Introduction

The original version of Assassin's Creed Black Flag is still a looker and one of the best Assassin's Creed games to date. Still, more than 12 years have passed since we sailed the Caribbean with Edward Kenway, and since Ubisoft hasn't really had a blockbuster lately besides Assassin's Creed Shadows, the company decided to remake the game. The Resynced version features updated visuals, some welcome gameplay improvements, and removes most of the modern-day sections—a change that anyone who's played Black Flag will likely appreciate.

The game runs on the latest version of Ubisoft's in-house Anvil engine, which also powers the gorgeous-looking Assassin's Creed Shadows. The engine supports ray-traced global illumination and reflections (although not all reflections are ray traced even if you max out the RT-related options), but you aren't getting path tracing. Regarding upscaling, players have access to all three major upscaling solutions—DLSS, XeSS, and FSR—as well as all three frame generation technologies. On the flip side, the game doesn't include low-latency support or HDR.

Our handheld performance review evaluates how Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced performs on a variety of popular PC handhelds, including the fresh-from-the-oven MSI Claw 8 EX. Since we added the Claw 8 EX, we had to drop one handheld (we just don't have the time to test more than five devices), so from now on you won't be able to see how the original ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme running SteamOS performs in new AAA games. While that's disappointing, the good news is that we now cover every major handheld chip on the market: The AMD Van Gogh found in the Steam Deck, the AMD Z1 Extreme, AMD Z2 Extreme, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, and Intel G3 Extreme. We'll also provide optimized settings for every device.