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Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Preview

The angle at which you are aiming at the enemy
and the position of your ship dictates which type
of ammunition is fired, based on the way the guns
are placed around the vessel. It’s a clever system
that encourages careful and considered control
over simple button presses and sub-menus.

When boarding an enemy ship, in order to be
victorious you must eliminate a specific number of
combatants, at which point the rest will surrender.
Upon capturing the ship, significant rewards can
be obtained in terms of money and materials. The
vessel itself can then either be stripped and used
to repair the Jackdaw, or can be captured and send
After sinking one of the ships with constant to join your trading fleet.
bombardment, I decided to try something new on
the second. Demonstrative of a new latest feature, At this point, the Ubisoft demonstrator directed
which allows you to seamlessly move from steering me back to the iPad and showed me how trading
the ship and moving on foot, is the ability to board fleets can be managed using the tablet. Similar
an enemy vessel. Grappling hooks are thrown, the to the land-based trading networks in Assassin’s
vessels are pulled closer together, and captain and Creed III, Edward can utilise his own sea-based
crew can leap to the opposing ship and engage the network to trade and earn money. Ships can be
enemy in direct hand-to-hand combat.
loaded with goods to sell and dispatched to far off
destinations, making them unavailable until their
This gave me the first chance to go hands-on with task is complete. However, this trading network can
the combat mechanics in AC4, and I found controls be managed from a tablet or smartphone device
to be as intuitive as ever and functionally identical to outside of the main game as a separate entity.
previous series iterations.
Focus is still on counters,
dodging and chaining kill
moves and there are still
the usual variety of enemy
types that require slightly
varying tactics; such as
agile enemies or heavies.
Little can be said to have
been improved upon in
combat, but the system
remains an accomplished
and enjoyable one. It may
be that gadgets unlocked
further down the line can
deepen this somewhat,
but even if not, fans of the
franchise are unlikely to be
disappointed.
Assassin’s Creed Special Edition 2013

57 • GameOn Magazine