Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review: Double-Edged Sword

Assassin’s Creed has been walking a tightrope strung between its past identity and future ambitions since it abandoned its stealthy sandbox and embraced the expansive role-playing formula seen in successful open world games like The Witcher 3. Ubisoft has favoured a ‘more is more’ approach with newer Assassin’s Creed games and found runaway success, but older titles, that came with a sharper focus on the series’ central tension between good and evil and everything grey in the middle, continue to appeal to long-term fans.

And thus, each new entry in the history-hopping action-adventure series becomes a dispute on what Assassin’s Creed is. Ubisoft has cast a wide net to please all parties with recent games in the series. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Valhalla were action-heavy spectacles that mixed history, mythology, and conspiracy to deliver open world blockbusters. Assassin’s Creed Mirage, on the other hand, narrowed the scope down to a throwback stealth formula that stoked nostalgia for the series’ origins. 

With Assassin’s Creed Shadows, however, Ubisoft has tried to have it both ways by doubling down on brutal action while also bringing back stealth as a core mechanic. Through its two distinct protagonists, Shadows attempts to address the incongruency between the old-school Assassin’s Creed experience and the series’ new identity with mixed results. There’s no denying that stealth in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is more meaningful and robust than it has been in recent games like Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. However, its stealth systems are also made to fit in an open world designed very much like those games.

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And consequently, Shadows’ stealth sandbox and its explosive action often slide against each other as two tectonic plates, leaving the game feeling like an ill-fitting double bill that struggles to find cohesive themes and ideas. Individually, both gameplay styles can be incredibly fun. The emphasis on stealth gameplay makes the game feel more like Assassin’s Creed than the series has in a while. And the action-combat here is the most refined and reliable it has been in the franchise’s RPG era. The two well-oiled individual parts, combined with a polished presentation of everything else that surrounds them, make Assassin’s Creed Shadows the best entry in the series in a long time. But the sum of those disparate ideas fails to bring any real distinction from preceding RPG-style Assassin’s Creed games.

Shadows is still very much an expansive open-world RPG along the lines of AC Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Stealth returns to the spotlight here — and the game is better for it — but the core DNA of modern AC titles remains unchanged: A much bigger chunk of the game is spent on horseback than it is on rooftops; Far Cry-style camp clearing takes precedence over handcrafted sandbox-style assassination missions; and repetitive checklist activities are favoured over a focussed narrative. And so, even with all its refinements and polish, its improvements to stealth and combat, and its well-intentioned separation of the assassin fantasy of silent murder from the power fantasy of brash encounter, Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t quite manage to step out of, well, the shadow of the series’ recent past.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings back stealth in a meaningful way
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

One of the ways the game tries to shed some of the issues plaguing its predecessors is through its story. Shadows attempts to ground its narrative in documented history, closer to the historical fiction approach of older AC games before the series started flirting with fantasy in recent entries. The game takes place in the long-requested setting of 16th century feudal Japan, a complex period in the country’s history that saw consolidation of political power, violent civil war among formidable lords, and foreign influence through trade and religion. Shadows weaves a fictional tale through this turbulent time, beginning specifically in 1581 during Oda Nobunaga’s ruthless campaign to unify a Japan ruled by powerful warlords.

We meet Yasuke, the first of the game’s two protagonists, in Nobunaga’s orbit in the game’s prologue. He arrives to Japanese shores as Diogo, an African slave to Portuguese missionaries, and catches the all-powerful daimyo’s eye. Fascinated by his dark skin and sensing a larger purpose for him in Japan, Nobunaga, a real historical figure from the time, takes him into his service and gives him station in the Oda clan. Diogo undergoes training, learns the ways of the land, and eventually takes up the name Yasuke — also a documented historical figure and the first Assassin’s Creed protagonist to be one. Nobunaga grants him the title of samurai and places him at the tip of his spear piercing through Japan. The premise will be familiar to people who have read James Clavell’s historical novel Shōgun or seen the recent TV adaptation.

Yasuke is the first Assassin’s Creed protagonist plucked from real life history
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

Yasuke becomes Nobunaga’s instrument of war — a towering, fearsome warrior who executes his daimyo’s iron will with steely determination. The black samurai leads Nobunaga’s assault on the Iga province, a region that houses the Iga ikki, a community of fiercely independent shinobi. Here’s where Yasuke’s story collides with Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ second protagonist, Naoe. An Igan who belongs to a long line of shinobi, Naoe watches as the brutal Nobunaga invasion lays waste to her people and province. In the heat of battle, Naoe’s father, a shinobi who wears the assassins’ trademark hidden blade, tasks her to her retrieve a mysterious box and protect it with her life.

But aside from Nobunaga’s invading army, a secretive group of masked samurai are also in Iga on the fateful day. The group, called the “Shinbakufu”, attack Naoe and take away the box, leaving her gravely injured. The prologue ends with Naoe reeling from a devastating loss and determined to hunt down the members of the secret group to exact righteous revenge and recover the box. The rest of the game plays out in three acts, as you slowly uncover the identity of the Shinbakufu members, forge new allies, and ultimately uncover long-hidden secrets from the past.

Naoe is the assassin in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

To its credit, Shadows follows a tight narrative structure that helps the storytelling and information delivery, unlike recent games in the series that seemed to spill out in every direction. You’re locked to playing as Naoe for the entirety of the first act as she licks her wounds and embarks on her path of vengeance. Yasuke, now purposeless after his lord is betrayed, aligns with Naoe, who now wields her father’s hidden blade, and the two whittle down the Shinbakufu through the second act, before the game heads towards a meaty finale.

This second act, however, is where Assassin’s Creed Shadows crumbles under the weight of repetition. The forward narrative momentum is lost in a barrage of new characters who come and leave as the protagonists hop from province to province in search of their next target. It’s a problem of process that has plagued recent Assassin’s Creed games, too. You get a list of faces, but the way you go about putting a name to those faces and then crossing them off the said list is cripplingly uninventive and unvarying. Once you get to the middle section of the game, the larger story is put on hold for a dozen mini narratives to play out across different regions of the map. 

Yasuke barely makes an appearance in the first act of the game
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

It is, of course, not a problem that’s unique to Assassin’s Creed or Ubisoft. All open world games tend to rely on grind to connect story and gameplay to the game world. But recent Assassin’s Creed games have pioneered open-world fatigue like no other modern game has. Odyssey crippled main mission progress through level gating and Valhalla stretched out its tedious quest structure to the point where all desire to continue playing evaporated. Shadows is nowhere near as bad as its predecessors; its main story is around half the size of Valhalla. But the delivery of the story runs into similar problems in the second act populated by a conveyor belt of non-player characters and mini narratives indistinguishable from one another.

These faltering provincial questlines usually involve Yasuke and Naoe arriving to a new region, learning about the local conflict, and chasing down leads that reveal the big bad Shinbakufu member, before a final confrontation at the regional castle that either plays out sneakily if you pick Naoe or as a full-frontal assault with Yasuke. But amid these recurring mission cycles, personal stories centred around the two protagonists and their allies are a highlight.

One of the better ones involve Junjiro, a bright, affable, and unassuming kid whose fate becomes intertwined with Naoe’s early in the game. As you progress, Junjiro’s story unravels in surprising ways that urge you to see the violent world around you through the eyes of a child. At the same time, while playing as Yasuke, you meet Lady Oichi, the younger sister of Oda Nobunaga and an influential historical figure from the period in her own right. Oichi and Yasuke strike up an uncommon friendship when Nobunaga takes him into his service. Their lives later intersect in tragic circumstances as the two attempt to reconcile their bond even as they are restrained by custom and duty. These stories bring necessary depth to a game begging for an emotional core.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ cast of non-player characters disappoints
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Things, however, do pick up in the final act, where more of Yasuke and Naoe’s pasts are revealed through flashbacks and personal quests as you learn what binds them together. The mystery of the box stolen by the Shinbakufu, the lineage of the hidden blade passed down Naoe’s family, and grander schemes that guide the two protagonists are revealed in engaging sequences. But the final-act denouement arrives too little, too late. Slogging through 40 hours of an unremarkable middle section to reach a stirring seven-hour finale is not a fair trade. And that structure ends up diluting whatever little substance the game’s story promises. 

And while both Yasuke and Naoe are interesting characters on paper, their treatment leaves a lot to be desired. You can see Yasuke’s unflinching loyalty and his desire for greater purpose, but Shadows takes a long time before revealing more of his past. For large sections of the game, the samurai seems little more than a vessel for action-oriented gameplay. Naoe, on the other hand, is driven by revenge but is rarely peeled away to reveal more layers. Both protagonists, ultimately, lack the many shades that make up the palette of a person and largely feel stoic through the vast majority of the campaign. 

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Yasuke’s backstory is intersting but Shadows takes its sweet time to tell it
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Perhaps Shadows’ strongest suit, just like many Assassin’s Creed games in the past, is its historical setting. The series has a history of fascinating backdrops, from Renaissance Italy to Ptolemaic Egypt, but feudal Japan had been one of the most requested destinations by Assassin’s Creed fans. Before Ubisoft could deliver their take on it, however, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima arrived in 2020 and painted a mesmerising picture of feudal Japan, while also setting a standard for open world games. Last year, Team Ninja’s Rise of the Ronin explored the same setting, too. Of course, time periods vary, and locations change, but the country has become a familiar backdrop in games in recent years.

The familiarity of Japan as seen in other games robs the world in Assassin’s Creed Shadows from feeling novel and wondrous. Stepping into the historical worlds of AC games has always been an exhilarating experience without comparison in the medium. The settings draw you in and encourage you to familiarise yourself with the time and place. But the Japan in Shadows didn’t elicit the same curiosity from me simply because I’d seen it done a few times before.

However, that doesn’t mean Shadows’ meticulous recreation of central Japan isn’t jaw-dropping at every turn. The map concentrates on the regions surrounding Lake Biwa, including major cities like Kyoto and Osaka. The scale of the world is impressive, of course, but the obsessive detail packed into it is astounding. The map is brimming with castles, kofuns, temples, shrines, cities, towns and fishing villages to explore, all nestled in stunning wilderness. You climb sun-drenched mountains, cross gigantic lakes, and weave through dense forests as you move through the world of Shadows.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ meticulous recreation of central Japan is stunning to behold
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Traversal is slightly altered from previous games, too. You cannot cut through the map in a straight line to get to your destination by climbing any obstacle in front of you. With changes to the parkour system, you require handholds to climb up any surface, whether it’s the walls of a temple or the rockface of a mountainside. This requires you to look at the map and find winding paths through the unnavigable terrain. But it also means you’re spending a lot of time on horseback, circling around a hill to get to the other side. The game world in Shadows is undeniably beautiful, but it also sometimes presents a disconnect with its inhabitants, including you — the protagonist. It often feels like you’re pushing through your surroundings rather than living in them.

The Japan presented in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, while stunning to look at, also lacks variety. Since its a concentrated region, the general topography doesn’t change much, and there’s little that separates smaller settlements from one another. The visual repetition of the places you go to is compounded by the mechanical repetition of the things you do in those places. The landmarks change, but you’re climbing tenshu across different castles, praying at shrines, or finding hidden pages at temples — and you do them again and again.

The world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is also missing a knockout wonder that stops you in your tracks. Don’t get me wrong, the map is bursting with historical landmarks — the towering walls of Azuchi, the sprawling Lake Biwa, and the imposing Himeji castle. But nothing in the game quite lives up to the jaw-dropping visage of the Pyramids of Giza in Assassin’s Creed Origins, or the quiet grandeur of Cliffs of Dover in Valhalla, or the sheer scale of the Colosseum in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. This, of course, is subject to preference and each setting comes with its own rich history and culture. But I found the world in Shadows more one-dimensional than the ones seen in previous games.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is one of the best looking games on consoles
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

The game does add variety to its environments with revamped weather systems and constantly changing seasons. It seems Ubisoft took notes from Ghost of Tsushima on how to make the game world feel alive through natural phenomena. And consequently, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is teeming with movement. Strong winds blow through flat lands, swaying trees, shrubs and bushes. In the fall season, the ground is covered with red, orange, and yellow leaves that dance in the breeze in an explosion of colour. And in winter, the entire map is buried in spotless snow, changing how you move through the world. The world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows constantly shifts and withers and blooms over time. Every change of season — there are four in the game — resets the map visually, bringing a new dimension to an otherwise homogenous setting.

Despite its familiarity and uniformity, the feudal Japan of Assassin’s Creed Shadows makes up for one of the best-looking open worlds ever crafted in a game. It’s consistently pretty and impossibly detailed, brought to life with convincing weather systems and crisp lighting. And despite the sameness seen across the breadth of the map, Shadows does try to bring variety through its long list of landmarks and its changing scale of settlements. The visual presentation is aided by smoother animations for all things you do and a surprisingly bug-free open world that feels like it spent the required time in the oven before it was served. The two delays clearly helped the game launch in a state of polish not seen in recent releases in the series.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows features several historical landmarks from 16th century Japan
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

The same finesse is seen in different aspects of the bifurcated gameplay, too. Assassin’s Creed Shadows plays like two games in one because of its wildly distinct protagonists. This experience goes beyond combat and is felt through general exploration, side activities, and interaction with NPCs. Yasuke is unlike any other Assassin’s Creed protagonist that has come before. He is not an assassin, but that’s not what makes him distinct. Protagonists in Odyssey and Valhalla weren’t assassins either. But they could behave like one for all intents and purposes when it was required. Yasuke does not.

The samurai is much slower, heavier, and larger than Naoe, and it affects how he moves through the world. Yasuke struggles to climb a wall slightly taller than him and strains while jumping off rooftops. His movement is anchored and deliberate and often interrupted by obstacles. He cannot jump longer distances between rooftops; he cannot walk on ropes connecting two structures; and he cannot climb a towering tenshu from the outside. As a result, while it’s possible to sneak around to some degree with the character, stealth is largely out of bounds for Yasuke. If you need to infiltrate an enemy stronghold quietly, Naoe is always the right choice. But if you want to barge in through the main door and start killing everyone, Yasuke is your pick.

When paired with the right gear, abilities and perks, Yasuke can be unstoppable in combat. The samurai can cut through enemies with brute force, leaving a trail of unchecked violence in his wake. He can parry or step dodge incoming attacks and hit back with extreme prejudice. Both characters get access to three main weapons that reflect their playing style. Yasuke is armed with a long katana, a naginata, and a kanabo. The sword is the standard weapon, versatile and reliable for most situations, and the naginata offers range and crowd control. The kanabo, my favourite of the lot, is a blunt club that deals brutal, devastating damage. It is lumbering and ill-suited for when you’re outnumbered, but its brute power makes it the most fun weapon to wield as Yasuke. A single big swing with the kanabo is enough to reduce an enemy to a pulp. The samurai also gets a bow and a teppo (rifle) for ranged attacks, with the former offering a quieter way to dispatch a few foes in a stronghold before taking the others head on.

Yasuke brings a new brutal dimenstion to Assassin’s Creed combat
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

Naoe, on the other hand, can wield a kusarigama to be deadly from a distance, a tanto to get in up close and personal, and a katana for the middle ground. The tanto works in tandem with the hidden blade and is great for quickfire stabs and slashes, but I favoured the kusarigama during my playthrough. It’s easily the flashiest weapon in the game that’s effective at both short and long ranges. Noae is nimble, but she can get overwhelmed in open combat quickly. She can deflect an incoming attack, dodge out of the way, and vault over the enemy, but she’s neither as devastating nor as resilient as Yasuke.

She is, however, the assassin in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Naoe is the most agile protagonist in the series’ history and the game’s core stealth elements are built around her. She’s fast and fluid while parkouring across rooftops, flipping over ledges like a trapeze artist. She also packs a grappling hook that allows her to reach unclimbable rooftops and tenshu, and swing across larger gaps. Her tiny frame and stealth abilities make her the ideal choice while infiltrating an enemy stronghold. While sneaking around, light — or the rather its absence — becomes a core mechanic in the game. For the first time in the series, staying in the shadows keeps you hidden from enemies. You can extinguish light sources and stick to the darker areas as you crouch or crawl your way to your target unseen.

The kusarigama is deadly from a distance
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

The implementation of the new stealth mechanic, however, feels incomplete. Staying in the shadows is essentially reduced to being an equivalent of hiding in a bush and there’s no deeper exploration of the mechanic in stealth-based assassination missions. The game’s larger stealth sandbox, however, is the best it has been in the series in years. Naoe is armed with shinobi tools like throwing knives, shuriken, smoke bombs, and the hidden blade — all of which encourage the player to engage with stealth mechanics and stay out of open combat. 

Shadows often asks players to infiltrate sprawling, historic castles with several layered levels that converge into the central tenshu that hides legendary armour or weapons. Navigating these maze-like compounds with Naoe Naruto sprinting on rooftops, picking off gaurds one by one, and finally climbing up the main tower for the loot, is fun the first few times. But doing variations of the same castle run again and again and again wore me down soon enough. And even though you can choose to sneak through these bases, everything that surrounds the castle grounds doesn’t quite embrace the game’s renewed focus on stealth in the same way.

Naoe can use the dark to her advantage
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Ubisoft does a fine job of balancing the stealth parts of the game with its action combat, clearly drawing a line that separates the game’s two major pillars. Combat in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the best, most responsive, and polished it has been in the series since it adopted the hitbox-based system in Origins. There’s a weight to your weapon swings and a crunch to weapon impacts. The combat is brutal, too. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is perhaps the goriest game in the series yet, especially when seen from Yasuke’s perspective. His brutal assassinations and violent combo finishers often made me flinch. Naoe, too, is no slouch. She is built around stealth, and she doesn’t have the raw strength of Yasuke, but her strikes are quicker and more precise. Her finishers, too, favour dexterity over brutality.

But just like its story and its missions, Shadows’ combat runs into the problem of repetition, too. While you do add new abilities, both passive and active ones, you can’t help but feel that the Assassin’s Creed combat formula has gotten stale, especially when there are plenty of action-adventure games now that feature far deeper and more rewarding combat systems. Just like recent games in the series, Shadows attempts to add complexity through flashy skills, but the core combat experience doesn’t stay fresh over 40 hours. 

Naoe’s combat is based around quick, precise attacks
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Where does that leave Assassin’s Creed Shadows then? Much like the duality of its two protagonists and the distict gameplay systems attached to them, Shadows comes as a double-edged sword. On one hand, this is the most refined Assassin’s Creed game at launch in a long time. It’s free of bugs and jank and comes with polished presentation, slick combat, and stunning visuals; it addresses pressing issues from previous games and brings back stealth into the spotlight; and it reconnects its story to larger Assassin’s Creed lore in ways that recent games have just not bothered to do. 

On the other hand, Shadows often treads the same ground as the preceding games in the series and thus carries a lot of the same frustrations. Despite a different story structure, repetition remains a cornerstone of the game’s design that ends up diluting narrative impact and the novelty of exploration. None of its flaws, however, stopped me from having fun while playing it. I’m someone who put 180 hours in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, a fundamentally broken game that actively made me angry as I played it. So of course, I enjoyed my time with Shadows. But as someone who has loved the series and played every AC game, I also recognise that it shies away from evolving the familiar formula, opting instead to iterate on it. The decision to play it safe is understandable — Assassin’s Creed is Ubisoft’s biggest franchise, and the company needs it to work. But a string of risk-free games has seen a series known for bold leaps of faith lose the essence of innovation. And while Shadows impresses in many ways, it fails to innovate on any one of them.