A lot of people in the industry have their eyes on Ubisoft. Since 2023, the company has seen their headcount reduced by over 17,000 workers. It would be irresponsible to say that this is solely due to recent games not having the critical or sales metrics expected, but it’s definitely something on people’s minds. When Assassin’s Creed Shadows was unveiled last year, buzz around the game was mixed, and the fact that it saw two delays before its eventual release raised even more heads. But now that it’s here, while I can’t say it’s Ubisoft’s savior, I can say it’s easily one of the best entries in the series yet.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes fans to a place they’ve been clamoring for years over, Japan. That said, since Ghost of Tsushima sort of beat them to the punch five years ago, excitement simmered down a little bit. Despite that, Shadows’ take on Japan is tremendous and it’s about as vast as you’d expect a Ubisoft open world to be. It might even be too vast, but we’ll go over that later.
The game puts you in the shoes of two protagonists. There’s Naoe, one of the last remaining members of her clan before they were vanquished by the samurai lord Nobunaga. After the death of her father, she uncovers a hidden blade that her family had been protecting and seeks revenge while learning more about the secrets her family had.
Then there’s Yasuke, known in the mainstream as the black samurai. Yasuke acted as a servant to the Portuguese before Nobunaga requested that he be put into his care, where he eventually grew to become Nobunaga’s “one-man army.”
Yasuke’s clunkiness will make you not want to explore Japan with him.
While Assassin’s Creed has more or less had the same controls for years now, both Naoe and Yasuke have a different feel to them. Naoe is your more traditional Assassin’s Creed protagonist. She’s quick, nimble, great at parkour and is best used for stealth and swift assassinations. On the other hand, with Yasuke, there’s hardly anything stealthy about him. He’s not quick or nimble, he struggles to climb, and while he can duck and cover, he’s best used as muscle. His assassinations are incredibly brutal to boot.
The game’s story eventually causes the two protagonists to cross paths, and once you get to that point, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between the two, depending on situation’s context. For example, if you’ve been discovered as Naoe during a stealth segment and have to go hide, you won’t be able to switch to Yasuke at that point.
As I mentioned in my review in progress, my biggest annoyance with the system was the fact that you never actually get to use Yasuke until much later in the game–except for the game’s introduction. I clocked in over 16 hours on the campaign before finally getting to use him, and because his movements were so heavy, there weren’t many times I actually enjoyed playing as him. When you get through various story beats, you’ll often be given a chance to move on with the story using either character, and most of the time, I used Naoe just because she was the more enjoyable character to use and traverse with.
Depending on who you ask, traversal in Shadows might leave much to be desired. As a way to increase immersion, Shadows employs a scout system when exploring new areas. When starting a quest in the game, you’re only given an idea of where to go, and you have to use context clues given in the story and the objectives to figure out exactly where your destination is. To make this easier, you can send scouts to scout the area to pin the area down even more, but even then there’ll be times where you’ll walk around aimlessly looking for your waypoint. While the system makes sense, it’s more archaic and troublesome than it has to be, and thankfully you can turn off the immersion setting so you’ll be able to make waypoints for where you have to go right away. Assassin’s Creed’s Japan is a joy to explore, but it’s easy to be overwhelmed by it, and there’s simply too much to do to rely on this immersion setting.
As usual, assassinate the main targets to advance the story. It’s just really easy to get caught up doing something else for other reasons.
This is actually where the game really starts to falter. As with many of their open world games before it, there is little to no limit to the places to explore and things to do in Shadows. While it’s great that it comes with this amount of content right out of the box, it’s really hard to focus in what it is you should be doing or even want to be doing. On top of the main story, you have the arcs of people in the league, you have other assassination assignments to attend to, there are shrines to pray in, viewpoints to discover, and in addition to everything else I didn’t mention, this is stuff that you have access to virtually right away.
The result is a disjointed experience that makes it easy to see why there are some years where Assassin’s Creed tries to dumb itself down. If they did some more quest locking the way Sucker Punch did with Ghost of Tsushima, the depth would be much easier to handle. The problem is that while the game does have a canon mode, it still encourages you to go out of your way to do as many quests as possible in order to level up and find the best gear, because that’s the main way to make the game easier. In doing so, it just makes it way too easy to lose any focus or inspiration to move on.
When you eventually get a handle of how the game is structured, it becomes easier to focus on the game’s key beats while building the duo up. There’s a solid story for both Naoe and Yasuke told in Shadows, and without saying too much, they’re tied to each of their origins. You don’t really unearth much of this until Act 3, and it’s really at that point where you’ll decide whether the rest of the game is worth your time–at least this was the breaking point for me where I decided I was going to at least roll the credits.
But when I got to that point, it felt abrupt. Yasuke’s ending felt anticlimactic while as Naoe, it felt like she only just got real direction as to what it is she’s supposed to be doing in the story. Rolling credits was a weird feeling of the story not feeling finished, but there was undoubtedly enough polish and content to be satisfied with the playthrough. I wouldn’t call this a bad feeling, but I wouldn’t call it a good feeling either. Either way, it took me around 40 hours to finish the main story, and I still had plenty of side stories with the league and other targets to go.
Hopefully you like subtitles because the English dub is atrocious.
Feelings about the plot aside, the game’s production is also a bit head scratching. First off, the game is beautiful. I played the game on the PlayStation 5 in performance mode really enamored with the 4K HDR. It’s easily one of the best looking games I’ve ever laid my eyes on. The animations are crisp, the character design is excellent, and Ubisoft really created a feudal Japan the rivals that of what we’ve seen out of Ghost of Tsushima. The way the visuals transition into its black-and-white-and-red-all-over style makes every assassination feel good, and the mix of modern hip hop blended with the classical Japanese wind instruments really give the game some character. That said, audio isn’t a complete win.
The game’s English dub is absolutely dreadful. It sounds like a bunch of Asian people were thrown into a studio to read English lines, and there’s some bad pronunciation of both English and Japanese words. This did get better over time, but I’m unsure if it was because it improved with updates or because I somehow got used to it. On the other hand, you do have the option of playing the game in “immersion mode” which allows you to hear the Japanese and Portuguese speak their native tongue. That’s perfect. At the same time, if you’re not somebody who really enjoys reading subtitles, this won’t change your mind.
I have a lot of respect for Ubisoft Quebec and the chances they took trying to change the formula up for the sake of immersion while adhering to a lot of the feedback that people have for what’s now their fourth open world RPG iteration. Not a lot of those changes work, but the good thing is that most of them can be turned off or reversed in the settings. There are tons of annoyances along with these like how long it takes for you to unlock Yasuke (and then him being kind of lame when you do), changes in season that aren’t immediately obvious when they’ll happen, and a base mode that as far as I’m concerned serves no purpose.
That said, it’s a polished experience with no lack of things to do. There’s lots of game here, whether you spend the full $70 or the $30 it’ll likely be a few months from now. For everything it has going for it, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a great game and easily one of the best games in the series.
A lot of people in the industry have their eyes on Ubisoft. Since 2023, the company has seen their headcount reduced by over 17,000 workers. It would be irresponsible to say that this is solely due to recent games not…
A lot of people in the industry have their eyes on Ubisoft. Since 2023, the company has seen their headcount reduced by over 17,000 workers. It would be irresponsible to say that this is solely due to recent games not having the critical or sales metrics expected, but it’s definitely something on people’s minds. When Assassin’s Creed Shadows was unveiled last year, buzz around the game was mixed, and the fact that it saw two delays before its eventual release raised even more heads. But now that it’s here, while I can’t say it’s Ubisoft’s savior, I can say it’s easily one of the best entries in the series yet.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes fans to a place they’ve been clamoring for years over, Japan. That said, since Ghost of Tsushima sort of beat them to the punch five years ago, excitement simmered down a little bit. Despite that, Shadows’ take on Japan is tremendous and it’s about as vast as you’d expect a Ubisoft open world to be. It might even be too vast, but we’ll go over that later.
The game puts you in the shoes of two protagonists. There’s Naoe, one of the last remaining members of her clan before they were vanquished by the samurai lord Nobunaga. After the death of her father, she uncovers a hidden blade that her family had been protecting and seeks revenge while learning more about the secrets her family had.
Then there’s Yasuke, known in the mainstream as the black samurai. Yasuke acted as a servant to the Portuguese before Nobunaga requested that he be put into his care, where he eventually grew to become Nobunaga’s “one-man army.”
Yasuke’s clunkiness will make you not want to explore Japan with him.
While Assassin’s Creed has more or less had the same controls for years now, both Naoe and Yasuke have a different feel to them. Naoe is your more traditional Assassin’s Creed protagonist. She’s quick, nimble, great at parkour and is best used for stealth and swift assassinations. On the other hand, with Yasuke, there’s hardly anything stealthy about him. He’s not quick or nimble, he struggles to climb, and while he can duck and cover, he’s best used as muscle. His assassinations are incredibly brutal to boot.
The game’s story eventually causes the two protagonists to cross paths, and once you get to that point, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between the two, depending on situation’s context. For example, if you’ve been discovered as Naoe during a stealth segment and have to go hide, you won’t be able to switch to Yasuke at that point.
As I mentioned in my review in progress, my biggest annoyance with the system was the fact that you never actually get to use Yasuke until much later in the game–except for the game’s introduction. I clocked in over 16 hours on the campaign before finally getting to use him, and because his movements were so heavy, there weren’t many times I actually enjoyed playing as him. When you get through various story beats, you’ll often be given a chance to move on with the story using either character, and most of the time, I used Naoe just because she was the more enjoyable character to use and traverse with.
Depending on who you ask, traversal in Shadows might leave much to be desired. As a way to increase immersion, Shadows employs a scout system when exploring new areas. When starting a quest in the game, you’re only given an idea of where to go, and you have to use context clues given in the story and the objectives to figure out exactly where your destination is. To make this easier, you can send scouts to scout the area to pin the area down even more, but even then there’ll be times where you’ll walk around aimlessly looking for your waypoint. While the system makes sense, it’s more archaic and troublesome than it has to be, and thankfully you can turn off the immersion setting so you’ll be able to make waypoints for where you have to go right away. Assassin’s Creed’s Japan is a joy to explore, but it’s easy to be overwhelmed by it, and there’s simply too much to do to rely on this immersion setting.
As usual, assassinate the main targets to advance the story. It’s just really easy to get caught up doing something else for other reasons.
This is actually where the game really starts to falter. As with many of their open world games before it, there is little to no limit to the places to explore and things to do in Shadows. While it’s great that it comes with this amount of content right out of the box, it’s really hard to focus in what it is you should be doing or even want to be doing. On top of the main story, you have the arcs of people in the league, you have other assassination assignments to attend to, there are shrines to pray in, viewpoints to discover, and in addition to everything else I didn’t mention, this is stuff that you have access to virtually right away.
The result is a disjointed experience that makes it easy to see why there are some years where Assassin’s Creed tries to dumb itself down. If they did some more quest locking the way Sucker Punch did with Ghost of Tsushima, the depth would be much easier to handle. The problem is that while the game does have a canon mode, it still encourages you to go out of your way to do as many quests as possible in order to level up and find the best gear, because that’s the main way to make the game easier. In doing so, it just makes it way too easy to lose any focus or inspiration to move on.
When you eventually get a handle of how the game is structured, it becomes easier to focus on the game’s key beats while building the duo up. There’s a solid story for both Naoe and Yasuke told in Shadows, and without saying too much, they’re tied to each of their origins. You don’t really unearth much of this until Act 3, and it’s really at that point where you’ll decide whether the rest of the game is worth your time–at least this was the breaking point for me where I decided I was going to at least roll the credits.
But when I got to that point, it felt abrupt. Yasuke’s ending felt anticlimactic while as Naoe, it felt like she only just got real direction as to what it is she’s supposed to be doing in the story. Rolling credits was a weird feeling of the story not feeling finished, but there was undoubtedly enough polish and content to be satisfied with the playthrough. I wouldn’t call this a bad feeling, but I wouldn’t call it a good feeling either. Either way, it took me around 40 hours to finish the main story, and I still had plenty of side stories with the league and other targets to go.
Hopefully you like subtitles because the English dub is atrocious.
Feelings about the plot aside, the game’s production is also a bit head scratching. First off, the game is beautiful. I played the game on the PlayStation 5 in performance mode really enamored with the 4K HDR. It’s easily one of the best looking games I’ve ever laid my eyes on. The animations are crisp, the character design is excellent, and Ubisoft really created a feudal Japan the rivals that of what we’ve seen out of Ghost of Tsushima. The way the visuals transition into its black-and-white-and-red-all-over style makes every assassination feel good, and the mix of modern hip hop blended with the classical Japanese wind instruments really give the game some character. That said, audio isn’t a complete win.
The game’s English dub is absolutely dreadful. It sounds like a bunch of Asian people were thrown into a studio to read English lines, and there’s some bad pronunciation of both English and Japanese words. This did get better over time, but I’m unsure if it was because it improved with updates or because I somehow got used to it. On the other hand, you do have the option of playing the game in “immersion mode” which allows you to hear the Japanese and Portuguese speak their native tongue. That’s perfect. At the same time, if you’re not somebody who really enjoys reading subtitles, this won’t change your mind.
I have a lot of respect for Ubisoft Quebec and the chances they took trying to change the formula up for the sake of immersion while adhering to a lot of the feedback that people have for what’s now their fourth open world RPG iteration. Not a lot of those changes work, but the good thing is that most of them can be turned off or reversed in the settings. There are tons of annoyances along with these like how long it takes for you to unlock Yasuke (and then him being kind of lame when you do), changes in season that aren’t immediately obvious when they’ll happen, and a base mode that as far as I’m concerned serves no purpose.
That said, it’s a polished experience with no lack of things to do. There’s lots of game here, whether you spend the full $70 or the $30 it’ll likely be a few months from now. For everything it has going for it, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a great game and easily one of the best games in the series.
by Danreb Victorio
