Assassin's Creed: The Rebel Collection

I'll be honest: when I first heard Ubisoft was putting two mid-generation AC games on the Switch, my expectations were modest. Ports of open-world games this size tend to arrive half-broken, and the franchise's previous Switch outing, AC III Remastered, was a rough ride at launch. The Rebel Collection surprised me. What you're actually getting here is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - still one of the most purely fun entries in the entire franchise - bundled with Assassin's Creed Rogue, plus all single-player DLC for both. Black Flag casts you as Edward Kenway, a charismatic pirate captain who stumbles into the Assassin-Templar conflict across over 75 Caribbean locations, from Kingston to Nassau. Naval combat is the centrepiece: broadsides, mortar volleys, wind management, and the satisfying crunch of boarding enemy ships at close range. The HD Rumble implementation on Switch makes those cannon impacts hit harder than expected. On top of the seafaring, you get the full stealth-and-parkour toolkit - hidden blade takedowns, freerunning across colonial port cities, underwater diving for shipwreck treasure. The Freedom Cry DLC (starring Adewale) and the Aveline DLC add several more hours on top of an already substantial main campaign. Motion control aiming for projectile weapons works surprisingly well in handheld mode, and the touchscreen interface makes menu navigation faster than the console versions ever managed. Rogue is the weaker half of the pair, and most reviewers agree on that. It flips the formula - you play as Shay Patrick Cormac, a former Assassin who defects to the Templars and hunts down his old brothers. The air rifle gives combat a defensive, reactive dimension that Black Flag lacks, and the North Atlantic setting trades tropical sun for grey, icy water. It is genuinely interesting to see the conflict from the Templar side for the first time in the series. But Rogue is shorter, the world feels thinner, and it was always overshadowed by Black Flag, which launched around the same time on last-gen hardware. On Switch, Rogue runs well in handheld mode but can stutter when docked. Performance overall lands in a comfortable place. Black Flag holds up remarkably well across both TV and handheld modes, and the texture quality - while technically pulled from the PS3/Xbox 360 versions rather than the higher-resolution PS4 assets - is not something most players will notice on a Switch screen. The collection was patched post-launch to address early framerate and audio issues, and the current state is stable. Community sentiment settled well above the AC III Switch port, with players calling out the port quality as a genuine step up for the platform. Who is this for? Switch owners who never played these games on PS4 or PC get the best deal here - Black Flag in portable form is genuinely great, and the sheer volume of content across both titles and their DLC packs is hard to argue with. Series veterans looking to revisit will find Black Flag holds up and Rogue is at least worth finishing for the story angle. If you have already put 60 hours into Black Flag on another platform, Rogue alone probably does not justify a repurchase.

Alex · Scout Team

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