Review - Assassin's Creed: Shadows

Developer: Ubisoft Quebec

Publisher: Ubisoft

Available on: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5

Review system: PC

Ninjas Finally Take the Creed

It has finally happened! When you ask a layman what they imagine when they picture a historical figure stalking through the night, sneaking and stabbing, I bet the Ninja is what they picture. Ubisoft has finally decided to use that setting and motive for their famous Assassin's Creed series. Has Ubisoft brought the Far East into the mythical brotherhood? Or have they pinned all the company's hopes and dreams on a dud?

Game Play

Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure game with some RPG and stealth elements. You will spend the majority of your time smacking and stabbing people all over feudal Japan, and the variation comes from the way you decide to set up those actions.

This is where Assassin's Creed: Shadows introduces its most novel (and controversial) concept, the two-character protagonist. In some of the most recent games in the series, you are playing a character who can do it all. Someone who can solo hordes of enemies while simultaneously sneaking and climbing around environments to ambush and slay key bad guys without ever being noticed. To me, this never felt right. Perhaps one of the most successful elements of Shadows is how it feels to play these two separate characters. Naoe is your sneaky ninja. She carries ninja stars, climbing ropes, smoke bombs, a smaller build, and the brand favorite Assassin's retractable blade. The tradeoff is that she can fight some enemies one-on-one (you will need to be very precise with your parry and attacks), but when there are a couple of enemies, you are better off running and hiding. It feels like an Assassin/Ninja should.

Yasuke, on the other hand, is your tank. Dude is enormous relative to the enemies you face, and you can feel it. You can take on large groups and power through their defenses with repeated attacks. He wears heavy armor and can use big Japanese weapons like the Kanabo and Naginata. Dude doesn't open gates, he smashes through them! As expected, he looks very out of place doing any parkour. In his animations he wobbles back and forth and if you fall into hay he destroys the stack and lands on his ass. Both characters feel like a Samurai and Ninja distinction that you would hope for.

Regarding combat (disclosure, I played at the highest difficulty, which I recommend as it makes the Ninja/Samurai prowess distinction more felt), you are doing light and heavy attacks with frequent blocks and deflects to find your opening. It's in a similar vein to a Dark Souls type of game, but a lot faster-paced and forgiving. Playing on higher difficulties, you are forced to think tactically by trying to take on 1-on-1 foes as often as you can and trying to avoid the larger groups. Many foes often have armor first that you have to fight through before you can start damaging their health, which is represented visually. You can tell ahead of time if someone has armor, and you can certainly tell when you have busted through it. This starts to train you on how long it will probably take to defeat the opponent.

Both characters also have their skill trees, with skills that further develop their weapon and abilities. With some passive and some active abilities. On top of that, both also have unique weapons and equipment that you will loot, steal, and buy on your adventures. Each piece of equipment has its own look and specific stat/ability that goes along with it. As you would expect, there are also legendary equipment which have powers that completely change your build and how you play.

That point in particular is something that rubs me. All equipment have “levels” that make the item more redundant the longer you play and level. But you can upgrade your equipment to your current level at your home base. You collect uncommon and rare equipment that you won’t use, and just have to make time to break down or sell to free up your inventory. If I have 3 unique legendary pieces for each inventory slot, I’m not even looking at the other things I’m gathering. It starts to feel like busy work.

Fighting, climbing, and stabbing are the majority of what you are doing. The rest of the time is spent traversing the land, building your sanctuary, climbing and scoping off of lookout towers to flesh out your map (Ubisoft staple), and the occasional talk to people and dungeon dive.

Building your sanctuary is the other, more unique part of Shadows as compared to past games. You can explore the land collecting aesthetic items that you can build into your dream Feudal Japanese villa, to include decorative items, plants, pets, and even ponds and foot paths. For the right person, I am sure they would love it, but it didn't particularly interest me beyond what improved my gameplay (I preferred the more set-based upgrades of past games).

Plot

Assassin's Creed as a series has added a lot of deeper lore, which I will be avoiding here. What’s important to know is that you are representing a secret society of assassins who believe that if the right people are stabbed, we can all be free. Opposing them is a secret society of people who are trying to capture power and shape the society to be as obedient as possible for their own good. Except now, during the Era of Sengoku Jedai in Japan! With Oda Nobunaga and everything.

Naoe is an Iga clan ninja who starts the game with her village burned to the ground, and Yasuke is a far-from-home Ronin who is sticking around for some reason (hasn't really been explained this far into my play). True to the game name, you are talking to people to learn about an ever-growing list of mean and terrible people in good need of a stabbing. While I love the setting and the drama of the Era it represents, the game only started to lose me around the 30-hour mark. Now, the main “bad guy” circle is interesting enough. You get cutscenes, tie in to your characters, novel ways to take them out, etc. However, as you play, you start to build out additional kill lists that frankly are….boring. I find myself murdering random people on the map because they are on some list that I couldn’t be bothered to understand, or even worse, I would randomly come across people on the map with an icon over their head that indicates they are something key to kill. So you stab them real good, and now you are getting a checkmark for a kill list that you haven’t even uncovered yet….what? What the heck is this game training me to do?

Good job, you killed some random mean guy who hoarded rice, and in exchange, you receive an uncommon hat that you probably won’t bother looking at before you sell it. Or maybe some hideout building material… which I am already at max levels for the important buildings and not interested enough to bother with the aesthetic build.

Music | Voice-overs

I played the game in “Immersion Mode”, which means that the characters speak the language you expect them to speak. Which is either Japanese or Portuguese. Now I can’t speak Japanese, so it’s hard to tell if the voice acting was great or not, but I had no issue with it. I could be imagining things, but I feel like when the Portuguese traders spoke Japanese, it even sounded distinctly different from the native speaker. The only thing that really stands out is when you are in the more produced cutscenes, the characters' mouths are clearly speaking English. As their mouths match the subtitled words and not the audio being spoken. It comes across like a reverse dubbing. You are reading subtitles, hearing English, but seeing their mouths speak the English subtitles.

For the music and audio ambiance, I liked it a lot. The ambient nature was pleasant with wind blowing, leaves rustling, people moving about, and animals chirping as you ride your horse around. No notes. The music was strong and played at the correct moments for maximum highlight. I noticed that most of it was a classical Japanese sound, except for the grand combat scripted scenes where a more techno style music would play. Not a bad sound, just a bit jarring comparatively.

Immersion and Graphics

Dear reader, you must forgive me, for I am no expert when it comes to analyzing graphical fidelity. I played with a 4070 Ti, and I found the game to be very beautiful. The game represents the 4 seasons within the game, and they are all great to witness. Small animals run about (perhaps a bit too much, you feel like snow white sometimes), flowers bloom, wind rustles the trees, and people mill about in the towns and cities. Lighting looks great and casts all the shadows you expect as you stalk about the estates at night.

My only real graphical gripe is that I started playing this game from day one, about a week in, an update dropped and caused a repeating frame rate bug. Often, when I would interact with something in the environment (the Y prompt), my frame rate would crater, and it would take a few seconds to get back up to 60 fps. No idea why, never could figure out how to fix it.

Regarding the setting, again, no notes. Towns look and feel realistic for the time. Some of the highlights of the game are where they lean into the immersion factor. For example, one of the main missions for Naoe, you must make friends with a merchant, which requires participating in a Tea Ceremony. So you learn about the behaviors and symbology in such a ceremony and have to repeat it in-game. Huge props from me, as I am aware of such a thing but didn’t no squat about it. Of course, your reward for doing this is the opportunity to stab someone…but like I said before, stabbing is the crux of this game.

Fun Factor

The last Assassin's Creed game I completed was Origins. I started Valhalla, but couldn’t finish it. That game had a very similar fun factor trajectory to Shadows. Starts very strong. You get your gameplay hook, slow drip cool equipment and abilities, and have a blast sneaking and stabbing in new ways (you can low crawl for the first time!). Especially on the higher difficulties, the enemies feel believable, you can put out lights and hide in the shadows. You feel powerful playing as Yasuke, all great stuff. But once you start clearing your 3rd or 4th district, diminished returns start setting in. Combat starts to become repetitive, rewards start becoming busy work in themselves, and the motivation to find and kill some other random person just isn’t there. The main story beats are by far the most interesting parts, especially if you are a fan of classic Japanese lore or the Sengoku Jidai characters and personalities. But once my 5th side wheel of random bad guys to kill opened up, I wasn't having fun anymore. Assassin's Creed desperately needs to give a more compact and high-quality game (which would demotivate people from buying cosmetics) or provide more varied gameplay than just stabbing things. The occasional parkour or dungeon delve was pleasant enough, but the motivation to find and hunt down my next dude just faded out.

Final Thoughts

I want to be fair. I started this game really wanting to like it. I love the setting, the premise was interesting, and ambushing bad guys is always fun (to a point). I even really like the two protagonist elements, which earned the game so much flak from the greater internet.

This game suffers from a feeling of “busy work” after a certain point. It’s a problem that I find in a lot of recent Ubisoft games: endless question marks on your map that lose their luster. The rewards for completing become meaningless, and the intrinsic fun in completing the quest fades without a variety of quests or choices in completing the quests.

In my younger days, with a lot more free time, I likely would have pushed through. However, when I only have 1-2 hours a day to play, I struggle to find the motivation to come back and see where the adventure ends.