There is plenty of fanfare surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It is the first full-fledged entry in 5 years in Ubisoft’s long running, ever popular stealth action series. It is an entry finally making good on long-requested fan clamor by setting one of these games in Feudal Japan. And it has been subject to plenty of controversy in the process.
Removing any bad faith discourse surrounding the project, as a long-time fan of the franchise dating back to the original one in 2007, I had a couple of questions heading into Assassin’s Creed Shadows. As the longest in development Assassin’s Creed game yet and the first one built from the ground up for the current generation of consoles, does Assassin’s Creed Shadows deliver on Ubisoft’s promise of a shift in design philosophy and approach to the franchise? And does it do enough to stand out besides just being a new entry set in Japan?
The Nation Under One Sword
Set in 1579 Feudal Japan during the final stage of the Sengoku period, Assassin’s Creed Shadows puts you in the shoes of the kuinochi Naoe and the legendary historical figure, the samurai Yasuke. After Naoe suffers a tragedy during Oda Nobunaga’s assault on the Iga province, she sets out on a quest for revenge against a specific group called the Shinbakufu. Naoe’s quest eventually crosses paths with Yasuke, forming an unlikely pairing with different perspectives, becoming a legendary force with which to be reckoned as they liberate Japan from the Shinbakufu’s influence, along with other more nefarious figures operating within the shadows.
Despite the way Ubisoft promoted Assassin’s Creed Shadows as a dual protagonist tale, the game’s story actually withholds this choice for a good chunk of the beginning. The prologue gives you a brief taste of Yasuke’s brutality as a Samurai in direct service of Oda Nobunaga. However, it’s only very briefly before you are locked in to Naoe for the next 8 to 12 hours as the game establishes the motivations of the Shibankufu and Naoe’s tale of revenge. While Naoe is a fairly likable protagonist, her revenge motivations are not too dissimilar to previous protagonists in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, like fan favorite Ezio Auditore. It makes her tale feel like a new coat of paint in pretty well-trodden territory, and it takes until Yasuke comes back to the picture, setting the dual protagonist structure in place, for the story to start feeling fresh and proper for the setting.
Simply put, the story comes alive every time Yasuke is on screen. The game quickly justifies the choice of having a playable historical figure with how well developed Yasuke feels as an outsider in Japan. They’ve made his real life story tie-in with the series’ long-running lore in a compelling way. There is a great narrative pull to the mystery of Yasuke’s time as a slave prior to his time as Samurai, enough so that it makes Naoe’s revenge tale just feel a bit less compelling in comparison.
This is aided by the great strides Ubisoft Quebec has made to storytelling for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Where some recent Assassin’s Creed games have felt a little rote in their storytelling presentation, Assassin’s Creed Shadows presents its story with great panache and respect to the Feudal Japan setting. Without even having to pretend it’s a Kurosawa film, there is an earnestness to the way the setting and its characters are portrayed that feels like a good step up in their storytelling chops. While it gets bogged down in excessive cut-scenes, especially in the early hours, it’s still an element that helped engross me in the game’s story once everything takes off. And it mostly held together, leading to a fairly satisfying ending for Assassin’s Creed standards.
Without Destruction There Is No Change
For the uninitiated, Assassin’s Creed Shadows marks the franchise’s fourth entry as an Action/RPG. Developed primarily by Ubisoft Quebec, who last developed 2018’s very popular Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and the final traditional entry in 2015’s criminally overlooked Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, this newer game feels like an interesting attempt to merge some of the ideas and systems of Quebec’s prior games. Coming almost 5 years after the release of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, if what you were hoping for with Assassin’s Creed Shadows was the next big reinvention of the series, you’ll be slightly disappointed. Despite the extended development time, what Ubisoft cooked up with Assassin’s Creed Shadows definitely feels more like a refinement of the RPG era of the franchise, with additions and subtractions that both help it in spots and hinder it in others.
Let’s start with the positive. If there is something I highly appreciate about Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it is how it tackled the grinding feel that plagued the director’s previous game, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Out of the three previous RPG-style Assassin’s Creed titles, Odyssey had the biggest problems with grind and level gating, enough so it could be seen as a devious way for people to feel like they had to buy the $10 experience boost. Assassin’s Creed Shadows still has areas that are a recommended level, but the quests you acquire are not as level gated as they used to be. It feels like there is a much cleaner progression throughout your quest towards the main Shinbakufu targets that are easier to manage and pursue without feeling like you are forced to do side quests to progress.
Obviously, the game accommodates itself to the completionist gamer that just can’t help themselves as they go for every question mark in the map, which will then level them up enough to attempt to do things in any order they pursue. It definitely took some of the right lessons from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and, when paired with the deeper quest design that was a trademark for Odyssey, Shadows delivers much stronger progression in comparison.
Alongside the refinement in progression comes a few subtractions. The loot gear pursuit continues the dial down towards more simplicity. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla paired back Odyssey’s loot barf into more defined sets you could upgrade. Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like an in-between of the previous two games’ gear systems. You have far fewer options in Shadows when it comes to your equipped gear, having just a head piece, your costume, and a trinket. While on paper it sounds disappointing that the gear you wear provides less customization, I find it less overwhelming as a result. You can get plenty of gear while you are out exploring and killing your targets, which still comes with certain perks you can use to spec a specific play style. As for weapons, depending on who you are playing, you’ll definitely get a small selection specific to your character, which is emblematic of Shadow’s biggest headline feature.
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Very similar to Ubisoft Quebec’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes that earlier game’s dual protagonist dynamic between the Frye twins and replicates it in a more extreme way in the new game. The split between Naoe being a character more focused on stealth and Yasuke being the melee-focused character is almost a mirror of the strengths of both Evie and Jacob Frye. Shadows is a more extreme implementation, however, as it fully commits to the idea of Yasuke as a Samurai and Naoe as a Shinobi.
There are no two ways around it: the implementation here in Assassin’s Creed Shadows does feel like a very lopsided affair. Regardless of the individual strengths of the Frye twins, it didn’t come at the expense of making a character unable to do the basic things you expect from an Assassin’s Creed protagonist. The Frye twins could both do parkour, stealth, and combat. In Shadows, only Naoe can do all three, with Yasuke only being able to do the latter. The idea to split the Assassin’s Creed gameplay fantasy between the two is better on paper than it is in execution. If you want to play as Yasuke, it comes with the understanding that you will almost not be able to climb everything and even do most of the map synchronizations. You’ll face everything head on with very fleeting moments where you can attempt a stealthy approach with your bow and arrow or a rather loud brutal assassination. There’s little variety to Yasuke’s gameplay besides combat, and while combat with him does feel chunkier and more refined than the last few series entries, it’s unfortunate that he feels so limited compared to his co-protagonist.
As for Naoe, on top of being able to do everything you want with a series’ protagonist, if you love your stealthy approach, I will say Ubisoft Quebec has more than delivered on the slinking shinobi fantasy with her. Naoe moves swiftly in a very satisfying way that’s at its best when you are taking on the many, MANY bases with plenty of enemies ready to be stabbed and killed. Armed with the hidden blade, a couple kunai and shurikens, and a few distraction gadgets, the stealth fantasy with Naoe is the best it’s ever been in an Assassin’s Creed game. I appreciate how this game takes some cues from the classic Ubisoft stealth game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in the way you can hide Naoe in the shadows and manipulate light to your advantage at night. While the core Assassin’s Creed mechanics prevent the game from feeling like a fully-fledged stealth game akin to Ubisoft’s classic stealth series, it’s definitely nudging in that direction better than before.
With that said, Naoe also comes with plenty of caveats. If you engage in combat with Naoe, especially early on, she’s one of the worst-feeling Assassin’s Creed protagonists when it comes to holding her own in combat. It takes too many hits for her combat to feel satisfying, and when you get overwhelmed by too many enemies, boringly spamming the area attack of her Kusarigama is the only way to keep enemies at bay. Considering she can also go down very quickly, it’s obvious you are meant to run away instead of engaging in combat, the total opposite of Yasuke. Unfortunately, there will be moments where the game forces combat on Naoe, and it just highlights how much worse she feels compared to Yasuke. Eventually, the upgrades you get allow her to hold her own in combat and even look stylish in the process, but it takes time to get there. If you are going to focus on Naoe, it’s absolutely more for stealth than her combat prowess. Considering Yasuke gets almost all the rest of the game’s arsenal, it’s clear where the priorities lie.
A final word on stealth: Assassin’s Creed Shadows once again commits the cardinal sin of the RPG era where the series’ traditional one-hit hidden blade kill is not something you can do by default. In order to get one-hit kills naturally in the game via the upgrade mechanics, it requires you to get to Knowledge Level 5 in the upgrade tree for that to become a guaranteed kill with everyone. Thankfully, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla before it, you can enable a guaranteed assassination from the start in the option menu. If you are of the belief one-hit assassinations is the norm for the series, absolutely enable this as soon as you can. It adds extra dynamism to the game where I even dared to stealth around in world areas way higher than my current level. And the tension of completing base camps in stealth, knowing that being seen meant I could die in one hit, worked so well.
The way both Yasuke and Naoe are split creates a bit of a monkey’s paw scenario. As someone that loves stealth, I definitely mainly played as Naoe as much as I could because I love that style. At the same time, I do feel Yasuke comes out as the more compelling character out of the two due to multiple layers in Yasuke’s story and plight compared to Naoe’s more singular revenge focus. I always wanted to experience the story moments from his perspective, and it just made me lament that if I wanted to experience the gameplay how I really wanted it, I always needed to switch out to Naoe. While the game makes the transition between the two characters easy, I can’t help but think how Assassin’s Creed Syndicate implemented the gameplay split better in comparison. But on the more positive side, Shadows does a better job at allowing you the chance to mostly play who you want in the main missions, which wasn’t the case in the 2015 game during the core assassinations.
If there’s an aspect I love of the dual nature of the game, from a gameplay perspective, it is when you engage with the main assassinations. You get a chance between certain checkpoints of the mission to switch between the characters in a way that feels very thought out and tailored to the strengths of each character. For the most part, I kept switching between the two depending on the situation, making sure that a specific character would get the final kill based on the end quest reward. While you have the freedom to kill these targets with whomever you want, I like being given the option in specific times. Considering the game does include a “Canon Mode,” which I did not enable for the review, I specifically wonder if it even takes the choice away regarding who you play as in these main missions. At the very least, I do like being given the choice, with the game properly accounting for that switch in dynamics.
If I do have one major gripe about the main assassinations, with few exceptions, it seems like they boil down to a boss fight before the kill. I don’t mind that being the case when you play as Yasuke, but it felt like something was wrong every time I attempted most of the assassinations with Naoe because the targets would automatically see me in a way that didn’t make sense, forcing a boss battle with them. There were a few I got to work on a stealthy approach, but the fact that others didn’t allow for this approach did hurt my enjoyment a bit as the game wasn’t accounting for my choice to take down the targets in a stealthy way. Maybe it will be polished later on, or maybe there was another specific thing I needed to attempt for that to not happen. Regardless, it did slightly undercut the promise of two separate ways to kill the main targets, making it feel like the only difference between the two was the lead up to the kill.
Look At The World, Within the Sea, There Is No Immortal
As keeping tradition with the recent Action/RPG Assassin’s Creed games, the Feudal Japan they created in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a massive play space full of question markers to find, map markers to synchronize, and a couple of side activities to complete besides your main missions and side quests. While I feel this game did pair back down the excessively endless content that plagued Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it is still a massive game that took me more than 60 hours to complete while going through only the main story missions and a few side quests. While it applied some lessons from the past, it still feels like the rest of the RPG entries where the game is bigger and more bloated than you’d like.
As for the quality of the map you traverse, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The scale of this virtual Japan is awe inspiring and beautiful in the way you can always expect an Assassin’s Creed game to deliver. But for as beautiful as it is, it’s quite shocking how similar it looks from town to town, and also how finicky it can be to traverse when out in the wilderness. It reminds me a bit of the American Revolution setting for Assassin’s Creed III, with its small towns that lacked verticality besides some of the settings’ iconic castles. But this is more seamlessly connected between the different towns, and with much higher terrain that can be very annoying to try to climb as you’re met with constant slide downs. The design is such that I feel it’s a necessity for you to enable the Pathfinder mechanic, otherwise you’ll sometimes be at a loss regarding how you traverse some areas of the map due to the inconsistencies of what is and is not climbable. But when you synchronize your map points, open the different fast travel points, and take it all in, any frustration in navigation will evaporate.
The game also brings back a Villa for you to upgrade. Compared to the town of Ravensthorpe, which you could upgrade in Valhalla, how you progress your Villa in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is more tailored to how you are going to build it, which can vary from player to player. Think of it like a version of “SimCity” in Assassin’s Creed. As someone not big on doing that kind of building in games, I like how the Villa mechanic is simple while being a means to an end to get some specific upgrades out in the world. These include a cheaper cost for opening Assassin boroughs to help with fast travel, unlocking upgrades for this game’s version of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’s companion system, Forge upgrades to keep your favorite gear constantly leveled up, and more. And with the resources to upgrade the Villa readily accessible through the course of normal gameplay, there’s a better circular synergy to the Villa’s upgrade loop in Shadows than there was last time.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows absolutely is carried by the strength of its main and side quests, but it still has a few side activities to tackle. Other than the usual bandit clearing activities, to which there’s around a half dozen variations, the different activities I’ve found included meditations with Naoe that unlocked some flashback missions, platforming challenge pathways for Naoe, Yasuke quick-time fighting training and horseback archery, tomb raiding tailored to either Naoe or Yasuke, and, finally, interactions with the Animus.
Compared to previous games, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has one of the most minimal interactions with anything in the modern day besides some weird anomalies that hint at…something during your Feudal Japan escapades. If you were expecting the next step in the modern era after the Layla Hassan story concluded with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, there is no follow up to what was set up with its ending, nor any new developments stemming from 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Considering this is the first game announced as part of their new Assassin’s Creed Infinity hub, where they said any modern day story would happen within that hub instead of the game, as one of the few people that actually loves the synergy of there being a future element alongside the historical tourism, I found the execution of what is currently available kind of wanting. The very few times you get an interruption by the Animus, it’s vaguer than it’s ever been. And while some specific animus glitches provide some context for the current story, it feels like a complete capitulation for those that simply prefer to exist in the historical time. I know I’m in the minority, but when I see the Animus has now become a provider of fetch quests for progression of this game’s version of a Battle Pass (of which there are two), I can’t help but lament where the metanarrative is currently at.
And now for the big elephant in the room. Of course, I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed Shadows releasing after games like Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Ronin beat Ubisoft to the punch, delivering the open-world games set in Feudal Japan that many had wanted from the Assassin’s Creed franchise. While, for sure, there are similarities you can levy at it to its competitors, I feel Assassin’s Creed Shadows manages to stand toe-to-toe with those competitors in many areas so as not to not feel like its lunch was completely eaten for coming last to market. While I don’t think the game is as picturesquely beautiful as Ghost of Tsushima, or its combat as varied and aggressive as Rise of the Ronin, it still delivers a better sense of place that’s trademark for the series better than the other games, with gameplay that’s easier and more pick-up-and-play friendly to boot. While it absolutely loses out on the novelty factor, it hits a perfect middle spot in the strengths shown elsewhere from its direct competition.
As the first full Assassin’s Creed game developed for the current generation of consoles without ties to last gen, I can say Assassin’s Creed Shadows benefits from the focus on the new hardware, showing Ubisoft’s Anvil engine can still deliver the looks despite its age. This game’s version of Feudal Japan is a thing of beauty, with the game taking full advantage of the size of the place, and with the game’s season rotation spicing up the look quite often. It looks great during the spring and summer, but it’s extra beautiful in the fall and winter seasons. And when you combine it with the improved cut-scene quality, it becomes obvious how the new hardware has provided the series some improvements despite the usual visual inconsistencies that continues to plague the series during gameplay.
At the same time, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is that rare entry where it seems like it’s the most polished the series has been at launch before succumbing to some unfortunate bugs. At least, within the first hours of the game, it performs incredibly well on both a PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro on which I tested Shadows for review. The frame rate was solid between both, with the only difference being a cleaner look in the Pro’s performance mode and more stability in its quality mode. But the further I got into the game, not only did I start experiencing some more frame drops, I also started to experience some hilarious bugs and glitches, two of them ending on T-Pose animations that required a restart. Considering this happened after a patch was implemented halfway through the review, be aware that the game could be fixed or become more unstable with further patches. They weren’t enough to fully ruin my experience, especially with how late in the playthrough they happened, but they did hinder it during important moments later in the game.
For an entry as massively desired and anticipated as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I can’t imagine the pressure Ubisoft must have felt when they finally decided to deliver on such a requested entry. Despite losing out on the novelty of having a game set in Feudal Japan, they delivered another solid Assassin’s Creed entry with some smart additions and great storytelling, falling just shy of greatness. It may not provide the shift in design philosophy and approach to the franchise that its long gestation period suggests, but it’s a solid step forward for the series. If you’ve ever enjoyed one of these games before, I’d be hard pressed to imagine you not enjoying this one.
Sincere thanks to Ubisoft for providing a review code for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. You can find our review policy here.
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