The “Assassin’s Creed” series has a long and somewhat troubled history. The confusingly named sixth installment, “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag,” seeks to dispel rumors of an aging property, but is it sailing for better horizons or going down with the ship?

The story of “Black Flag” is somewhat scattered and less focused than in previous titles. It follows Edward Kenway, a Welshman in the new world out to make his fortune anyway he can. Along the way, he gets embroiled in a handful of plots far bigger than him, with none feeling particularly important unless you’re already familiar enough with the series to understand the direction the story will go.

More than the story, it should be noted that the cast of characters in this game is fantastic.  Ranging from honorable pirates to bloodthirsty scallywags, corrupt officials to conniving conspirators, each of these people is well defined, dynamic and just plain memorable. You’ll like them even when you hate them.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, the first and most important thing to note is this game is a radical departure from the previous five titles. While it still has all the assassination and free-running that made the previous titles so exciting, this game’s emphasis is on being a pirate. Stealth, while still present to a great degree, is often sacrificed for large battles on the decks of ships and naval battles that involve hellish torrents of cannon fire.

The game shines with the huge plethora of side activities for you to do, all of which are fun and make you feel like a pirate lord. You can go deep-sea diving for treasure from old wrecks, assault British strongholds and claim them as your own, hunt down legendary ships for their fabulous wealth and a huge variety of other activities.

Aesthetically, the game is par for the course. This generation of games is known for its astoundingly impressive visual graphics for even the most mediocre of games. “Black Flag” certainly isn’t mediocre, but it still doesn’t do much to outshine other games in terms of visual fidelity.

The one area of in which “Black Flag” excels is the sea shanties your crew sings as you sail around the tropics. Found as collectibles in the world, these songs are all incredibly fun. You’ll find yourself humming them for weeks afterwards.

Multiplayer is something that needs to be talked about, but only in passing. For good reason, as the single player campaign is so well-rounded, you’ll rarely want to leave it for the shores of multiplayer. There is a cooperative horde mode style game that pits players together against computer opponents, but it’s not well-developed or, frankly, fun.

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” is a different game than its predecessors. It forgoes the normal tropes of the series in order to excel at something new, and in this it succeeds. It has its rough patches here and there, and the multiplayer is rather lackluster, but the core game is so well-developed you’ll gladly overlook these minor flaws. I give it a four out of five stars.

Four stars out of five.