Review: Assassin’s Creed Shadows is two steps forward one step back

In playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I’ve realized the series is the video game equivalent of Huel. It’s the most basic elements of “video game” refined into a tasteless powder that fills you up and keeps you going without having much else of value. The difference is that Huel is much quicker than cooking meal, while the Assassin’s Creed games suck up 50 to 100 hours of your life. As negative as that sounds, I do think there’s a place for that in our gaming diets, and Assassin’s Creed is the one series I let get away with it.

The historical settings have a lot to do with it. I don’t claim to be an expert on Japanese culture, but Shadows captures the vibes of the era well, although there is plenty of room for improvement. The biggest weakness is the people of the world, who don’t stand out at all. I know this series has never known how to motivate its characters with anything other than vengeance, but somehow I was still disappointed when that was all Naoe and Yasuke could go on about.

That said, when I sit atop a viewpoint and look out at the wooded mountains with vibrant autumnal colors and the sun just peeking over the horizon, I can’t help but be taken aback by it. Japanese architecture and flora are beautiful, and the game gives you plenty of moments to revel in it without overly fetishizing it like Ghost of Tsushima always did. If I’m going to be running around an open world filling in a checklist of question marks, viewpoints, and activities, then that world better be as gorgeous as it can be, and Shadows hits the mark in that aspect.

As far as Ubisoft’s open-world checklists go, this isn’t its best outing. Most question marks on your map will just be locations with nothing to offer, a hostile district with little value outside of early game resources, and occasionally an actual activity. However, even those activities aren’t anything special. Gone are the days of stumbling across interesting missions out in the world – now you’ve just got to sit and press a series of button prompts to meditate or trot slowly on a horse while shooting very easy-to-hit targets.

By far the best thing you can do in the open world is infiltrate the castles. These locations have a lot of loot, and to unlock the final legendary chest you must assassinate several elite enemies scattered around the place. Some of these locations can be quite large and taking them out was always a fun challenge, especially with the new tools at your disposal in Shadows.

Kunai, smoke bombs, bells, and shuriken offer a variety of strategies to help distract and take out enemies as you run from bush to bush in these forts. Plus, with a new system that factors the light and shadow level into how hidden you are, you gain a lot from taking the time to assess your environment and figure out a plan. It’s still not Splinter Cell levels of stealth gameplay, but it’s better than the “sit in a bush and whistle” strategy of previous entries.

It isn’t without its frustrations though. Despite making light level a factor, there is no way to wait for nighttime before infiltrating – aside from sitting around and waiting the 30 minutes or so it takes for the day to cycle – which is an especially odd decision when so many gear upgrades encourage nighttime infiltrations, only activating once the sun goes down. On top of that, the enemy’s AI seems to have gone backward from previous games, as they can no longer climb rooftops to pursue you, so if you do get spotted, you can just lie down on a roof and wait for them to give up.

You’ll have much more fun getting into open combat anyway, especially as Yasuke is designed around that entire gameplay style. The combat still isn’t world-class but it’s a dramatic improvement on previous games with a fun dodge and parry system that forces you to put some thought into battles, instead of Valhalla’s button-mashing affair or the disjointed system Mirage attempted.

When you turn your attention to missions, things seem like an improvement at first. A game about assassins assassinating people is a step up from a lot of the recent games until you realize just how many targets get thrown at you, most of which are optional. The objectives menu just kept filling up with more circles of targets to track down and assassinate and it got tiresome by the end, especially as locating them isn’t much of a challenge. Each one gives you a brief description of their location that you can usually work out very easily, and even if you can’t, the game lets you use scouts to narrow down their location anyway.

I think back to the older games where side-quest assassinations used to have interesting set-ups in unique locations – sometimes with set-pieces to accompany them – and I wonder where all that charm and character has gone; a statement I can apply to the whole series at this point.

Despite all these complaints, I still come away from Assassin’s Creed Shadows saying I enjoyed it. It has plenty of frustrations, but this series has a formula that I click with, and the improvements in stealth infiltrations this time around go a long way to make up for the game’s other weaknesses. That said, if you’ve never been a fan or have felt your interest wavering with successive entries, Shadows isn’t going to do anything to turn you around on it.