Photo Courtesy of Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a poorly made, mind-numbing action Role-playing video game experience that will leave your thoughts as soon as you drop the game.
I will be honest, I don’t really know what drew me into buying and playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I felt like the Assassin’s Creed video game series was drawn out and directionless at this point. I mean, I liked Origins and Odyssey, but completely avoided the two most recent entries due to my interest in the overarching story dying out at this point.
The comments in the game’s official trailer were absolutely brutal, and I recall one of the commenters comparing this to Ghost of Tsushima. Ironic, considering that Ghost borrowed a lot from AC in terms of its stealth mechanics. There might have been other comments regarding the publisher Ubisoft and how Shadows might be their “last chance” at a financial hit, but I cannot confirm or deny that since I wasn’t really buying into the hype that the game was generating.
Regardless, I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to pay $70 on the March 30 launch, plus the deluxe content, and see if Shadows was going to surpass my relatively low expectations. After about 115 into the game, I dropped it completely. I couldn’t finish it. It was simply too much to bear.
The experience for me was incredibly boring all throughout, reminding me that I am a sucker, and irresponsible with my money. However, there isn’t just one overarching drawback with Shadows, as there are many pressing issues with Ubisoft’s incredibly dated game design.
Story
Quick rundown of the main story:
You play as two characters, Naoe and Yasuke. This takes place in Feudal Japan, where Naoe is a shinobi whose home, Iga, is destroyed by Oda Nobunaga’s samurai to restore order. Yasuke is a former slave who has risen the ranks of Nobunaga’s clan to help establish his position as a samurai, and was one of the catalysts behind the raid of Iga. When their paths collide, they figure out that a more dangerous threat will emerge.
I know this sounds stupid, but I felt like there was a decent idea of where to take the narrative. Unfortunately, I felt like there wasn’t anything to like about the campaign.
The prologue and first act were an absolute drag to get through. Naoe isn’t very interesting as a protagonist, and I couldn’t buy into her story. What was more interesting was Yasuke’s story. See, he wasn’t playable until the second act, and it did take a while to get to the actual meat of the story. Yet when I got there, I saw that Yasuke was even more sleep-inducing than his counterpart.
I just don’t know how you mess up the story of a black samurai, with your basic themes of perseverance and overcoming the odds. Easily the biggest blown layup in recent memory. I am currently at the second act of the story, dropping it at that point. Maybe the story gets better. I bet that doesn’t happen.
Graphics/Performance
In terms of graphics, Shadows is the most visually impressive game I have seen in a while. The environment around Feudal Japan is grand and lush, with every passing season having its own beauty. The character models are nicely detailed, with the gear and weapons having their own unique look that fits for the time period.
The performance was surprisingly solid for a game that was just recently released. Shadows runs on a consistent 60 frames per second on my PS5 with performance mode on. No bugs, with very few glitches. Easily one of the smoothest launches I have been a part of.
Gameplay (Mission Design and Combat)
Let’s start with the mission design. It is not at all bad, but it feels incredibly monotonous and kills the impact of a mission I try to start.
The main mission board consists of the foes you have to assassinate and the citizens in Japan you can help out. A huge majority of these missions consist of collecting evidence, just so you can go kill an enemy. Yet, you aren’t “collecting evidence”, you are sent on these fetch quests where you either have to sneak past an enemy to read a meaningless paper to go to another objective.
If you aren’t doing that, you are meeting with the citizens to eliminate a certain amount of enemies in an area. More often than not, these smaller quests are not rewarding enough.
If you want to take a break from the mission board and focus on the locations on the map, you can ramsack castles, forts and complete knowledge quests that help unlock new abilities for Naoe and Yasuke. They will be fun at first, but you quickly realise that this is the same for every major landpoint. It becomes an endless cycle of boredom that has the same copy and paste design for the entire game and it doesn’t end.
The combat is okay for the most part. It does get repetitive quickly and lacks depth in its melee combat. Although this does depend on the character you play as.
The problem is that the characters aren’t balanced right. Naoe has an emphasis on stealth, yet she is well rounded as long as you focus on being defensive. Yasuke is an absolute tank that isn’t effective at stealth at all, but can deal huge damage. Most of the missions feel catered to Naoe and I felt the need to use her character most of the time. The stealth is surprisingly good, especially in higher difficulties, but it doesn’t change the fact that combat feels like a kindergartener’s puzzle.
Miscellaneous
The voice acting is absolutely terrible. You would expect Ubisoft, a triple-A gaming publisher, to acquire talent that would take a project like this seriously. But at least I get to hear someone fail to whistle!
The facial animations are also oddly stiff, to the point where the characters feel like robots half of the time.
The world of Feudal Japan is incredibly huge. So why does it feel so…empty? No secrets to discover, no secret quests, nothing worth stopping for. This is not what you want when you are playing an open-world game.
The monetization is shoehorned in this game. There are item bundles in the store, and “Projects”, which is Ubisoft’s version of a battle pass. The thing is, the gear drops are actually good. There is always a way to try and get the best equipment at any point of the game. So why are battle passes even here in a single-player game?
Final Thoughts
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a poor excuse for an open-world video game. If you have played a Ubisoft title within the last five years, you get exactly what you paid for: a vapid, insomnia-curing video game experience that you will soon forget about and delete from your console as soon as you close out of it.
Many other triple-A games have a lot of heart and soul put into them: Ghost of Tsushima, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Black Myth: Wukong, Sifu and many more. How does Ubisoft have a huge budget and still put out something that is cheaply produced?
Don’t get me wrong, there is an audience for this game, with 3 million players and counting. People like to play games that don’t require the player to think much, just to pass the time. Yet, making games just to make money shouldn’t be prioritized, and I think Ubisoft did just that. They make something that requires no thought, just to line the pockets of investors. Because of that, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a game I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, not even to dedicated fans of the AC franchise.