GameSpot called Black Flag Resynced a bad remake, then gave it a 7.
The Original Review
“Having now played Resynced, I don’t think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good.”
The headline says 'Black Flag Resynced Is A Bad Remake Of Peak Assassin's Creed.' The score says 7/10. Already we have a calculator crime scene: one chalk outline shaped like editorial standards and a tiny GameSpot badge asking if anyone has seen the missing three points. If a review calls something a bad remake and then labels it 'Good,' that is not nuance. That is a ruler made of soup trying to measure a pirate ship during a hurricane. The math aint mathing.
The review spends paragraph after paragraph itemizing structural damage: the framing device is stripped out, the new sci-fi material is buried like tax fraud in a treasure chest, characters are added and then treated like DLC ghosts, combat drifts toward ability-button oatmeal, and the remake keeps fixing old problems by manufacturing new ones like Ubisoft owns a defect printer. Then the final number waddles in wearing a 7/10 hat, as if the preceding autopsy was merely a spa treatment. This is the scoring equivalent of saying the house is on fire but the curtains are brave.
GameSpot's scale has reached that magical state where 'Good' can apparently mean 'worse than the original, narratively mishandled, mechanically compromised, and emotionally confusing, but it loaded successfully.' A 7 used to be a recommendation; here it functions like bubble wrap around a corporate franchise, protecting the brand from the sharp corners of the reviewer's own sentences. If your prose says 'bad remake' and your score says 'good game,' the reader has to become a forensic accountant with a parrot on his shoulder just to understand whether to buy the thing.
The funniest part is that the review itself contains plenty of useful criticism. The words are doing push-ups while the score eats glue in the corner. A sharper outlet would either lower the number or soften the thesis, but GameSpot chooses the sacred middle path: publish a negative review in a positive costume, like a hostage note written on a souvenir map from Nassau. We give this review a 2/10: one point for noticing the problems, one point for accidentally documenting why numerical scores should be sent to sea in a leaky barrel.
