Assassins Creed Shadows

(available for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC. Playstation 5 version used for this review)

Assassins Creed has been around for such a long time that it has reached double digits of which anniversary we’re going to experience next, which is weird because it doesn’t feel that long to me, which is probably because I’ve been there since the start of the franchise. I’ll be honest, I haven’t cared for the recent entries to the franchise, I found Valhalla in particular a massive drag, and I found the other entries rather dull in many regards. I thought that other games came along and added more innovations whereas the teams involved in these games rested on their laurels, so much so that historical accuracy in the games went down significantly as time went on.

A Japanese setting for these games has been hinted at for a very long time, even hinted at during a short movie at the end of the Ezio saga at the end of Assassin’s Creed Revelations. It was believed for ages that we would get a Japanese setting for game three, which turned out to not be the case as it was set during the American Revolution instead. For years and years we went through many settings until during an Anniversary stream of a Ubisoft Forward that a game called Codename Crimson was there and would be set during the time of Lord Nokinaga in Japan, which would later be revealed as Assassins Creed Shadows and the game would have two playable characters, the Assassin Naoe and Yasuke, a real life historical figure who was a slave sold by Portuguese missionaries who would eventually become a samurai. Look up his life, it’s really fascinating!

The big factor that goes against this game is that we kind of have a game set in Japan while we were waiting for this game to be creed, and it’s called Ghosts of Tsushima- I really liked that game and since I reviewed it, my opinion of it has gone up even higher. This game doesn’t really offer too much new. If you’ve played an Assassins Creed game, you know what to expect here. You’re doing assassinations, recruiting people for the home base, exploring the open world.

I’ll stress that while this may not be one of my more positive reviews, that this is still a step up for the series. But I think that for every step forward that this franchise takes, it also takes a few steps back. The combat is like normal, but while Naoe plays like a typical assassin, Yasuke is a more tanky and up-close character. The storyline is again typical of this franchise, Naoe’s father is murdered by eight masked samurai, and she hunts them down one by one to retrieve something that they have taken, which really reminded me of Assassin’s Creed 2. I won’t spoil how Yasuke gets involved in the storyline since I actually thought that his introduction was one of the best parts of the storyline, but as a whole, I kind of think this game doesn’t really have an engaging narrative and has other issues as well.

PROS

• Assassination Missions

I thought that the assassination missions for the main storyline were much better compared to previous entries in recent memory, mainly because they give you some decent variety in how you’re supposed to track down targets and the actual missions themselves give you a lot of options on how to tackle them. This is obviously a big part of the game so I’m happy that they nailed them this time around.

• Yasuke’s Story

While I think that Naoe’s story is a bit generic and feel like the writers don’t really have any ideas for new assassins, Yasuke’s story is really great. I’m very dubious about saying whether or not Yasuke’s segments are historically accurate, since he is one of the few figures in this game who is actually based on real life figures, and I don’t like listening to people who say whether or not it is accurate because of a few bad faith actors who work on a racist agenda- so I don’t want to say one way or the other about whether it’s accurate. But either way, I found his story a little bit more compelling.

MIXED

• Open World

The open world in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is big, which I think works against this game because I usually prefer the more contained worlds, but there you go. That wouldn’t be too much of an issue other than the fact that the world feels kind of lifeless. I played the game in performance mode and the game looks fine, but it really stood out to me that there isn’t much going on in this world and there aren’t many landmarks to tie yourself to. It doesn’t feel like a world you can get yourself lost in like Breath of the Wild and it doesn’t have the beauty of a game like Ghosts of Tsushima. As a result, it doesn’t really nail anything. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it but it’s not great either.

• Combat

I’m not a huge fan of the combat in Assassin’s Creed, and this game really emphasised my opinion. I do like the combat this time more than Valhalla and I think that they have made some improvements to the weapon variety and controls, but the blocking mechanics only work when they feel like it, but I have been informed that I may be playing the game wrong so take that with a pinch of salt.

It doesn’t feel as fluid as Ghosts of Tsushima, which this game really invites comparisons to in several ways, especially with the emphasis of katanas and stealth. I will stress that it works in their favour that the enemies aren’t as dumb as in previous games.

That leads us to Yasuke, so most of what I was just describing was Naoe’s. Yasuke is a bit overpowered, and it feels like he is playing the game on an easier mode for the most part, but I just think that his combat doesn’t feel like an Assassin’s Creed game, so maybe Ubisoft should have made a Yasuke game as a spinoff to this franchise. So, while I do enjoy Yasuke’s combat, it does feel out of place in this game.

CONS

• Vague Objectives

This was the worst part of the game for me. I hated that everyone was so vague with where you had to go. Once you selected a mission it would give you three clues on where you’re supposed to be going, and it wouldn’t give you an exact marker unless you could send some scouts to where you think the clues were leading you and just hope that you would get lucky. That’s if you had scouts available!

All I can say is that this was so annoying. I think Assassin’s Creed Shadows really needs to have map markers in order to just get on with the story missions. It meant that getting the viewpoints from the tops of towers really took up a lot of my time just to figure out where I was supposed to be going. There must be a better way of doing this outside of trial and error.

• Length of Side Content

This was really emphasised with the castle missions which involved assassinating a certain number of samurai in order to get more gear. I don’t really think that these games suit an RPG format- I might be a minority in that one, but I stand by it. Second, these missions were way too long. Some of the castle missions took me over an hour and it wasn’t because a couple of times I made a mistake and got ambushed, sometimes it was just for finding the samurai! Sometimes it would take me an extra 20 minutes just to find a samurai because these castles were so huge!!

It’s not just that, there was other side content like this and plenty of it, but normally I like a bit of side content, but this just felt like they were padding on the runtime particularly because parts of the skill tree were locked behind this content. I think that all of this caused the game to overstay its welcome.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is perfectly fine, I actually think it’s a good game in many regards, and it has improved, but the side content is way too long and takes ages to do- I went back to my favourite game in the series, Black Flag, and the side content in that game was a breeze to do. I also felt that the objectives and maps were way too vague, and I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what to do.

For everything that I think that this game does right, it makes several errors too, and it really affirms that I am just not into this series anymore.

FINAL SCORE: 6.5/10