Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - Freedom Cry (PlayStation 4) review "Small-scale Black Flag with a dollop of diminishing returns. "

Freedom Cry, while not at the same level of the main Assassin’s Creed IV game, is a worthy expansion that gives gamers who really enjoyed that title a few more hours of stuff to do. As a gamer who really enjoyed that title, I appreciated this, as I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to it and welcomed the opportunity to play just a little while longer.

Taking place roughly 15 years after IV, you’ll control Adewale, Edward Kenway’s second-in-command for much of that game. The former slave is now a card-carrying member of the Assassins and has finally ascended to be captain of his own ship — the sort of rank he despaired of ever reaching in the base game due to the color of his skin. As Freedom Cry begins, he’s endeavoring to complete a mission by using the cover of a storm to put distance between his ship and those pursuing it. One minor issue: Storms aren’t all that discriminating as to what vessels they sink or spare, so next thing you know, Adewale is washing up on the shore next to the town of Port-au-Prince.

And it doesn’t take Adewale — whom is, as I said before, a former slave — to realize this place is a haven for the slave trade with a person unable to walk more than a handful of steps without seeing unfortunate souls being placed on the auction block, locked in cells, being punished severely or being chased down. Suddenly, all that “fight the Templars” stuff doesn’t seem so important to him, so he embarks on a campaign to assist in starting up a slave revolution. This will wind up having all sorts of repercussions, especially considering that certain local powers might not be all that keen on that sort of thing.

While most of the action — you know, following and eavesdropping on people, infiltrating secured locations and killing the bad guys — takes place in and around Port-au-Prince, there is a small open world to explore that contains a lot of the elements present in IV. There are a number of small islands and forts to scour for treasure, while ships roam the waters for you to challenge in order to take their cargo. There’s one shipwreck that can be explored and there also are a few areas where you can attempt to harpoon various aquatic life.

But the bulk of the action revolves around advancing through the nine missions that make up this expansion’s plot, as well as freeing slaves. There are a lot of small activities around Port-au-Prince that will free a handful of them. There also are a number of plantations in the game’s world where you can free up to 40 of them if you can stealthily take out a large number of their overseers. And, while out on the ocean, you can tackle slave ships to rescue a lot of them — assuming you’ve upgraded the ship you’ll eventually receive enough to take out their support vessels before their attacks send you to Davy Jones’ locker.

Freeing slaves has a few benefits beyond simply being able to finally tell yourself that you’re a good person. The more you rescue, the more upgrades and equipment you’ll be able to snag at local stores. If those slaves are capable of becoming freedom fighters, you’ll wind up with more crew for your boat, as well as help in storming plantations. And, oh yeah…these activities can be necessary to unlock missions. Early in the game, I had to free a number of slaves to access a quest. Later on, I had to successfully take on a slave ship and liberate a particularly well-guarded plantation to be able to start other missions. A person could say this is a way to artificially lengthen a fairly short DLC. A person could also say the goal of games such as Assassin’s Creed is to immerse a player in their worlds and it’s kind of hard to be immersed in a tale of liberating slaves if you’re not actually doing stuff to free them.

Besides, by tying in plot missions to your progress in freeing slaves, Freedom Cry actually succeeds in integrating that otherwise optional activity into the game. The rest of them, not so much. I mean, I guess you could say that sacking ships to get their cargo is necessary to a degree simply because the “well-guarded” part of the well-guarded plantation you have to liberate happens to be a really powerful ship that you probably won’t want to tackle until you’ve purchased a few upgrades for yours. And hand-to-hand combat might become a bit easier if you explore islands until you find the one containing a really powerful machete. But other than that, anything you do is simply out of personal desire.

You can hunt animals and marine life for money, but their bones and hides won’t be used to craft character upgrades like in the base game. You can painstakingly explore every location for every single treasure chest, but virtually all of your ship’s upgrades simply need coin and other ships’ metal and wood to craft, with there being no hidden blueprints to find. And as a result, it really didn’t take me long to experience all I needed to from Freedom Cry and decided I’ve had my fill, at least until the urge to pick up the series again with Rogue pops into my head.

So, in short, I’d define Freedom Cry as a nice “what happened next” epilogue for one of Assassin’s Creed IV’s more notable supporting characters. It gives you a lot of the same gameplay and activities as the base game, but at time struggles to give a number of them any purpose other than being something to do if the mood strikes. Overall, it’s a fun expansion that just doesn’t reach the immersive level of IV due to being so centered around its main story. Then again, it’s a DLC and not a full game, so perhaps that’s what I should have expected.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (August 06, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.