Is the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake worth the 13 year wait?

Image source, Ubisoft Image caption, It's a mystical quest to the isle of Tortuga... amongst other places By Tom Gerken Technology reporter Published 4 minutes ago You don't need to look hard to find a film or TV fan who will say a reboot is never as good as the original. Yet gamers often beg studios to remake their favourite titles and give them a new lease of life with modern tech. Some 13 years after its original was launched, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been released to cash in on leaps in graphics and gameplay. But is it worth the wait? What Will We Do With a Drunken Sailor? Image source, Ubisoft Image caption, Early 18th century Havana has received a significant uplift between the original game (left) and the remake (right) Assassin's Creed is one of the most popular franchises in gaming, having sold an estimated 230 million copies across its various iterations. I have played every single one of them and, like many gamers, would rank Black Flag among the best. That mainly comes down to its excellent setting - players take control of fictional Welsh pirate Edward Kenway in the Caribbean during the 1700s. While hardly the first game about piracy, it was by far the most successful. So it is no real surprise Ubisoft chose this as the first game in the series to remake. It opens with pirate ships in battle, swiftly followed with a lush tropical island on a sunny day. It all looks good, as you would expect from a big budget game in 2026. Image source, Ubisoft Image caption, Do you think Edward's feeding the turtle arrr-tichokes? Early on, players are encouraged to dive underwater and are met with a fantastic coral landscape. The developers are keen to show off the fancy new graphics, and here the game holds its own. It is a lot brighter than the original, which suffered from something unaffectionately referred to as the "muddy era" of gaming (amongst other less publishable names), where developers used darker colours to help games look gritty and realistic. Released right at the tail end of this era, the original Black Flag was not the most egregious example of this - but still suffered somewhat. Image source, Ubisoft Image caption, Sailing a ship looks a bit different in 2013 (left) and 2026 (right). Now, we have moved far beyond this "muddy era" - and the new game is filled with bright colours befitting of the Caribbean setting. Running Down to Cuba It is a game which, in hoping to live up to the original's legacy, photographs well. Andy Farrant, co-editor of the YouTube channel Outside Xbox, told the BBC he was excited to play it. "I firmly believe Black Flag is the best Assassin's Creed game," he said. For Farrant, its only downsides had been "the boring modern day bits" which saw a pirate's life swapped out for meetings and water cooler chat in a Montreal office - a section of the original axed in its remake. "The world and the characters of Black Flag is what made it so appealing," he said. "The chance to dip back into that wor