Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review – A New Dynamic Duo

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a very good AC game. It’s definitely not the ultimate AC experience or however the developers hyped it. But it’s certainly not the kind of disappointment fans of the series always worry about when a new game is released. I’ll get right to the point here. Because life is short and we all have things to do, something which AC Shadows sometimes forgets. But we’ll get to that.

Thanks to its setting – Feudal Japan in the late 16th century – Shadows will be compared to games like Ghosts of Tsushima, Rise of the Ronin, and Nioh. Of course, it will also be matched against other recent and classic AC games. Questions will be asked. Does it return the series to its roots or lean into the more action-RPG focus of the last few games? Does it fix the open-world bloat problem? The short answer to all these queries is an unqualified maybe. Sort of.

The Return of the Two

Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings back the twin protagonist mechanic from AC Syndicate. In the older game, the characters were literal siblings, Jacob and Evie Frye. The wise-cracking pair rubbed shoulders with well-known English historical figures like Queen Victoria and Jack the Ripper. Jacob was a brawler, and Evie was a more stealthy assassin-type. They had chemistry and wit on their side and the game’s structure and narrative alternated them as playable characters.

Shadows brings back the dual-character mechanic in much the same way. Naoe is a shinobi, leaning into stealth, parkour, and deadly silent takedowns. Yasuke is a samurai, physically imposing and a master of weapons and brute force combat. Because the player can often switch between them in a mission – a bit inelegantly, unfortunately – they sort of meld into one, versatile character. Unintentionally or not, they also represent a “have your sushi and eat it too” desire on the developers’ part to satisfy two subsets of gamers and AC games. Naoe comes close to being a traditional AC archetype, and Yasuke is definitely a standard action character that would be right at home in any open-world RPG. 

Sometimes Assassin’s Creed Shadow’s narrative forces the player into one role or another. Often the player can choose, and if the situation demands it, switch out one character for the other. A lot of the time, the mission description will give the player a strong hint as to which hero is the best one to pick, which kind of undercuts the whole free-choice idea. The reality is you might prefer to play as Yasuke, but getting to the top of that tower requires Naoe’s parkour skills and an immersion-breaking loading screen in between. In other words, the back-and-forth, choose-your-own-adventurer mechanic is a mixed success. 

Drama in Feudal Japan

We’ll return to Naoe and Yasuke as action-game heroes. As narratives go, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is pretty good. Japan at the end of the Feudal period was a morass of internal and external conflicts that made modern geopolitical strife seem quaintly simple. Traditional Japanese culture was clashing with European influences and the powerful warrior Oda Nobunaga was using might to “unify” the different clans through diplomacy, subterfuge, and combat. It was a time when mistakes in a tea ceremony could reveal a spy and wars were initiated over an improvisatory haiku contest. If AC Shadows succeeds anywhere, it’s in its depiction of the period and culture. The world is geographically stunning and its customs are intricately detailed. As always, Ubisoft’s historical research is spot on. 

As a former slave with a warrior’s cunning and strength, Yasuke becomes Nobunaga’s samurai. He’s loosely based on a historical figure and his stranger-in-a-strange land story is more interesting than Naoe’s familiar revenge narrative. Naoe is more fun to play, but her story of seeking to avenge her father’s murder rarely escapes cliche melodrama. Unfortunately, the game spends a great deal of time on Naoe’s character early on, and the pace is strangled by respectful but tedious storytelling. 

Toys and Tools

When it comes to mission design, combat, and exploration, AC Shadows takes some stabs at mixing up the formula with newish ideas. Naoe’s shinobi skills include expertise with a variety of blades and her repertoire of sneaky movement now includes being able to go prone, do backflip takedowns, and use a grappling hook. She’s great at finding secret passages and fluid movement over rooftops but not so competent in fighting groups of enemies. Yasuke brings to the table expertise in swords, polearms, clubs, and new-fangled 16th-century guns, but he’s not agile by design. 

Obviously, Naoe is meant to appeal to longtime fans of the franchise hoping for a pure assassin return to form. Yasuke is a bridge to ferry in fans from other action RPGs and the recent AC games themselves. They’re both fun, but the fact that each has defects that make the other necessary is a complicated tradeoff. AC Syndicate handled the idea better through its focused mission design, resulting in better narrative momentum.

Speaking of mission design, Assassin’s Creed Shadows makes a big deal of tossing out the cluttered Ubisoft open-world map with missions that give clues to locations instead of markers. It gives the players recruitable scouts to narrow things down and, well, place markers on the map. It’s nice to not be intimidated by a map choked with busywork but using scouts to pinpoint objectives feels like Ubisoft hedging its bet. Plus, players can turn off all this vague poking around the world and go back to AC business as usual.

Maybe It Runs Great? Who Knows?

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ art design and attention to historical detail is an unqualified home run. The world is beautiful to experience, with weather and changing seasons that have a minor impact on gameplay and mechanics. Characters in cinematics are beautifully performance-captured, but out in the world, there’s a lot of variability in quality, voice acting, and polish. This could be said about virtually every open-world game. Aside from art and environmental design, the graphical shine wasn’t mind-blowing but I think there’s a reason.  

Reviewers like myself played the PC version of the game over Nvidia’s streaming service with a resolution capped at 1920×1080. It mostly ran without significant issues, aside from loading times. But the experience was obviously a curated one and it means I have no idea how it runs as an installed game, with higher resolutions or various settings and options tweaked at a more granular level. It’s an interesting choice, and I’m curious to see how the game runs out in the real world.

Your Next Favorite AC Game

Assassin’s Creed Shadows does not revolutionize the formula that has both served and undermined the franchise for a very long time. It does shake things up a bit by bringing back the twin protagonist mechanic in a new way and making some tentative progress with mission design, stealth, and combat. Shadows’ world and attention to Japanese history and culture are genuinely impressive. Naoe is not the ultimate assassin and Yesuke is not the most refined ARPG hero. However, their different strengths add creativity to combat and narrative complexity. I don’t think Assassin’s Creed Shadows will disappoint many fans, nor pull in the uninitiated in great numbers. It’s a solid AC game with just enough new ideas to make it stand apart from the recent titles.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***