Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry (2013)

[FRENCH PLAYTHROUGH]
So I remember playing this many many years ago upon release. I remember trying to play Black Flag but actually had to put it down, it was just not an enjoyable game for multiple reasons. I do reckon that I had a very fond feeling from the Freedom Cry DLC, which I exhausted and maximized upgrades with back in the day. Recently, feeling like I wanted to play an AC game and climb around a bit, I loaded it up from the depths of my ps3 hard drive.

Now, I really do enjoy the theme of the game, which basically revolves entirely around liberating slave workers and recruiting them for your crew. I remember that I thought this was the most satisfying part of the game and a lot of ludo-narrative harmony with that! However, in retrospect, I realize this is literally the ONLY THING you do in the game. In between missions the side quest isn't really much going on and the main thing do to is to liberate and recruit more people. This is the main focus of the gameplay loop as you do need to recruit a certain number of slaves in order to progress the main story.

My interest was lost extremely quickly. I played about 3 hours in or so and quickly grew tired of the repetitive gameplay and constraints for progressing the story (my main interest in these open-world games more often than not). Also what I found the most unappealing to me is the setting. To me, the AC games highlights are always in the climbing the cities, and the environment. That's why I didn't even finish Black Flag as the environment is incredibly uninteresting to me. Sure there are some ruins here and there that are pretty fun to play around but other than that we mostly find palm trees and other vegetation to climb on.

I can't quite understand why I had so many fond memories of this game from many years ago but maybe it's also a different time, having played recent installments of the series they have done a lot of improvements (and some not). It just hasn't aged all that well. I did encounter even game-breaking glitches having me restart missions and enemies popping up right in front of me as I was sneaking up on another guy.

Quite the disappointment, there are better AC games to pick up I guess, depending on your liking of course. Freeing slaves is always a good time though, I must admit.

*3.5, maybe?

Basically just extra AC4 content, but with some new systems and a better story. The mission with the sinking slave ship stood out for me, and I found the story more compelling because there was a clear goal for Adewale to achieve. I also preferred the focus on the Maroons and Haiti to the pirates in the main game as I'm more familiar with this history.

The artificial lengthening of the campaign with mission prerequisites was a bit shady but I usually had already completed them. Also, the blunderbuss was a cool addition and using it to kill 5+ guards at once was fun!

First, you take AC4: Black Flag. Change the protagonist, totally remove the present day story elements, shrink the map waaay down, and cut the story down to about 4-5hrs. Now you have Freedom Cry.

Adewale isn't quite as interesting a protagonist as Edward, but still has about 10x the personality of Aveline (who also has a tiny DLC add-on in Black Flag).

Harpoon hunting exists like it did in Black Flag, but serves no purpose but to farm money. Unfortunately, money is fairly useless in this game, because the currency you actually need to grind for upgrades is slaves.

Wait, what?

That's right, the game takes an eyebrow-raising track of using freed slaves as a currency and as a method of checkpointing. Want an upgraded machete? You have to free 300 slaves first. Want to start the next mission? Not until you've recruited enough "Maroon" soldier-slaves. Slaves are freed either by wiping out guards on plantations, storming slave ships, or via extremely repetitive & rapidly respawning on-land mini-events where you kill a few guards.

Want to upgrade your sailing ship? Okay, you'll need actual money for that. Though, during my playthrough, I always had way more money than I ever needed to buy ship upgrades (with metal & wood being what you really need to grind to proceed).

The sailing is exactly like Black Flag. So if you liked that, you'll be happy. The Assassin on-land combat is also like Black Flag (but maybe even clunkier). I'm pretty sure nobody likes that, so hold your nose and tolerate it, chumps. The on-land missions are also quite heavy on some particularly obnoxious tailing sections.

The story doesn't seem to further the overall AC story arc at all. If you got Freedom Cry as part of Black Flag, and you reeeally want to play more Black Flag, then this is for you. Otherwise, I can't really recommend paying money for it.

I think I got this in PS plus?

If I hadn't played the main game, the mechanics would make no sense. As a DLC it's fine, still a bit short. The PS4 version can be exceptionally glitchy, objects which you need to complete quests stop existing, audio cuts in and out, you snap between surfaces seemingly randomly.

Plus side is you get to kill a bunch of slavers. Bottom side of that is it's very repetitious, the same few events pop up in the one town over and over again.

It's fine, but better to just pick up a used copy of Assassin's Creed 4.