Assassin’s Creed 4: Freedom Cry is the single player DLC companion to Black Flag. 15 years after the events of Black Flag, with king D-bag Edward Kenway long gone, you now take on the role of his former quartermaster, Assassin and freed slave Adéwalé as he captains his own ship the “Experto Crede” in the name of the Assassins hunting down Templars in Caribbean waters.
The establishing tones of the story are, as usual, weak, with Adéwalé chasing some MacGuffin of a Templar package and ending up shipwrecked on Saint-Domingue. Not letting something as minor as the loss of an entire ship and crew take him off task, Adéwalé sets out to find a local brothel owner named Bastienne Josephe who is in bed with the Templars (eh? EH?) so he can find the truth behind the package and figure out more about the Templar’s recent movements.
Gameplay fits snugly after Black Flag, and objectives feel easier than they did for the entire course of the main game. This is in part because your ship, Experto Crede, already has most of the mid to high level upgrades of the Jackdaw. However even on the ground while doing tail missions and infiltrating plantations the game gives you a smoother ride, enemy layouts were a bit thinner, and new additions to Adéwalé’s arsenal such as the blunderbuss and firecrackers made for simpler distractions and faster enemy encounters. This isn’t so much a criticism, as Black Flag felt like the difficulty was just turned up a tad too high, but also know you’ll likely be breezing through this DLC.
Aside from a few minor new toys it’s everything you’ve already seen in Black Flag… Well, with one slight change, everything in the game is now tied to slaves. That’s not me being cheeky, every objective from assaulting ships to chasing couriers (or overseers now) to liberating plantations is entirely tied to freeing slaves, to the point the game begins to feel a little over the top and a parody of the statement it’s trying to make. You get new crew members by freeing slaves, you recruit help by freeing slaves, you unlock shops by freeing slaves, you unlock upgrades by freeing slaves, you unlock story missions by freeing slaves. You see where I’m going with this? It’s actually downright lazy, letting the game fall back on one answer for everything ultimately becoming repetitive and monotonous.
There are a few gameplay tweaks to support this “Free all the slaves all the time” mentality of Freedom Cry, instead of the hard stealth requirements Black Flag enforced, plantation overseers will now kill slaves if alerted to your presence which more just deprives you of a gameplay edge than triggering anything emotionally. At sea naval combat and taking prizes is still in place, but why bother? Freeing an escorted slave ship nets as good a reward as some of the much harder to take prizes in the Caribbean sea. The only truly nice thing about this is Liberation missions, a series staple that usually just results in freeing the map from Templar control, now carry a bit more incentive in providing soldiers and upgrades, it would be cool to see this more rewarding form of liberation return in future releases for the IP.
Port-Au-Prince is a pretty boring place, and the only island the game takes place on (other than an irrelevant plantation the game makes you free before you can progress a story mission). There’s not a whole lot to see or do, Adéwalé being a former slave seems limited in his actions, which ignores the historical fact there were free blacks walking around this island and the game’s own lore of Assassin’s being cultural chameleons, Edward was always an infamous pirate, Connor was Kanien’kehá:ka blending in Colonial cities, Aveline literally made her way through different castes of society, but they all moved pretty freely in every location, not to mention Assassins are always wanted criminals, so in Adéwalé case it didn’t so much feel like a story point as it felt like an excuse to dumb down wanted level mechanics and shopkeepers. There are no other real ports of call, where Black Flag sent you all over the Caribbean, to Havana and Africa, you are are stranded in one place. I did go exploring a few times but there wasn’t much to see in Adéwalé’s version of the Caribbean outside of reused assets.
Whereas you couldn’t make Edward do a damn thing he didn’t want to, with Adéwalé all you have to do is drop the word “slavery” and his focus instantly changes from the plot to any slave chain breaking mission one might have. Whereas Edward was hard headed, selfish and unlikable, Adéwalé is almost too noble and preachy, we’re still stuck with a one sided character who just happens to sit on the other end of the morality spectrum. With Adéwalé everything had to be an inspirational speech, a reminder that slavery is bad, freedom is good. He got very tiring very fast.
The one real saving grace for this title is the Adéwalé/Bastienne relationship, there’s something of a James Bond-esque vibe going on between the Assassin and the Brothel Matron, and about the only place the game shows any well written or thought out content. Bastienne is a very interesting character just in the fact she seems to be doing the wrong things for all the right reasons, and so she gets a bit more depth because of it. Again this kind of reminds me of both the best and worst part of Black Flag, where the secondary characters were more interesting to watch than the protagonist. Everything else is a bit squandered, such as the Maroon rebellion and the politics of the French empire, which seemed to be more of an after thought to the game than the closer lens of history Assassin’s Creed usually likes to give us.
Story and gameplay wise, it really doesn’t make any greater missteps than Black Flag did, unfortunately uninspired content and an ultimately boring protagonists just drag the whole thing down, there’s also not a great deal of new stuff that Freedom Cry is offering here, not to mention the game is super short even with artificially beefing up the playtime with objectives that want you to free X amount of slaves before you can move on. Like its parent, Freedom Cry is a game that bleeds out its own potential, and it’s in my personal opinion the idea of churning out one Assassin’s Creed a year is part of what held back the Black Flag/Freedom Cry set. It’s tough to recommend this even at 10 bucks, sure it does a few things slightly better than Black Flag, slightly, but unless you’ve squeezed every last drop out of Black Flag and feel you absolutely need just a little bit more I would give this one a pass.
