Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry is an action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Quebec and published by Ubisoft. Set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) between 1735 and 1737, Freedom Cry follows Adéwalé, a prominent supporting character from the 2013 title Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. While attempting to disrupt Templar activities in the Caribbean Sea on behalf of their rival organization, the Brotherhood of Assassins, Adéwalé finds himself shipwrecked in Saint-Domingue, where he comes face-to-face with some of the most brutal slavery practices in the West Indies.
Originally released as a post-launch downloadable content (DLC) expansion pack titled Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag — Freedom Cry, a standalone version that does not require the base game of Black Flag was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 in February 2014. In December 2019, the game was re-released on the Nintendo Switch as part of a compilation titled Assassin's Creed: The Rebel Collection, which also includes Black Flag and its successor, Assassin's Creed Rogue. The story campaign of Freedom Cry, which takes place thirteen years after the events of Black Flag, is loosely connected to its narrative but retains most of its core gameplay mechanics. Writer Jill Murray served as the lead writer for Freedom Cry, while French musician Olivier Deriviere composed the game's soundtrack, replacing Brian Tyler, the composer employed for the base game.
The Xbox One version of Freedom Cry received favorable reviews from video game publications, whereas the overall reception of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 360 versions was less positive. Critics generally praised the game's storytelling and the decision to focus on an already established side character, but were disappointed by its short length and the lack of substantial gameplay improvements over Black Flag. Freedom Cry has been retrospectively assessed as a notable depiction of the slave narrative genre in the video game medium.
Gameplay
Freedom Cry is a single-player action-adventure, stealth game set in an open world structure and played from a third-person perspective in both land and sea environments. Players assume the role of Adéwalé, a former slave from Trinidad who served as the quartermaster of Black Flag protagonist Edward Kenway onboard his ship the Jackdaw before joining the Brotherhood of Assassins. Like Black Flag, Freedom Cry features naval combat where players may engage, board, and capture passing ships. From Adéwalé's ship, which is upgradeable throughout the game using in-game currency and resources, players may examine distant ships along with their cargo and strength using a spyglass.
A new gameplay mechanic introduced in Freedom Cry is the liberation of oppressed slaves. Each freed slave serves as a resource for the player to accumulate in order to unlock upgrades for Adéwalé's personal armaments and equipment at his base of operations. Players may utilize a similar recruit system introduced in Black Flag to enlist recruited Maroons to fight by Adéwalé's side. Players will encounter opportunities for Adéwalé to liberate slaves and fighting Maroons from their oppressors through procedurally generated instances, raids on colonial plantations, or story missions.
Plot
In 1735, while leading an attack on a Templar convoy in the West Indies, Adéwalé (Tristan D. Lalla) manages to recover a package containing an ancient artifact, but his ship, the Victoire, is caught in a violent storm shortly afterwards. Adéwalé awakens off the coast of Saint-Domingue and finds himself within the vicinity of its capital city of Port-au-Prince. Aware that the Templars were meant to deliver the artifact to a woman named Bastienne Josèphe (Mariah Inger), Adéwalé discovers that she is the madame of a local brothel. He confronts Bastienne, who discloses that she is secretly a sympathizer to the Maroons, a group of freedom fighters made up of liberated slaves, and that she uses the money paid to her by the Templars to free slaves in the region. Adéwalé is persuaded by Bastienne to aid the Maroon cause; he meets their leader Augustin Dieufort (Christian Paul), and commandeers a new ship called the Experto Crede to disrupt the regional slave trade.