In a lot of ways Japan has always felt like Ubisoft’s break glass in case of emergency for Assassin’s Creed. The setting was teased in the very first game in the franchise and since then has more or less been the most sought after setting. Ubisoft however, has felt more interested in the western half of the world, giving unprecedented locals like Renaissance Italy & the Caribbean timee to shine. While this has worked for the most part, after years of fan clamoring, and likely some competition from Ghost of Tsushima, with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft delivers on the promise they made over a decade ago: You can be a ninja.
And it’s pretty good!
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Developer: Ubisoft Quebec
Price: $69.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was supplied with Ubi Connect code for review
Assassin’s Creed Shadows still functions as an RPG like the last 3 games in the franchise, only this time splitting the stealth and combat focuses between two characters: Naoe and Yasuke. This of course means two skill trees AND two sets of gear to manage. Thankfully it’s relatively straightforward to deal with.
Naoe is the ninja and more or less the main character. Most of her abilities are the standard fare Assassin’s Creed ones. Sneaking, leaps of faith, stabbing, the usual. Yasuke on the other hand is a mountain of a man who launches people 20 feet back with a single kick and can brutally deal with waves of enemies. The game is built around using whichever character you prefer to deal with any task, and it’s cool that they really worked to highlight the benefits of using both.
That said, stealth seems like it was the major focus for this game, getting a major overall from the last few entries. Which is what you’d hope, because: ninjas. It feels great running across rooftops and nailing samurai in the head with your kunai or disappearing into smoke when things go south.
Instead of the traditional AC style of hidden or not hidden, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has you sticking to the titular shadows. Your visibility to enemies is partially based on how much light is hitting you. Fully visible in broad daylight, hard to see in shadows, and invisible in bushes or hiding places. It adds a lot of dynamism to the stealth, making daylight escapades harder and night ones more brutally efficient. Various other factors can affect visibility such as weather, like storms and fog that obscures you more, while making it harder for you to see. It’s the best stealth has felt in any of these games since the Assassin’s Creed 2 era.
The combat on the other hand is just fine. It’s a basic parry then hit style, which gets tiring. Even if it is fun to launch people around as Yasuke. It just never gels into something great, just a thing you can do.
They do a great job separating the characters for the specific goals. Naoe is great at everything you expect out of an Assassin’s Creed game, while Yasuke is just good at being a nice dude and an unstoppable killing machine. It’s a joy watching him mess up the leap of faith and tumble out of the hay or barely holding on the edge of a building with a “What am I even doing here” look on his face.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a gorgeous rendition of feudal Japan. Set in the areas in and around Kyoto & Osaka. Deep lush woods that give way to farms, towns and cities. All of it feels very alive in a way these games usually excel at. I’m no scholar of Feudal Japan, but you can tell real work and care went into representing these historic locations, capturing the essence of what it looked like and possibly felt like.
A welcome addition to this is the inclusion of seasons. All 4 seasons are represented in this game adding a lot of diversity to the visuals, and honestly changing the way you navigate the map. In winter the ground off the road might be covered in deep snow making it hard to run through, or icicles might be on roofs you’re sneaking across, dropping and alerting people to your presence. In summer huge storms roll through, making fights feel extra climatic or giving you that extra boost to stealth at the risk of impaired vision. The changing seasons also end alert phases and may bring resources. It’s a cool system, that shockingly isn’t just for show and just adds that little bump to the world.
They also changed the way you interact with the world, gone is the massive Ubisoft checklist map! It’s replaced by a map that you slowly uncover as you explore. Entering towns and overhearing people talk about the local comings and goings. Leading to finding things like a corrupt samurai holding up folks in a tea garden, or just simply the location of nearby collectables. Finding main mission objectives has changed as well, instead of pointing you directly to a place, you are given clues about its general location then use a scout, to well, scout out the place and give you a general area of where the mission starts. From there you search for the person or object in question by holding down L2 and looking for a glowing blue ball.
A lot of this feels cool, but at times it feels like an over designed answer to a relatively simple problem. The massive checklist is there, just obscured and hidden, and while the systems in place feel cool, they get tiring and confusing. Sometimes you just want to start a quest without wasting a scout, so you spend a lot of time running up and down the streets of a town or city looking for the magic blue ball that starts the game.
Randomly stumbling onto a corrupt cabal of samurai is cool, but it’s not as cool if the rumor mill in town still talks about it even if you’ve dealt with the problem. In some cases, it’s hard to tell if people talking is just for world-building or actually leads to a quest. In one case I followed a man chasing after his dog for a good 20 minutes never knowing if this actually led to something or if we were both caught in some sick predesigned loop.
All of this can be turned off in favor of a more traditional Assassin’s Creed experience, but warts and all the new systems are worth it, the joy of discovery will always beat being spoon fed info. You can’t help but feel like there were more elegant solutions for this problem, seeing as every recent major open world game seems to have broken free from the Ubisoft system.
If all of this didn’t seem like enough to you, there’s also an Animal Crossing style base building mode. In which you build the protagonist’s hideout. Placing buildings that give various buffs and gameplay features while completely customizing them and the area around them. Putting down Cherry Blossoms and cows to your heart’s content. It’s all very fun, but the interaction is minimal. As you make these buildings for you, and you alone. As far as I can tell, the NPCs that fill out your hideout only interact with one of these buildings, leaving the rest noticeably empty and untouched. It’s strange, as if everyone was whisked away mid task leaving you alone with your many cows.
Does Assassin’s Creed Shadows Deliver?
This is emblematic of the game as a whole, solid choices, mixed with overambition that never quite realizes what it’s reaching for. But what’s strange is that the game still mainly works despite its flaws. At its core, it’s a strong well made game, and you want to keep playing it. Experimentation isn’t always perfect, not every game can flawlessly reinvent itself, sometimes there are misfires, and sometimes they nail it, and sometimes both can happen. Sure there are criticisms of the format of this game, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows succeeds in the one area it needed to: making you feel like a ninja.
Sometimes that’s enough.
The Final Word
While not perfect, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a great ninja simulator and an okay open world game.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
