REVIEW: ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Buckles Under Its Massive Weight (PC)

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings players to late 16th-century Japan for the franchise’s first main series entry set in East Asia, its first attempt at dual protagonists in a decade, and its first new massive open-world RPG title since Assassin’s Creed Valhalla debuted in 2020. The first title integrated into Ubisoft’s new Assassin’s Creed launcher, the Animus Hub, Assassin’s Creed Shadows splits its narrative and its gameplay between two antagonists: Naoe, a shinobi whose home is under threat from the Oda clan, and Yasuke, a samurai who’s indebted to his lord for freeing him from Portuguese slavers and training him to be a respected warrior.

For long-time fans of the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is carrying a lot of weight. Fans have clamored for a Japanese-set title since the franchise’s early days. The last dual-protagonist title, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, is not remembered as one of the franchise’s best.

Plus, there’s the specter of the most recent game in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Mirage. It’s a smaller main series game that was released between Valhalla and Shadows. Its streamlined experience intentionally evokes beloved earlier games in the franchise’s history, leaving players wondering whether Ubisoft should abandon its open-world RPG formula and stick with releases more akin to the original titles.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows buckles under the weight of these heavy expectations. While it never collapses entirely, the strain is felt quickly and enduringly. The story is quite captivating, but the pacing is challenging. The dual protagonists help allow players to easily favor their preferred playstyles, but a lot of the open-world gameplay is imbalanced. Despite building a beautiful and lively world worthy of the hundreds of hours it could take to experience its totality, Assassin’s Creed Shadows places too many guardrails and barriers around exploration.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows continues the franchise’s standard of storytelling excellence until it doesn’t.

Players come to Assassin’s Creed games for all kinds of experiences. Whether you’re approaching it as an opportunity to flex your stealth skills, as an action-combat RPG, or as an elaborate and immersive storytelling experience, satisfaction may abound. Especially for those who are story and lore-inclined. Assassin’s Creed stories are, at their core, about truth, justice, knowledge, and how people across human history have wielded power to control it all. Always set during moments of great change, outside influence, and clashing culture, Assassin’s Creed Shadows begins in 1579.

Japan is enduring the brutal unification campaign of Oda Nobunaga, one of the three Great Unifiers of the 16th century. The many clans of the region hold different values and different loyalties, but none can escape the orbit of Nobunaga’s vision of one country unified under his sword. Through the game, players encounter lords, ladies, warriors, children, and peasants alike who have different takes on what it means to live in peace and how peace can be achieved and maintained.

Meanwhile, Portuguese missionaries and traders are taking residence across the land, entangling their values, their desire for power, and their weapons with the ongoing generations of war. The protagonists, Naoe and Yasuke, both arrive in the narrative with their own sets of morals as well as connections to the various powers vying for control of the people and the land. Together, their alliance stands up for the people first and foremost. Even if that requires shedding blood themselves. The suffering of the few is righteous along the path to freeing the many.

The story has some of the strongest emotional beats in the series thanks to the deep connection Naoe and Yasuke build together and with those who join their cause. However, the story is quite sizable. There are dozens upon dozens of characters to keep track of and the game has a weak system for helping players keep up with it.

As has become standard in Assassin’s Creed games, the whole game revolves around a large objective board. It’s the best organized in the series. All of the linked quests are attached to individuals, who are each part of larger circles representing the groups they are part of. Interconnected quests automatically send the cursor between the different individuals on the board to make it clear which quests are related.

However, highlighting the individuals on the objectives board is the only way to recount information about them. And the information is generally limited and surface level. Unlike previous Assassin’s Creed games, there are no codex entries about individuals. The in-game glossary is excellent for collecting information about the environment, Japanese culture, and history. Still, as soon as a character is no longer part of the narrative, there is no way to retrace your experience with them or even call up their name if they’re not a quest giver on the board.

This is a mortal sin in a game as unwieldy as Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Especially because so much of the game’s most intriguing lore—the parts that connect Naoe and Yasuke’s individual journeys to the larger franchise—is separated from the central questline. Assassin’s Creed games regularly have this issue. The primary driver of the plot is introduced immediately and then almost none of the main quests provide any more insight until the game is winding down. Even then, many questions are unsatisfyingly left unanswered.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has a lot of pacing and repetition issues.

This is just a portion of the game’s pacing issues. The game endures multiple long prologues and doesn’t fully open until many hours into the game. And even when it does, there are still more tutorials and long, actionless flashbacks to get through before the first third of the game is finished. The story is interesting the whole way through, and it’s never a burden to spend time with these characters, but it’s hard to get fully invested in the game early on when it takes so long to become fully playable.

Technically, the game can be played in no particular order. After a certain point, a large swath of main objectives opens up that can be theoretically approached in whatever order the player wants. But there is really only one correct order because Assassin’s Creed Shadows is severely level-gated. It should have picked a lane. Either require more of the side quests to be played earlier to serve as interstitials between main quests (and prevent players from having to complete them all at once at the very end of the game) or equalize the level requirements for the main quests so they can actually be done in any order.

If you venture into an area or take on a quest too many levels above your current player level, enemies will automatically kill you in one strike. This isn’t to say they’re undefeatable. Sometimes, it’s a fun challenge to take on an over-leveled enemy or two. But it’s unsustainable as an approach to progressing. Every main quest in the game has a minimum enemy level a few levels higher than the last. This means that unless you’re willing to suffer countless instadeaths, you have to spend some time on side quests and local objectives to progress in the game.

There’s nothing wrong with a leveling system that makes you step away from the main action to paint some animals, practice meditating, assassinate corrupt tax collectors, or clear castles of high-level enemies. The approach doesn’t seem to align with the game’s supposed open-world presentation. Nonetheless, progress is further gated by a new sub-leveling system called knowledge.

Like any RPG, skill points can be assigned across six different mastery categories in both characters. The points unlock new shinobi tools like shuriken, active skills that drain an adrenaline meter for special attacks across the characters’ different weapon types or give stat increases in various categories. Skill points and levels are gained for both characters at once, no matter who you play as, and are spent separately, which means you never have to grind with separate characters for any reason. However, the skills are tiered in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and higher tiers are only unlocked by accruing knowledge points. Most of the ways to gain knowledge are tedious, repetitive, and boring.

There are some better ways, the occasional horseback archery challenge. But the primary way is either collecting missing scrolls or praying at multiple spots in a single temple. These rinse-and-repeat objectives are reasonable ways to make players stop and appreciate the game’s many beautiful locations. But they’re also unimaginative and dull. Plus, it’s hardly ever worth doing them as Yasuke because of the differences in their gameplay.

Naoe and Yasuke’s gameplay are totally different in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, for better and worse.

Naoe is sneak-forward. She’s weaker in combat and has lower health, although she is perfectly adept at fighting as well. Players who prefer clamoring over rooftops and extinguishing fires to create more shadows to hide in will prefer to play as her. Yasuke is tankier, with a lot more health and a lot more damage per second.

Where Naoe has a toolkit with throwable objects, Yasuke has access to legitimate ranged weapons he can carry one at a time, along with a main weapon of your choice. He can run through certain objects and doors, which helps feel like the giant you are, but annoying when it destroys arrow caches or causes you to constantly bump into walls with a full animation every time you’re sprinting in tight quarters.

Naoe has Eagle Vision, where you hold a button down, and all of the enemies in an area light up red, even through walls. She also has an enhanced observation skill, where holding a different button lets the player scan the immediate area for enemies in red, collectibles like scrolls and shrines in white, chests holding new weapons, armor, and money in gold, and quest objectives in blue.

Yasuke can observe as well, but his scope is more limited. He also can hardly climb or parkore. It makes navigating with Yasuke almost never worthwhile. Yasuke can climb buildings, is more adept at sneaking through shadows, and has a grapple that allows her to climb otherwise unclimbable architecture and swing from certain posts. Whether you’re searching for scrolls or looking to climb towers to unlock viewpoints/fast travel points, Yasuke will always be the character to explore with, at least during the main journey.

Switching between characters is easy and sometimes a necessity.

Fortunately, players can at least quickly switch between characters any time through the pause menu, as long as they’re not in enemy territory or engage in certain types of missions at the end of questlines that require manually aborting to disengage with. In some missions, players will be asked to choose whether to play as Naoe or Yasuke. During that time, players are locked into their choice unless they restart the mission from the beginning. There is no correct choice. It’s entirely up to the player how they prefer to play.

The preceding dialogue often hints at how players might tactically consider their options, like if there’s an army outside your door or if the mission is to infiltrate a castle. Other times, the characters will have totally separate, clearly announced objectives they are splitting their labor between, and your choice determines which task you pursue. The first time players are tasked with this choice, they play both sides back to back.

This never happens again. It would have been nice to have more opportunities to play both sides of a mission, not just because that first time set an expectation that was squandered. Still, it’s sometimes a bit weird when you pick a character, the other one goes off and does their thing, and when they reunite in the next cut scene, they talk about things they did that the player never actually witnesses.

Because both characters level up together, if you’re forced to play as one character or the other for plot purposes, it’s okay to favor one character over the other. You will never miss an important character moment or plot point based on these decisions because both characters always return together between gameplay segments for cutscenes. Any dialogue in the rest of the open world or interactions that would affect one character or the other requires you to play as them to proceed.

There are a few moments where dialogue choices can affect character relationships or future quest opportunities. The game is pretty clear when these are happening, and for those who are concerned they’ll make the wrong choices, Assassin’s Creed Shadows offers a new Canon Mode that eliminates these choices.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t innovate enough on the basics.

For new players, the gameplay cycle in Assassin’s Creed Shadows might be totally satisfying. Combat is based on light and heavy attacks, blocks, parries, dodges, and a mix and match of abilities and posture attacks that can break enemy stances or deal extra damage. But for long-time players, it’s much of the same. Compared to the white light of standard attacks and red of unblockable attacks, a new multi-attack indicated by blue light mixes the combat dance up a tad. But Assassin’s Creed could seriously benefit from new combos.

There are a plethora of enemy types in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Many of them have interesting attack combos that players cannot replicate. Chaining light and heavy attacks with dodges or even blocks and parries in strings more interesting than just basic four-button combinations would go a long way in making combat more interesting. There are a few new things like this unlocked through the skill tree, but there should be even more.

The stealth side of the game has a few innovations. Namely, Naoe can go prone in addition to crouching, and fires can be extinguished to create more shadows. Shadows play a major role in the game’s stealth. In addition to hiding in shrubbery and sparsely placed outright hiding places, any shadow can mask your presence. The higher the stealth difficulty is turned up (which can be adjusted separately from the combat difficulty), the less effective hiding places become. But for the patient, stealth feels pretty good in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

Except for when you’ve been caught. Once you’re noticed, there are really only three options, and none of them are ideal. You either fight and hope you’re not to heavily outnumbered. You can run away and reset. Or, you can just die and try again. If you’re dedicated to sneaking through an objective, which is never a requirement, letting yourself die is the easiest option. But it’s not ideal. There is no way to simply reload the last checkpoint, which would make stealth feel like a much more reasonable choice. Without it, switching to Yasuke and fighting your way through a situation is almost always more efficient when you’re tired of trying to be stealthy.

Stealth is still underserved in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

The game needs a better way to restart stealth attempts, and it needs much greater incentives to try in the first place. Having bigger rewards for completing objectives unseen or enemies that will disappear if not assassinated quietly would easily remedy the issue. As it stands, Assassin’s Creed Shadows lets you try to be as sneaky all you like, but it still doesn’t feel like a core element of the game. Especially because enemies beyond your level cap can’t even be assassinated until you match their level.

The other basic element of Assassin’s Creed Shadows that needed more innovation is the mission types. The game has only four types of missions. There are “assassinate the enemy” missions, “talk to this person and get information” missions, and “kill a certain number of enemies of certain types in a certain region” missions. There are “find a certain number of a kind of collectible for an NPC” missions. A couple of smaller side objectives mix things up slightly, namely the kofuns and forest paths that offer limited puzzle-solving and climbing challenges as they’re explored.

A game that requires at least 30-40 hours to complete all of its main objectives needs to have more diversity in its objectives. The series used to have missions that required protecting individuals, completing elaborate parkour challenges or puzzles, or even just creative ways to assassinate targets. Here, every target is either standing in the open or locked behind a cutscene, ready to duel you afterward. Naoe is a shinobi; she should have more explicit opportunities to sneak into a guarded area and sabotage or assassinate a target than the straightforward nature of the game provides.

The world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is beautiful and lived in, yet empty.

The world of Assassin’s Creed Shadoes suffers from the same “so close, but not quite” issues. It is beautiful in almost every way. The environments are pretty; there is fauna everywhere, including a wide variety of cats and dogs you can pet, and the different regions of the game are generally quite distinct from one another, except in one key way: all of the buildings feel like they’re exactly the same.

No matter where you go across the large map, there are really only two kinds of buildings you can enter. There are small buildings where cutscenes and conversations are initiated, and there are large tower structures that hold a few chests, a major collectible, maybe a big enemy, and a viewpoint at the top.

Their contexts are absolutely unique. A castle in a bay feels notably different to navigate than a caste on top of a hill or a temple nestled in the woods. But the design of every building is virtually the same no matter where you go, save for some special cases. And so is the way you navigate it. You either slowly climb stairs and fight enemies from the inside, or you grapple your way to the top from the outside.

They’re not fun to interact with. From the inside, the floorplans vary and are fine if you’re in the mood for combat or stealth on your way up. But from the outside, they can almost never actually be climbed without your grapple. Because of the canopy nature of the architecture, grappling up floor by floor is the only option, and it gets old fast. Especially because once you reach the top, you can almost never just straight down like in classic Assassin’s Creed fashion because the viewpoint is at the top of a spire in the middle of the roof.

You have to slowly descend and usually straight back into enemy territory. While you can always fast travel from the peak, if you use these towards as fast travel locations, it’s a pain to get all the way down, especially because you almost always have to navigate several more layers of wall, moat, and enemies before fully leaving the area to carry on your journey.

Fortunately, the game has a new type of fast travel point that you can buy access to as soon as it becomes visible on the map. Even if they’re sometimes inside enemy zones, they’re always on ground level, and they’re convenient places to refill supplies, change out allies you can call to aid in your combat or stealth and accept localized missions.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows took away auto-navigation.

The other disappointment with the game’s world is navigation. For no good reason, you can’t auto-navigate to an object by horse anymore in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. This feature was essential in previous open-world RPG iterations of the franchise because the map is vast. This time around, you have to do all the galloping yourself. Except when you’re inside a village or temple. You’re only allowed to trot there. It’s so slow you might feel like you’re moving faster if you just run on foot.

To make it worse, the game specifically asks you to stay on the roads. It’s a hint in the loading menus and everything. The game is not designed for you to travel between locations outside of the roads. Even if you see an objective on your compass and it looks like the fastest way there is straight, it is never the fastest way. The game is riddled with mountainous terrain and thick forests with poor lighting. Horses cannot easily navigate through trees, and unlike in earlier titles in the series, you cannot climb sheer rockfaces unless there is a clear ledge to grab.

This will be especially frustrating for those used to navigating previous entries without sticking to the paths. But while the terrain may be accurate to the region, it makes travel a pain. Nobody deadset on reaching an objective marker 2000 meters away wants to get stuck on a long, winding road to get there.

Even when side objectives are regularly encountered along the way, they’re often the boring temple, level-gated enemy territories, or just locations that force your horse to slow down to pass through. Everything is genuinely pretty to look at—as long as you don’t turn the camera to see NPC’s polygonal faces up close—it would just be really nice if you could look at it faster and with auto-navigation.

A complete change to navigation in Assassinc’s Creed Shadows is that objective locations will no longer just appear on your map. You will have to locate nearly every one of them yourself. Previous games made this an optional part of the experience or only used it for some quests. Now, every time you want to figure out where to go, you’ll be given three hints, including the province, the sub-region, and a general direction to look in from a specific location. If that location is already on your map, it’s easier to start scouting from there. If not, you may be running around a large area looking for blue dots on your focus screen.

Two things help find locations faster. You can listen to the locals as you pass by, who often have vague but sometimes helpful hints. Or you can spend money on a scout who reveals objectives within a certain radius directly from the world map. Sometimes, exploring is fun. Sometimes, it’s tiresome. The scouts feel like cheating at times, and they feel like time management assets at others.

The only issue is that sometimes the scouts reveal additional objectives, showing the location of an assassination target you weren’t looking for, ruining the chase later. They can also be too accurate, sometimes revealing locations that are meant to require treading down a forest parkour path but instead take you right to the end.

Is the base-building worth it in Assassins’ Creed Shadows?

Where many previous Assassin’s Creed games have had versions of home bases or hideouts with varying levels of utility and customizability, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has the franchise’s first fully customizable hideout. Throughout the game, players will pick up supplies or encounter deposits where they can assign scouts to collect resources at the end of an in-game season. Seasons change after a certain period of time and deliver new weather and environmental textures along with the resources assigned to scouts.

Your hideout serves two purposes: one practical and one aesthetic. Practically, this is the area where all of your allies gather, so you can find certain quests there or fun conversations (although there are many wonderful objective markers throughout the world that trigger cutscenes offering moments of quiet and character for Naoe and Yasuke, like some lovely cloud watching together). This is also where players build a forge, a dojo, and other buildings that unlock more slots for allies or allow the player to upgrade weapons and armor.

The forge is the most practical reason to ever physically visit the hideout. You have to be there to upgrade. While you will constantly collect higher-level weapons and armor throughout the game from chests and defeated enemies, you can use the forge to increase the level of things you already own.

The benefit might be that there’s a perk attached to a weapon, called engravings, that you really want to keep using, but you haven’t unlocked the perk to add it to a different weapon on your own. You can always have one item equipped and choose to assign it the aesthetics of a different item of the same type as long as you don’t get rid of it, so you don’t need to upgrade things just to keep their look, at least.

But beyond the forge, all of the other utilities of the hideout are passive or aesthetic. But because there is almost no reason to return there very frequently, unlike the highly customizable home village in Valhalla or the ships in games like Black Flag or Rogue. So, the incentive to spend time customizing your hideout is lower than before.

It’s a shame because the area is quite big, and the objects you unlock or collect from chests through regular gameplay are fun to play with. You can even unlock pets to spread around the hideout through side tasks or finding them and petting them around the world. People who like customizing an area like this will have lots to work with; it would just be nice if there was a reason to stop by more regularly.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is as enjoyable as you want it to be.

How much you get out of playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows is really up to each player. Players who try to rush through the main story will not have fun. The level-gating is intense, and skipping side objectives doesn’t just mean slowing your leveling; it also means spreading out story content unevenly.

Players who want to emphasize stealth can do so better here than any open-world RPG Assassin’s Creed game yet, but it still doesn’t fully feel like the integrated part of the game it was when the franchise began. And players who are excited to get locked into a lush and varied world have a gigantic playground to do so, but the world favors Naoe’s navigation abilities too heavily. It doesn’t offer as much variety in the gameplay as a world this big ought to.

It’s a well-crafted game within its own scale with a great story and emotionally resonant characters. However, in the grand scheme of what a big open-world RPG could provide, Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t maximize its potential. While there are many more hours of side quests and future content to look forward to spending time with, the overall package isn’t as satisfying as the heights of the franchise.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available March 20th on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.