Assassin’s Creed: Shadows finally takes the series to the oft-request setting of feudal Japan. It wholeheartedly follows the blueprint set by Origins back in 2017, but there are a number of areas where Shadows attempts to break the mould. It may stop short of being something I’d call ‘ambitious’, but Shadows certainly deserves commendation for at least trying to break free of its formulaic restraints.
Most prominent among its deviations: Shadows features dual protagonists. After a certain amount of time playing as the Shinobi Naoe, you can swap between her and an African samurai by the name of Yasuke. Dual protagonists aren’t a new concept for the series with Syndicate, Odyssey and Valhalla all toying with the idea to various extents, but Shadows takes it to an entirely new level.
Yasuke and Naoe are more than just two sides of the same coin, they are in direct conversation with each other as characters, dropping in on the other’s cutscenes and developing a relationship of their own. There is tension here too, the man responsible for lifting Yasuke out of slavery and enabling him to become a samurai is also the man responsible for razing Naoe’s village.
Dare I say it, these two are the most compelling Assassin’s Creed protagonists in over a decade. Bayek, Eivor and especially Kassandra had their moments, but Naoe and Yasuke are given real depth here, and their pivotal emotional moments actually feel earned. They’re both extremely likeable in their own way yet are coming to the table from complete opposite angles, which allows for some great character writing.
The first ten hours or so of the main story are spent entirely with Naoe. In these opening hours, she is more fleshed out than your average Assassin’s Creed protagonist is over the course of their entire game. She has a defined arc; she struggles with grief and upholding a legacy she doesn’t fully understand, and develops as a person because of this. This culminates with her choosing to work alongside Yasuke, who she has every right to hate, but through good writing they make it work.
The duo differ significantly in terms of gameplay too. Yasuke can use long katana, naginata, bows and rifles, whereas Naoe uses short katana, tanto and kusarigama. They also have completely unique armour sets and skill trees. In a fight, Yasuke is a strong, storm-the-gates warrior while Naoe is a more traditional Assassin’s Creed protagonist: agile, quiet, and armed with a hidden blade and grappling hook.
These differences go beyond the superficial: Yasuke may be able to knock foes off their feet and smash through shoji, as well as hold his own fighting several adversaries at once, but he’s also slow and can’t climb anything higher than a garden wall. If you attempt a traditional leap of faith with him, for example, he screams in terror and rolls out of the haystack clutching his back.
Naoe on the other hand can climb basically anything in a flash, has access to a variety of throwing weapons (kunai and shurikens, of course) and a grappling hook. In an all-out fight she really struggles, however, and if enemies are even one level higher than her, don’t even bother: you will die.
This commitment to making each protagonist straight-up useless in certain scenarios is admirable. Especially in a series that largely strives to make the player feel like a badass. It leads to some truly gratifying moments because who you choose to approach any given scenario actually matters.
Beyond the character-specific stuff, there are a number of pretty gritty mechanics Shadows introduces. At night, you are essentially invisible to guards when keeping to the shadows, so taking out light sources by throwing a shuriken at a lantern is a viable strategy. You can also crawl, meaning your stealth options feel a little more varied. There are certain times when crawling is required (like when traversing a cave or exploring under a house, for example) but it’s also just generally useful to keep out of sight, even during the day. Naoe can even unlock the ability to crawl underwater in ponds, using a reed to breathe.
Then there’s the season and scout systems. In Shadows, quest objectives are not explicitly marked for you. Instead, you’re given a series of clues: “the person of interest is in this province, in a small town by the river, by an umbrella stall”, or something along those lines. You can follow those instructions and try your best to find the objective yourself, or you can use your scouts. The way this works is you choose a small section of the map where you suspect this objective might be. Kinda like a clue-based version of battleship. If your objective is in the area of the map you chose, their exact location will now be highlighted.
When you run out of scouts, you can’t refresh their numbers until the seasons change. I couldn’t quite work out what triggered seasons to change. Sometimes it seemed to coincide with the passage of time in main story missions, but there were other instances where it seemed to happen for no reason other than I fast travelled. Suffice it to say, the seasons will change whether you do it manually or not.
The different seasons are a cool way to keep the open world feeling fresh, and on a technical level it’s pretty impressive because they’ve essentially had to make four different versions of the same map. That said, beyond aesthetics, I think I’d struggle to come up with any tangible way the different seasons impact gameplay. The same goes for the scouts, I suppose it’s an interesting way to avoid the map being inundated with quest markers at all times, but I can’t help but feel Ubisoft’s other somewhat innovative title in this regard, Star Wars Outlaws, did it better.
The core narrative is a familiar one, with Ubisoft Quebec blending Japanese history with the mythos of the Assassin’s Creed series. There is a masked cult to hunt down, with each target requiring the completion of several ‘preparation’ missions before you can go after the target themselves.
These sequences of missions feel far more immersive here in Shadows than in prior games. One plot line saw Naoe having to attend an auspicious tea ceremony. Not only do you have to track down the appropriate outfit to wear, but also learn the traditions of these ceremonies, how deep to bow, what gifts to bring and so on. It really makes you feel as if you put in the work to get close to your target by embedding yourself in the town, learning about its culture and influential figures.
Visually, Shadows is a significant step-up from its predecessors. This is largely thanks to the inclusion of ray-traced global illumination, which looks absolutely stunning in action here. The open-world Assassin’s Creed games have always looked just pretty good, the scale of their worlds meaning certain compromises had to be made, but in Shadows those compromises are all but invisible. Afternoon sun filtering through a bamboo forest, the shadows cast on the underside of a exquisitely rendered tower or castle and of course how different the world can look in the various seasons. All of it is astounding.
Animations, those relating to combat and otherwise, are extra polished this time too. They’ve always been a bit of a spectacle, but in Shadows the jank has been ironed out. Some of the kill animations are as technically impressive as they are brutal. Yasuke’s strength leads to a lot of poor soldiers getting dismembered in various ways (something that I believe is a first for the series?). When dealing with samurai swords, it just makes sense for heads to roll, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make combat a lot more thrilling.
The design of the open world is another element that stood out to me. The last few games in the series, but especially Origins and Valhalla, feature worlds that are wide open and mostly flat. There may be cliffs and hills, but they’re easily climbed. This is not so in Shadows. Not only is Yasuke literally unable to climb a cliff, but the hills of Japan are often impassable for Naoe too. The Anvil Engine here allows for truly dense forests, which means choosing to beeline to the top of a mountain will have you blindly running through vegetation, with no idea where you’ll come out. This might not sound particularly fun, but I loved it.
Assassin’s Creed is a not a series that typically features environments that push back. There were certain moments where I actually had to stop and check my map to see how the hell to even get to where I was aiming to go. In one instance this led to a detour down the banks of a river until I came across a tiny waterfall. I decided to follow the stream uphill, as the rocks surrounding it actually allowed for Naoe to get a purchase. Following this tiny trickling stream through dense, steep woods, I eventually came to the top of the hill and was able to look down the other side, where I could see an enormous lake, a small village and several temples blanketed in the cool mist of dusk. These moments of ‘discovery’ are few and far between in Assassin’s Creed these days, but Shadows really brings it back.
Basebuilding is another new feature in Shadows, but to be honest it’s not all that exciting. It’s kinda neat being able to make your own little village, and the UI is certainly intuitive, but it always seemed like a grind to get enough resources to build and upgrade stuff. If customising your own little town with statues and shrines and different trees and shrubs sounds fun to you then you may get more mileage out of it than me. You can find various animals out in the wild (including kittens and piglets) and then place them in town. So that’s cute I guess.
There are number of small issues that will likely get patched out but were annoying all the same. One is the inability to invert only the Y-axis for the camera when playing on PC. When inverting the Y-axis it will either do it for both the left and right sticks, or only the right stick but it inverts everything the right stick does, including scrolling text and zooming in on the map. Very strange. Riding horses could be a little fiddly, with them often getting stuck on narrow pathways and bridges. Hardly dealbreakers by any means, but enough to break the flow of things.
Assassin’s Creed: Shadows does its best to feel different while adhering to the perhaps now overly familiar blueprint of the modern series. The strong characters, gorgeous visuals and unexpected gameplay tension may elevate the experience, but it is still, still, an iterative experience. I enjoyed my time with Naoe and Yasuke immensely, exploring feudal Japanese towns and castles was a blast, and the extra time in the oven was clearly worth it, but I still couldn’t shake that feeling that I was just playing more Assassin’s Creed. And you know what, maybe that’s OK.
Rating: 8/10
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was review on PC with a code provided by Ubisoft ANZ.