In Assassin's Creed IV you can find stray cats and pet them

[҉]

11/10

[Shadowcatbot]

Ljs go home, your drunk.

[ACH0225]

You can also find people and stab them repeatedly. 12/10.

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

I think you can only stab them once and then they ded though, and people killer simulators are already more than plenty.
But you can also sail around in ships so that's a nice feature.

[Saravanth]

You can pet animals in AC3 and AC4ßF too. In AC3 you can even feed a swine if you so please.

[҉]

A more serious critique, granted that I've played AC1, 2, and Brotherhood a fair bit but only, like, two hours of Revelation and none of 3, and only a couple of hours of 4:
The game looks really nice. Being able to free-aim is great; that's something I think the previous titles were really lacking. The only city I've explored so far is Havana, but it's cool and different from what we've seen before. Climbing up the cathedral in Havana was awesome—all the games have had to pick some point on the scale between buildings that are obviously designed to be climbed and thus play well but don't look good and buildings that look good but can't be climbed, but Black Flag seems to have gotten around that. In AC1 most buildings are pretty realistic, and you can't just run up the wall of a castle; AC2 went the other way, with the otherwise-sheer castle wall having a bunch of beams and stuff sticking out of it in an extremely non-subtle way. What I've seen in 4 so far seems much more natural.
It also does feel more tactical than AC2. Being able to whistle to attract a guard to a hiding spot is a pretty small thing but it dramatically affects gameplay. Part of that may be that my combat capabilities are drastically reduced from what I had in Brotherhood; there, even without my gun, and my crossbow, and my poison, and my knives, and my bombs, and my darts, I could just go into any battle with my Hidden Blades and counter-kill and execution-chain really any number of guards, and even if I got in trouble I carry so much medicine that the chance of actually dying is nil. This may change in Black Flag as I get better equipment, but right now I can't just roll in and kill as many guards as run at me, and that feels really good.
The bad thing, though, is that the controls feel like they're designed to screw with somebody who's used to how it worked in AC2. Most of the same buttons are used, and most of the same button effects are still there, but they're all mapped together differently in such a way that it isn't possible to bind them back and get the control scheme from previous titles. When I press F to lock on to a selected enemy, Edward throws a handful of money straight out in front of him. When I press E to check out targets in Eagle Vision, Edward lets go of the wall and dies, because if there's a way to catch a ledge while falling I haven't found it yet. When I press Shift to gently push through a crowd, Edward starts sprinting—or rather, starts free-aiming, because I switched those to get as close as I could to right-mouse-for-high-profile system the previous games had. If somebody's attacking me, I press E (Head? What?) to counter instead of using my sword arm. This is really annoying me.
The other issue is the swordplay. One thing I loved about AC and AC2 was that the animations had been handled so that the weapons felt like they actually had weight. Instead of slashing around very fast like most sword games do, Ezio swings the thing like a golf club and really solidly plants it in somebody's shoulder. Accompanying this, most enemies die in one good hit, which reinforces the idea that you just swung a bar of metal into somebody's face, and that has consequences for them. But Edward has two swords and enemies seem to take a lot of killing, which doesn't make any sense—the dude's just wearing a uniform jacket, how did he survive getting hit with a saber? There's a lot of swirling around very fast and doing very little damage per hit.

[Saravanth]

The thing with the buttons has to do with the new engine they introduced with AC3, the controls are explained in the beginning there. It makes sense once you're used to it. And yes, the thing about the rapid-rate/low-yield attacks of Edward is completely true, I guess they wanted to add more difficulty and ended up the common grindish way of doing that.

[҉]

The thing with the buttons has to do with the new engine they introduced with AC3, the controls are explained in the beginning there. It makes sense once you're used to it.

Urr. Interesting. I may have to fire up AC3 just to do the tutorial, then.