Assassins Creed IV is a much better game than III in almost every way, but is still far from perfect. Many parts of the game feel like a huge reaction to the criticism of the last game. A few examples:
- The introduction of Edward and the time until you can freely explore the world is many times shorter.
- There are much less instant fail stealth missions than in the last game, which were probably my most hated thing about ACIII.
- Edward's personality is not that of a brick wall.
The biggest positive change I can think of though, is the performance. I played the game on a PS4, so maybe the comparison is not all that fair, but the game runs at a solid 30 fps without a single dip (well almost). The draw distance while on the open sea seems much better than the last generation versions from what I've seen, and there's a few little improvements such as the grass swaying as you move through it. Overall you can definitely tell it was a port from a last generation version though.
I never really did much of the ship combat in Assassins Creed III so I can't compare it too much to that game, but it seems mostly the same. The sailing is really awesome especially when your crew start singing shanties. You can get your crew to sing different shanties by collecting floating papers in many of the cities and smaller locations. This is probably the best collectible I have seen in a game in a long time. Other collectibles such as treasure chests (not the buried ones) and animus fragments don't really have an impact and I feel like I wasted a lot of time collecting them. Collecting the ones on the islands always comes down to the same tedious actions which involve sailing to the small island, stopping your ship as close to the island so you don't have to swim as far, grabbing the chests/fragments from the island, swimming all the way back to your ship, then sailing to the next island. At times while collecting these I would ask myself why I play video games. Of course these are all optional and you don't have to collect them, but I feel like if you're going to put something in your video game, it should probably be at least mildly fun to do.
Back to the ship combat. This is my favorite part of the game. Taking down a manowar with your little ship is pretty awesome and you can see a really clear progression of upgrades on your ship. At the start of the game an enemy manowar will just roll over you like a Snorlax rolling over it's Ditto wife in it's sleep. After you buy a few upgrades for your ship you can come back and easily see how much of a difference upgrading your hull a couple of times can make. Some missions will have you battle a few ships or forts in the middle of massive storms. The sea looks amazing when the big waves kick in and you have to take into account the different wind directions, the giant waves you must take head on to avoid damage, and tornadoes that will suck you in if you get too close.
Your crew really makes the sailing so much better. As mentioned before they will sing shanties, but also just the generic dialogue they yell makes it feel so much more pirate-y. Just hearing someone yell "That's a man-o-war sir!" at the top of they're lungs makes you go "Oh shit". They'll also yell stuff like "Cap'n o'erboard!" every time you jump out to sea, and when you come back to the wheel of your ship everyone will start cheering. All this just makes you feel like a pirate badass without a care in the world when you're out sailing.
The on land missions are pretty much the same as previous games. There is still a bit too many following/stalking missions for my taste, but many of the more stealthy missions will not insta fail you if are detected which is a huge relief. You'll meet other pirates like James Kidd and Blackbeard who are sort of interesting, but I never cared that much about them in the story. Edward is still no Ezio, but as mentioned before is still miles more interesting than Connor.
There were a few mild bugs in the game which were more entertaining than anything. At one part a shark in an underwater sequence (which I forgot to mention are terrible in my opinion, and absolutely the worst parts of the game) was stuck vertically in an air barrel. I swam around him a couple of time until he somehow instantly became unstuck and lunged towards me while me and my friend shat our pants. There were a couple of other janky type moments for sure, but the biggest bug I encountered was on the very last mission. Without spoiling anything, I couldn't complete the action I needed to finish the game (literally the last thing you do in the game). I had to look up if I was doing something wrong, but finally figured out a way to get around it. It completely sucked me out of the game and from what I've heard was a pretty common bug.
If Ubisoft could make a few more improvements to the next game such as more interesting things to explore the islands for, and some more mission variety, that alone would be a huge improvement.
4/5 would play again.