Assassin’s Creed 4: Freedom Cry DLC Review – Busywork

There’s a slave running through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag‘s first story DLC package, Freedom Cry, and he’s being chased by an overseer. My job is to murder the latter to save the former.

Sprinting through crowds and over rooftops, I stumble in the chase and the overseer traps the slave on a dock in the harbor. I arrive a second or two later and drive my hidden blade into the overseer’s kidney, but not before he executes the slave with a pistol. It’s something of an intense act of violence in a city teeming with these relationships between subjugated and subjugator, and I was too late to prevent it.

But that’s okay, because a few minutes later, another slave is running through the streets, pursued by an overseer, taking the exact same route and arriving at the exact same place. This time I kill the overseer by leaping down on him from above the route, since I know where it leads. The slave thanks me and disappears, and I get another tick on my “freed slaves” counter.

Quickly it becomes apparent in Freedom Cry that there are a billion of these moments playing out all around you all the time, but they’re flat, inconsequential, fleeting and, eventually, kind of dull — maybe that’s a comment about the incredible prevalence of slavery, or maybe it’s the weak execution of turning emancipation into a video game mechanic. For a story about freeing literally hundreds of people in the West Indies, in a content pack that depicts violence and oppression against them literally everywhere you turn, Freedom Cry has a tendency to turn these moments to rote. Free a slave, drive up the ticker, and hey, you earn a new machete.

Freedom Cry’s greatest sin is that it’s so littered with busywork in all this slave-freeing superhero work you do somewhat meaningless. Instead of feeling like you’re the point of the lengthening blade of revolution, you become the guy who’s just ticking off a list of things to do. By depicting a microcosm of Assassins’ Creed IV and introducing a pumped-up version of one of its more minor mechanics — saving certain people from attack by guards — the DLC amplifies the bloat and tedium of the overall package.

Ultimately Freedom Cry winds up a bit boring, and in so doing, undermines completely any message or empathy its premise might have conveyed.

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag: “Freedom Cry” DLC
Platform: PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4 (reviewed), Xbox 360, Xbox One
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: Dec. 18, 2013
MSRP: $9.99
Available: Steam, Uplay

Freedom Cry switches players out of the head of Assassin’s Creed IV protagonist Edward Kenway in favor of Adewale, Kenway’s former quartermaster, who left the pirate life to join the Assassins. After a naval battle leaves him in Port-au-Prince, where slavery is apparently the only industry (other than a single brothel and a couple plantations), Adewale’s sense of justice starts him about the business of freeing folks while also trying to find a way back to the Assassin Brotherhood.

Before long, Adewale gets mixed up with a local resistance movement of escaped slaves hoping to bring a revolution against the French slave masters, and decides to stick around and help out. Adewale’s backstory — he escaped slavery years ago himself — adds undercurrents to his story of outrage and moral obligation, and armed with a machete and a blunderbuss (as opposed to Kenway’s pair of swords and flintlock pistols), he basically runs around the city like Batman, leaping down on bad guys, freeing slaves, and then disappearing off to do it again. (And again, and again.)

Battling slavery is in Freedom Cry’s DNA, beyond just the narrative the DLC tells; it’s literally the means to advance through the content in almost every way. Where Kenway purchased new gear or crafted it through hunting, Adewale gets new stuff like expanded ammo pouches or shiny new weapons by freeing slaves. Free 100, carry more blunderbuss rounds. Free 300, try out a more powerful machete.

After joining the resistance fighters known as the Maroons, a portion of every group of slaves freed will join up, and that ticks off another counter that comes with another set of upgrades, as well as other fringe benefits. You might notice that, as you enter a plantation midway through the DLC, there’s an icon of a fist over some bushes. Investigating proves that it’s a group of Maroons waiting for orders, and you can bring them along as backup like other hireable groups in the game.

Freeing slaves is also a major portion of moving the story forward, as a big part of your job becomes bolstering the ranks of the underground. At a number of different points, you’ll be stopped from progressing to the next mission until you’ve freed the correct number of slaves. So you’ll run around, killing an auctioneer and his guards, stopping a slave convoy, pilfering a key to open a cage, until you hit the right number. Then you can do your next mission. Next you might be tasked with sinking the escorts of a slave ship and liberating it before you can move on. After that, it’s infiltrating and freeing a plantation by killing all the overseers there; once that’s done and your freed slave ticker goes up, you’re free to continue.

It’s not to say that those activities, when taken alone, aren’t exciting. Slave ships are well-guarded, for example, and you need to fight the battle without damaging the ship in question, lest you accidentally kill the men and women you mean to rescue. Plantations are huge areas with multiple guards that are fun to stealth through, especially because the more sneaky you are, the more lives you save. Even the small events that occur around Port-au-Prince, like the escaped slave mission I mentioned, or finding an injured man hiding out from overseers and carrying him to safety, can be engaging a few times.

The problem is that there are just so many of these instances, and that Ubisoft has done so little to humanize them. Freeing slaves is functionally identical to saving pirates in vanilla AC4, except that there’s a little more variety in the events. The men you free (they all seem to be men) really just end up being tallies on a sheet, though, and they are literally currency for you to accumulate so you can earn gear upgrades. That’s more than a little messed up, to say nothing of the fact that it completely undercuts any sense of freedom fighting you might actually get from the narrative.

After freeing tons of people, with more events popping up all around, I actually started to find them annoying — which is the opposite effect Freedom Cry should be having on players. While Assassin’s Creed IV’s biggest flaws were of the feature creep, busywork variety, Freedom Cry is even more guilty of these problems by turning its primary focus, the liberating of slaves, into a dull, mechanical feature. Meanwhile, the rest of the DLC is just more of the same from Assassin’s Creed IV, although in smaller doses, like an eavesdropping mission that takes place in a single room or a quick bought of naval battles.

During the course of Freedom Cry, you save upwards of 300 slaves, and recruit better than 100 fighters for the Maroons. That’s a veritable army, and yet there’s not a single one who is actually a character; instead, they’re reduced to numbers, rendering it impossible to care about their supposed fates, and literally nothing about Port-au-Prince changes, despite tens of murders and hundreds missing. Similarly, Freedom Cry makes its protagonist a man with a deep history with the institution of slavery, a moral imperative to engage in the story as he does, a burgeoning rage he unleashes against slave masters — and the game pretty much ignores all of it.

And so nothing feels like it matters. Freedom Cry has an interesting protagonist with an interesting perspective in an interesting time and place, and reduces it all to numbers on a sheet and repetitive tasks, all while playing it incredibly safe with gameplay or storytelling. If all you want is more Assassin’s Creed 4, then Freedom Cry provides that, and there’s plenty to do. The question is, will you really want to do it?

Pros:

• Plenty to things to do of the Assassin’s Creed IV variety
• Adewale is an engaging character who seems deeper and more likable than Kenway
• Some subtle changes to scenarios and new weapons and items change things up a bit from the main game
• Sneaking through plantations or carefully eliminating overseers to free slaves is exciting the first few times
• Well-priced for the amount of content offered

Cons:

• For all the emphasis on freeing slaves, they’re mostly reduced to numbers and even currency
• Glut of slave-saving objectives and missions makes them repetitive and tedious
• Story fails to really capitalize on the character of Adewale or the gravity of the situation it depicts
• Most of the gameplay and missions is simply more of the same that we saw in Assassin’s Creed IV
• Lots of busywork in general

Final Score: 50/100