New Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced remake footage looks terrific

1 hour ago 3

Published May 5, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

The Black Flag remake puts the assassin back in Assassin's Creed

Edward Kenway gets into a sword fight in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced

Video game remakes often beg a version of the same question: Did we really need this? In the case of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, the answer is starting to look more and more like "yes" — at least according to a new crop of video clips Ubisoft shared Tuesday.

Black Flag Resynced, a remake of 2013's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, circled the rumor mill for ages before Ubisoft officially announced it in March. In April, Ubisoft offered a more detailed look at Black Flag Resynced, showing that it'd be a fully rebuilt recreation of the classic Assassin's Creed game, which is largely set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy (circa early 1700s). In addition to shiny new visuals, Black Flag Resynced also fixes many of the game's more, uh, dated sensibilities, like those damn tailing missions.

But the biggest thing Black Flag Resynced seems poised to fix, going by the most recent batch of videos from Ubisoft, is a general course correction of the direction Assassin's Creed has taken in the past decade. Fans of the series largely consider Assassin's Creed games to exist in two eras: the stealth-action games of 2007–2015 (from the original Assassin's Creed up to Syndicate) and the open-world RPGs of 2017–2025 (Origins to Shadows). Each era has its merits, but it seems clear from recent footage that Black Flag Resynced will play more like the original games than the more recent stat- and health bar-heavy RPGs.

In two different clips, protagonist Edward Kenway faces three enemies, taking them all down in two hits tops, health bars be damned. If you've played any of the more recent games, you'll instantly recognize this combat sequence — which makes use of everything from the hidden blade to Kenway's rope weapon — as reminiscent of the older entries in the series. Exhibit A:

And exhibit B:

In a blog post accompanying today's footage, Ubisoft also said it aimed to retain "Edward's responsive movement form the original [game]" but made a number of tweaks to "heighten [the] sense of fluidity." You can roll when landing on the ground, for instance, so you don't lose any speed when sprinting off a ledge. You'll also get a bit of a speed boost after mantling up a ledge, all in the interest of keeping things moving. Ubisoft has also added new ziplines around the game's urban environments.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be released July 9 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.