After playing the game for few hours and finishing Spanish campaign, I feel like I can give an adequate review.
I like it, its fun to build up cities, lay out the shipping routes and build your empire. Graphics and details are really good. As an veteran of the series I notice the lack of few things I liked in older games like tavern missions, active city sieges by sea (fighting towers) and land battles to conquest towns. I understand that changes were made due to new artistic vision and I agree with most of them. Naval battles are tacitcal now and you feel that each ship has its role and you cannot really cheese them anymore. I really like it as it resembles history more, also love the new abilities for ships and captains. I noticed that sometimes you can have some lag or soft lock of the game when you enter saves, but it happened only once or twice. What I really miss is the ability to build new towns (or I did not find it/notice it?) but with the change that you are an agent of the crown, you get access to most of similar features right away. I just would like to place new cities from scratch, to have more of them. Maybe it would be great to have an freelance agent option also, the same way as in the past games. Wish there was more city warfare aspects like building forts, walls, towers or garrison.
Also fun fact, initially I disliked some of changes made comparing to older games but after few hours of learning them, I understood that newer approach has some advantages and had similar fun as in the past.

After playing the game for few hours and finishing Spanish campaign, I feel like I can give an adequate review. I like it, its fun to build up cities, lay out the shipping routes and build your empire. Graphics and details are really good. As an veteran of the series I notice the lack of few things I liked in older games like tavern missions, active city sieges by sea (fighting towers) and land battles to conquest towns. I understand that changes were made due to new artistic vision and I agree with most of them. Naval battles are tacitcal now and you feel that each ship has its role and you cannot really cheese them anymore. I really like it as it resembles history more, also love the new abilities for ships and captains. I noticed that sometimes you can have some lag or soft lock of the game when you enter saves, but it happened only once or twice. What I really miss is the ability to build new towns (or I did not find it/notice it?) but with the change that you are an agent of the crown, you get access to most of similar features right away. I just would like to place new cities from scratch, to have more of them. Maybe it would be great to have an freelance agent option also, the same way as in the past games. Wish there was more city warfare aspects like building forts, walls, towers or garrison. Also fun fact, initially I disliked some of changes made comparing to older games but after few hours of learning them, I understood that newer approach has some advantages and had similar fun as in the past.