Assassin’s Creed: Pirates Casts Off to Mobile Next Week

Assassin’s Creed: Pirates drops all pretenses and hoists a black flag on smartphones and tablets.

Despite all logic, a series about ninja assassins has become the go-to game series for pirate fans. The next entry in the Assassin’s Creed saga, bluntly named Assassin’s Creed: Pirates, is dedicated to those scourges of the seas. The mobile game revolves around the naval combat that has been creeping into the series since Assassin’s Creed III, complete with crew and ship management.

Starring the young and brazen Captain Alonzo Batilla, players will sail the Caribbean in roughly the same time period as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Familiar faces like Blackbeard and Hornigold are due to make appearances, and of course it wouldn’t be an Assassin’s Creed game without Assassins and Templars, but overall the story is a classic tale of hunting for pirate treasure.

You probably know where this is going: to get the treasure you’ll need a crew, so between battles you’ll recruit and manage a ragtag bunch of buccaneers, purchase upgrades for your ship, etcetera. All that management will pay off in cinematic naval battles much like the ship-to-ship combat in the console games, shrunk down to phone and tablet size.

Assassin’s Creed: Pirates is due to set sail on December 5, with a $5 price tag. You don’t need a treasure map to find it on the App Store, Google Play, or Amazon Appstore, so long as you’ve got a “high end” smartphone or tablet to play it on.