The Art of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - Review

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've done anything with Video Games Artwork due to me having been on a hard earned vacation the past couple of weeks. But now I'm back and guess what I found in my mail upon arrival, a copy of The Art of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag! Courtesy of Titan Books, the publisher of the book who asked me to write a little review about it. Now I'm a bit of a sucker for art books (my main reason to buy a collector's edition of a video game), so when the good people from Titan Books asked me if I'd like a review copy I felt flattered and was happy to write a review about it. So, on to review. The Art of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a hard cover book with a sewn binding and slip cover. The fact that they used a sewn binding method adds to the quality of the book, since such binding methods keeps the whole together for a longer period of time. You don't want to know how many of the books I have which use a glue binding method have either the cover letting go of all its pages or has individual pages hanging out of it. Without the slip cover, the book probably looks even more awesome. It's all black with a black shiny Assassin's Creed logo and a gold brown skull in the middle. The contents of the book are divided into the foreword by the art director Raphael Lacoste, seven chapters with concept art and acknowledgements. The concept art chapters are categorised as follows; Abstergo, Dramatis Personae, Cities, Exploration, Pirate Life, Sea Battles and Underwater World. All of the chapters are quite self explanatory, the only one that might need a little explanation is the Dramatis Personae chapter. But most of you'll probably guess correctly that this chapter focuses on the characters from the game. The layout of the book is quite dynamic. Pages can consist of several smaller images or one 2-page wide image. The pages with the smaller images are regularly accompanied by notes of the artist that created it where they explain their motivation for that particular image or some other comment related to that image. Most of the concept art in the book consist of the environment concepts or concepts depicting scenes for the game and although all of the art in the book is beautiful, I personally would've liked to see some more character art. All in all, all of the artwork in the book are simply amazing and I could definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in concept art. You do not need to be a fan of Assassin's Creed, or even video games in general to be able to appreciate the art in this book. And it will also look cool on your coffee table or bookcase ;-). If you'd like to know the type of art that is in the book before you want to buy it, you can take a look in the image gallery of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on this website. And if you'd like to buy the book, you can do it either in the store on this website or at the website from Titan Books, who were kind enough to provide me with this review copy.