed game." An 84 for a remake of an 88 is craft, not vision. Still, the same week Disney's live-action Moana sank to 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the gap between those two numbers is the difference between remaking something because you love it and remaking it because you own it.
Our verdict: buy it, and keep one eyebrow raised. Resynced is the right way to do this, honest about what it is and generous with what it adds, and Kenway's Caribbean holds up as the series' high-water mark for a reason. But an 84 built on borrowed cannon fire leaves the question that has trailed Assassin's Creed since Mirage: what does this series look like when it has to invent something? Ubisoft proved it can restore the furniture. The next test is building a new ship.
