Black Flag Resynced landed on 9 July 2026, and the Steam reviews turned ugly within days. Almost every angry review was about the same thing. Ubisoft’s pirate remake costs $59.99, and nine optional add-on packs went on sale the same morning.
A month later we wanted to know whether that anger stuck. So on 6 August 2026 we pulled the 1,000 newest English reviews from Steam and counted them ourselves.
873 of those 1,000 were positive. That is 87.3 percent.
Across the game’s whole life, the English reviews sit at 83.4 percent, or 10,700 positive out of 12,822. So the newest reviews are running about four points better than the lifetime score, not worse.
How the newest Black Flag Resynced reviews look
Our sample covers reviews written between 29 July and 6 August 2026. That is the window Steam hands you when you ask for the 1,000 most recent English reviews, and it slides forward every day. So treat every figure here as a snapshot of 6 August.
952 of the 1,000 bought the game on Steam. Only 8 said they got it free.
The median playtime at the moment of review was 35.3 hours. Just 2 percent wrote their review with under two hours played. These are not people who bounced off the game in an afternoon.
Steam’s own label has moved too. The store page now reads Very Positive, with 80 percent of 23,272 reviews positive. In mid July it read Mostly Positive at around 75 percent. Critics landed in a similar place. Metacritic shows 84 from 94 critic reviews, with a user score of 8.4 out of 10 from 1,034 ratings.
What players actually complain about
A percentage tells you how many people were unhappy. It does not tell you why. So we also counted which topics turn up in the review text, split between the happy pile and the angry one.
Story and writing came up most often in negative reviews, in 35 of the 127. That is 28 percent. Money talk came second, in 30 of them, or 24 percent.
The raw count is misleading on its own, though. Story words also show up in 16 percent of positive reviews, because happy players talk about characters too. Money words show up in only 7 percent of positive reviews.
So money is the topic that really separates a happy player from an unhappy one. It appears more than three times as often on the negative side. Story appears less than twice as often.
Performance splits the two piles hardest of all, at 15 percent of negative reviews against 3 percent of positive ones, although the numbers behind it are small. Difficulty follows the same shape, 13 percent against 4 percent. Our settings guide covers the PS5, Xbox and PC options if that is your worry.
Cheating and matchmaking barely register at all. That makes sense, because there is nobody to match with. Anyone arriving from Sea of Thieves should know this one is single player, and Steam lists it that way.
The nine day one packs that started the row
The July headlines got this part right. We checked all nine packs on Steam on 6 August. Every one is still on sale, and every one went up on 9 July 2026.
Eight of them cost $9.99 each. Four are character packs, called Master Assassin, Hellfire, Sea Serpent and Dragon Storm. Four are matching naval packs with sails, crew outfits, figureheads and a ship’s pet. The ninth is a map pack at $4.99.
Add them up and you get $84.91. The base game is $59.99 with no discount. So the extras cost about $25 more than the game they attach to.
Two of those packs come inside the Deluxe Edition, so nobody has to buy all nine one at a time. Steam still tags the game with In-App Purchases, in a game that has no multiplayer to support them.
Ubisoft’s answer at the time was that the standard edition is the complete experience and the packs are never a requirement. Our count supports that better than the statement did. Money is still the clearest reason someone leaves a bad review, but only 30 of the 1,000 raised it in one.
Black Flag Resynced sales and the Steam record
The sales side was never in doubt. Ubisoft said the game sold 2 million copies on its first day.
That number comes from Ubisoft, and nobody outside the company has audited it. Ubisoft did not split it by platform. The game is also on the Ubisoft+ subscription, and the company did not explain how that counts either. It is still a big number. It is just worth knowing where it came from.
The Steam side is easier to check. The game peaked at 99,451 players at once inside 24 hours, then climbed to 104,756 by 12 July according to tracking site SteamDB. That made it the first Assassin’s Creed game to pass 100,000 players at the same time on Steam.
The old series record belonged to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which peaked at 64,825 in March 2025. The pirate remake cleared that by roughly 40,000 players.
Review totals give you a rough idea of how many people are still turning up. In mid July the count sat above 15,000. On 6 August Steam counted 23,272.
What the remake changed, and what it cut
Resynced is a full remake rather than a touched up version. Ubisoft rebuilt it on its Anvil engine, and the Steam page describes a seamless open world with ray tracing and Dolby Atmos.
Ubisoft rebuilt combat around parries and takedowns, then reworked stealth and parkour on top. The Jackdaw gets new alternate fire modes at sea. There is a photo mode, plus new sea shanties and pets.
Ubisoft also added story content that was not in the 2013 game. Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet get new storylines, and three officers join Edward Kenway as part of the main plot.
The biggest cut is the modern day office sections that framed the original. In 2013 you played an employee reliving Edward’s memories, and the game quietly poked fun at an industry selling history back to players. Resynced drops that layer completely. Ubisoft’s next game in the series is Assassin’s Creed Hexe, which leaks tie to 2027.
Is Black Flag Resynced worth buying now
On the numbers, yes, with one condition.
87 percent of the newest 1,000 reviewers said yes, and they had a median of 35 hours played when they said it. That is a strong signal. Critics sit at 84 out of 100, and Metacritic users at 8.4 out of 10.
The condition is the store menu. If paid cosmetics in a single player game bother you, that has not changed and it is not going to. What has changed is how many people are still angry enough to write about it.
We counted every figure above on 6 August 2026. Steam’s most recent reviews window moves forward each day, so the exact numbers will drift from here.
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