Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review

It feels like there’s a lot riding on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Publisher Ubisoft hasn’t exactly enjoyed immense success of late, with Star Wars Outlaws sales allegedly not where they were positioned to be and the company’s big swing at another live service success, XDefiant, shutting down imminently. Even Shadows itself has been a thorny prospect with multiple delays, a couple of marketing hiccups and a minor but vocal army of online bigots fighting an imaginary war against interesting stories. But this is it. This is the big one. Fulfilling a dream we all had back in 2012 – Assassin’s Creed in Feudal Japan.

And so that’s exactly where we are. In the Sengoku period, to be specific. The country is undergoing constant, violent shifts in power as its central government is weakened and warlords known as daimyo have begun to rule local provinces, entrenched in castles with their samurai. It’s a period marked by many key players and struggles, but Shadows kicks off proper towards the end of the 16th century, as one of the “Great Unifier” daimyo, Oda Nobunaga, continues his expansion with a hostile takeover of the province of Iga.

Naoe is a young, Igan shinobi, one of the last lines of defense against Nobunaga’s invading armies. During this conflict, Naoe’s father is murdered by a mysterious group of masked ronin known as the Shinbakufu, sending her on a path of vengeance that takes her across Japan, against the backdrop of ongoing civil wars.

The game doesn’t let you name your horse. I would’ve called mine “Neigh-aoe”

The game’s first of three main acts is centred almost entirely around Naoe and is, predictably, where Shadows feels most like the Assassin’s Creed you’d expect. It strikes a familiar rhythm as you explore on foot and horseback, scouting out villages and temples, climbing high viewpoints (now aided by a very handy grappling hook), infiltrating guarded outposts and following quest threads in your efforts to unmask and unalive the members of the Shinbakufu.

There are some key differences, even early on, to the Creeds that came before. After a brief experiment with vague POI icons in Valhalla, Ubisoft’s team of studios has taken things one step further to make Shadows a game of information gathering and orienteering. Without a traditional, scrolling list of quests to sort through and slowly scratch off, your various potential objectives are plotted out in the same, growing mind map that houses your intel on the 12 Shinbakufu members. As you meet new people, visit new places and progress the story, this screen fills in with the many things you can do to move the plot along, or to expand it even further.

Even once you’ve settled on what to do though, Shadows won’t explicitly tell you where to go. Instead, you’ll follow some loose (but mercifully helpful) guidance on where you should be looking for the next step in a quest. There’s a key reason for this, and it’s not just to give players the illusion of a more organic world or to test their skill in following trails, it’s also to force them to slow down and consider the world around them.

Would you believe this isn’t from a cutscene?

This is a big and very important facet of Shadows’ personality and playstyle, ensuring that simply rushing from target to target will cripple the vibe. I am reminded of 2024’s astounding Indika and the parallels it drew between point-scoring in video games and faith, in moments where the game tells me to pray at every shrine in a temple to earn more Knowledge Points. But it’s refreshing that nearly all of the game’s optional open-world “activities” are of the passive and mindful strain, ensuring Naoe and Yasuke’s campaign of violence doesn’t also bleed into their relationship with culture, history or nature.

There’s a sense that this particular direction has a direct correlation with the subject matter, borrowing lessons from classic Japanese philosophy to inform the setting, but part of me does also want to believe that it’s Ubsioft doing its damnedest to ensure I properly appreciate this long overdue and long-gestating work. This is what you wanted from us, isn’t it? We worked really hard on this for you. Now look at it!

And goddamnit you’ll want to look at it. Outside of Horizon Forbidden West, this might be the best-looking open world game I’ve experienced on a console. Ubisoft’s Anvil Engine is firing on all cylinders here with spectacular detail at every scale from the sweeping vistas packed with dense foliate right down to the sweat on a samurai’s face or the gilded seams in a Lord’s robe. Lighting and weather effects are especially potent, the former propped up by a couple of different ray-tracing setups (depending on your performance preferences).

How’s the serenity?

The latter is a focal point of the game’s naturally shifting seasons, which regularly cycle as you play, acting as a sort of reset that sees any regional Wanted status wiped clean, among other things. It’s not seamless, there’s a little bit of a cutscene that plays between season changes, but the result is that the entire landscape changes which is genuinely quite impressive. Revisiting familiar areas as they spring with gorgeous cherry blossom trees or become blanketed in snow, changing now just how they look but sometimes how you navigate them, elicits immense awe and concern for the state of AAA development in equal measure.

All the lush lighting and weather effects also play a key role in Shadows’ updated stealth gameplay, in a too-rare example of fancy game tech actually adding to the game part. A lot of what’s in Naoe’s bag of tricks will feel familiar to seasoned AC vets, but there are some neat new wrinkles that genuinely elevate proceedings, like using the cover of darkness to hide from sight, which makes sneaking around at night and snuffing out nearby light sources a bit of a thrill.

Naoe can also go prone, a new tactic that means she’s able to hide in slightly shorter grass and crawl under buildings to get around unseen. Changes like this are small on their own, but together all add to a much more dynamic-feeling and reactive stealth game. It keeps you on your toes throughout, too. It wasn’t until maybe hour 40 that I first encountered a situation where I’d planned my route through a temple grounds and picked out my prey amongst its guardians, only for a storm to kick up and all of them to run for cover in the very building I’d holed up in. It didn’t go well for me – Naoe’s skills in direct combat don’t tend to sustain her when she’s overwhelmed – but it was a great bit of emergent, almost comically-timed action that’s emblematic of a good sneak-em-up.

Great game for history nerds

And then there’s Yasuke. Yasuke is a big, solid tower of a man, which comes with some pretty radical differences in gameplay. Gone is the stealth first, combat as a last resort and approach, replaced with a “go loud” mentality that sees the samurai rush in with such force that doors and debris crumble under his weight. In exchange for the inability to scale high walls or buildings or effectively hide his hulking frame, Yasuke is an absolute powerhouse in combat, easily breaking enemy guard while dishing out and receiving exponentially more damage than his shinobi counterpart.

It’s a steep enough departure from the norm when it comes to getting around, though Yasuke’s in-combat feel isn’t actually all that different from Naoe’s, a competent and crunchy dance where timing and attention are crucial. Your measures of success are still largely rooted in the level gap between you and an adversary as well as how well-equipped you are, Yasuke’s numbers just go higher and his unique combat soundtrack is way cooler. He can also wield a far bigger variety of weapons including the Teppo, a primitive matchlock firearm that takes 100 years to reload and almost never hits.

The value of this half of Shadows’ duo lies more in the character himself, though. Based on the historical figure of the same name, Yasuke is a former slave rescued by Portuguese Jesuit Christians and brought to Japan, who finds himself taken in by Oda Nobunaga to be trained as a samurai after the daimyo takes interest in his alienness, his intelligence and of course his towering stature. That alone makes him compelling to watch, and positions him to offer a unique lens to the ongoing drama and feuds that are heavily rooted in the upholding or tearing down of long-held tradition.

No head? *snaps skateboard*

While I’m forbidden from explaining the circumstances surrounding Naoe and Yasuke’s meeting and eventual alliance (it’s kind of hilarious being asked not to spoil a recorded moment in history, just by the by), their two stories are woven together in interesting enough ways.

Naoe’s mission is one fueled by the desire for revenge, not just for her family but as someone bound inextricably to her legacy and loyalism to a place, her very sense of self. Yasuke is someone long stripped of legacy, his self-worth forged in his deeds and a debt to a man that is, in his eyes, a strong and honourable leader, but to others is a cold and callous tyrant. It makes the two diametrically opposed in many ways, but with the Shinbakufu threat giving them a common goal, their differences eventually coalesce into a formidable whole.

The effort to allow players to embody their favourite of the two at almost any point, even through core missions, is certainly noble, though it’s not always elegant. There’s a consistent, awkward transition between a lot of story moments where you’ll pick who to continue along as, and then watch the other character simply walk out of frame with some vague explanation of where they’ll be while you go and do the thing. It works fine enough, and being able to switch between the two at just about any point from the pause menu is very handy, but I can’t help wishing there was more of an opportunity to see them in action together, even if it’s just a bit of chatter while they go between points to help fill in some of the jumps in the development of their relationship.

Still not a cutscene

Some sequences are clearly geared toward one or the other as well, especially the odd fight against a tough group of samurai that can be nigh-impossible as Naoe, and NPCs will often express disappointment at who you engage them with, to the point where I regretted not picking the much-touted “Canon Mode” at the beginning of my playthrough and just enjoying the ride. The flexibility is certainly appreciated though, and beyond just choosing who to play as there are often multiple avenues in approaching, completing or even discovering quests that help sell the organic feel of the world.

While the Shinbakufu act as the central threat and mission for much of the game, they don’t necessarily have to be your immediate goal, nor will seeing that particular plot thread to the end give you any kind of finality. There’s a lot of game here, and your path through it is as flexible as everything else. It’s impressive just how wide the game can open up to allow you to seek the stories you’re interested in, only occasionally giving you a gentle nudge toward a prerequisite for moving things forward. You’ll find some of the best stuff just by stumbling upon it, and before you know it wind up meeting historical figures, witnessing betrayals and uprisings, instilling hope in the hopeless and fear in the feared.

It’s unfortunate that the bigger assassination quests all kind of boil down to “go to this temple, sneak past or kill everyone and then cut down the big guy”, but most of the fringe and late-act missions and plot revelations are significantly more exciting, shining a spotlight on the best parts of both protagonists and the series as a whole. Your dealings with Japan’s warlords and scoundrels offer up a bevy of talking points around war, government, loyalism and the greater good that the game can’t really wrangle thanks to its commitment to player choice, but when the spotlight is back on Naoe, Yasuke, the Assassins and Templars it’s far more interesting.

Race ya!

Thankfully there’s a good amount of that along with some exciting, series-reaching backstory to discover. The new Animus launcher not only acts as a pseudo-live-service wrapper to the series going forward, but itself adds some cool layers of intrigue to everything if you choose to engage with it.

Between some of the awkwardness in the dual protagonist setup, the glut of systems driving your progress and the way that the mid-game story thread tends to get lost behind both structural freedom and vague player choice, Shadows’ biggest crime is just that it can feel a touch unfocused. Played the way it wants to be played, that’s not necessarily a deal breaker, nor is it a new problem. Ubisoft has clearly thrown everything it has at this entry and it’s actually more often impressive that it all gels as well as it does.

I haven’t even touched on the customisable hideout that acts as another filter for resources collected in the world, spitting out new gear possibilities, facilitating the management of scouts and allies and other helpful bonuses in exchange, along with tricking you into wasting hours meticulously arranging bamboo trees to watch animals frolic in.

Isn’t that who was in Lady Bird?

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given the multiple delays to get this game to launch, but I’m also quite taken with how polished the whole thing is. Aside from one small issue that was flagged in advance by PR and tagged for a day one patch, it was smooth sailing all the way through, which is enough of a feat in an open world game that’s publicly available, let alone one still in a pre-launch state.

Final Thoughts

After the refreshingly smaller and more focused Assassin’s Creed Mirage, I’m hoping fans of the franchise are as ready as I was to get back into an unnecessarily big, action-packed RPG (is this technically a JRPG??) entry, because Shadows is easily the best so far. The cost of a slightly erratic throughline to the fiction is a small price to pay for a world that’s so rich, explorable, dripping in history and a reverence for the subject matter, and one that offers two distinct gameplay experiences within the AC paradigm. 

It does need to be said that this kitchen-sink approach is exactly the kind of unsustainable game design that’s destroying AAA space from the inside, as evidenced by this game’s tumultuous development and release cycle, so hopefully the next game is another smaller-scoped project. But this one’s come out pretty damned good in the end.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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