Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag Freedom Cry Walkthrough Guide

The latest bit of DLC for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is Ubisoft's story-oriented expansion for one of the more well-received and critically acclaimed Assassin's Creed games in recent years. The first bit of the walkthrough follows pirate-turned-assassin Adéwale, maturing from quartermaster to full-fledged member of the brotherhood of assassins.

Adéwale's first mission includes storming a Templar ship and taking a precious item, in order to keep it from getting into the wrong hands. Much like the rest of Black Flag, players engage in some furious nautical fisticuffs between wood and cannon, clashing titans of beam and torn flag like some sort of aquatic joust.

It's not long before Adéwale and his crew make their way onto the ship to face down a certain and unflinching foe. From here we get to see all the flaws and mistakes of the Assassin's Creed core design come rearing to a head like an unfathomable force of unwieldly and immense disregard. What am I talking about exactly? The atrocious combat and terrible AI.

Despite being “new” content, the expansion still features all the drawbacks from the original Black Flag (which, unsurprisingly, is still a carry-over of crooked content from the very first Assassin's Creed). I was hoping that the $1 million Ubisoft invested into their proprietary artificial intelligence program would show a better sign of scalability and reactionism, but that just isn't the case here.

Things get especially bad when Adéwale chases down some members into the lower decks, where the camera struggles to focus and the enemy AI wade around like tap dancers with molasses in their shoes, shuffling and twitching but doing little in the way of providing the player with any sense of danger or threat. The AI sort of jammed in the corner looking like a dumbfounded drunkard who forgot why he was holding a sword in his hand and not a bottle of malt liquor.

To be fair, the walkthrough will probably be less for those needing to find out how to deal with the AI and more-so for mission related quests and finding tidbits of secret info to help you acquire or uncover less-than-obvious content in the game. It's a shame, but more than two decades on and the AI in Double Dragon 2 are still harder than anything they throw at you in Assassin's Creed.

Anyway, the walkthrough can be very helpful for difficult missions – even though, technically, they lay out waypoints and objectives – so even if you're blind, deaf and dumb there's still some way to ensure that you get to where you need to go, with ease.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Freedom Cry is an expansion for the original Black Flag release and is available for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Need more info? Feel free to pay a visit to the game's official website.