Assassin’s Creed Shadows
A confusing entry, in a franchise that doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore.
After finishing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I felt compelled to write all my thoughts down so I could properly understand exactly how I felt about this game. It’s odd — I should love it. I loved Origins, and this game upgrades many of Origins’ core systems and ideas. But for some reason, it just doesn’t feel right.
The Good
The stealth system remains really solid, there are some nice additions to the previous games, such as Naoe being able to go prone to stay stealthy in shorter grass. Some of the tools present in Mirage make a return and I think the bell is a good fill in for the ones that are missing and it is nice having smoke bombs in an RPG-style Assassin’s Creed since they were missing from the first three, discounting Valhalla’s strange smoke arrows which were trapped behind a DLC anyway.
Having double assassinate finally be present in one of these games is an excellent addition as well, even with the odd chain assassinate system from Origins, where Bayek would likely get noticed when before you could just assassinate two guards at the same time. However, the feature feels somewhat misguided. In previous iterations, double assassinate worked when two guards stood close together. You could approach them, and both would glow red, indicating you could kill them. Then, they would teleport into the animation. In this game, I assume in order to avoid teleporting guards, the context is if two guards are standing parallel next to each other as close as possible, only then does the prompt appear, meaning you have to use smoke bombs in most instances.
There is a visibility system which adds into the stealth as well which allows you to gauge how visible or hidden Naoe is at night or in the dark. This is a really nice inclusion, giving the player more interaction with the world, as they can extinguish lights and lamps to make it harder for enemies to see Naoe.
The combat feels largely similar to the previous games as well, sometimes there are enemies with more health than it feels like they should have, but generally the damage sponges have been toned down in comparison to Odyssey, even in the boss fights which sometimes feel like Yasuke can run right through them, sometimes to an annoying degree where it can feel unsatisfying to beat a boss.
Yasuke’s combat in particular feels really nice, his sheath attack is a very good addition to the combat, and allowing him to block, while Naoe can only parry separates them nicely. This isn’t a Syndicate/Jacob and Evie situation, Naoe and Yasuke actually feel different in the combat. As someone who got used to spamming dodge in Origins and Odyssey, then saw Valhalla add a stamina system to punish me for doing that, I am glad to see this game has no stamina so I can spam dodge to my hearts content. I’m talking about this now because it’s probably the largest way Naoe and Yasuke feel different in combat, in which Naoe leaps and rolls away after you press dodge, Yasuke merely side steps due to his larger frame and heavier armour. This can lead to a sudden spike in difficulty when Yasuke is fighting a larger amount of ranged enemies, where its much harder to close the gap than with Naoe who is much faster, luckily Yasuke’s larger health bar and armour help to mitigate this.
The question marks make a return though I feel in a much more streamlined way. The old style smaller restricted areas no longer have objectives to complete, and are simply used as ways to gather resources for the hideout. What’s left are temples and shrines, where the player has to find 2–4 either scrolls or altars and interact with them, very simple and essentially once you’ve done one, you’ve done them all, which would be fine, if they weren’t directly tied to progression, which they are, but I’ll get onto that later. There’s also specific Naoe and Yasuke side content too, with Naoe the player can meditate leading to some nice slower moments, this comes with a simple but enjoyable rhythm minigame too. I haven’t tried the Yasuke ones yet, even in my 35 hours, I’ve spent 95% of the time in the open world as Naoe.
One final thing I want to praise, Tongayi Chirisa’s performance as Yasuke. In a game somewhat suffering from some not great performances, his really stands out as solid, though this could be purely a fault with the English dub of the game as I have heard the performances in ‘Immersive Mode’ are much better. But for Chirisa, he really sells the emotion well, and the different ages of Yasuke too as we see in the flashbacks when he is younger.
The Not So Good
The map is somewhat mediocre when compared with the other large expansive open worlds of the previous games. It’s an unfortunate quirk of Japanese geography with both the hills and the trees diminishing the players sight lines making the map feel far more enclosed than it really is, and making navigation often feel difficult. As someone who makes the rather dumb choice of beelining for the next objective marker rather than using roads, getting over all this games obstacles proved tricky in that regard, where in Origins, and surprisingly even Odyssey it didn’t. There are some bright spots, the huge castles look gorgeous, though suffer from the fact that they all use very similar architecture, the map can somewhat blend together, where Origins in particular had the luxury of dividing its areas between three civilisations, which later games could not do.
Your journey through it also feels confusing, where Origins carefully guides the player around the map, moving clockwise, before the jump to the top right where you are led to the top left. It all makes sense and still allows the player to experience the world at their own pace, they hit the important side content at the right time, in line with the story. Odyssey does a generally good job at this too, its Valhalla where it fell apart. Because of the looser story structure, players can experience the midpoint in any order, making the progression feel random. This is unfortunately true for Shadows as well, where your jumping around the map so quickly you can’t get to know the areas as well.
The hideout only makes this worse, where Origins benefitted from not having one, and Odyssey has the Adrestia, meaning you can move it around if you needed to visit it, what this results in, is the player having to constantly return to the middle of the map for 5 minutes, completely breaking the pace and meaning a lot of the player’s actual interaction with the open world is jumping between fast travel points. Compare this with, what I think is the best game out of the last couple of years, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Similarly, the player will spend some time bouncing between fast travel points to access new parts of the story, however, KCD 2’s smaller and navigable maps make it easier to interact with and enjoy the games world. It helps that KCD 2’s random events and interactions make the player more engaged in the longer journeys, while such moments are missing from the AC ‘RPG’ games.
The progression system feels odd too. Generally, its normal, the player levels up by gaining XP from missions/side content, they are then granted mastery points, both from level ups but also just completion of content. These are then used to unlock abilities or passive bonuses. This is fine, the problem comes from the knowledge system. The actual skill trees are split into tiers, where the further up the tree you go, you need a higher ‘Knowledge Rank’ to unlock them. The way you increase this rank is by acquiring Knowledge points from doing the incredibly boring content I mentioned earlier, shrines, temples, rhythm games. This feels like an unnecessary complication to a system that didn’t need to change, I know the Valhalla tree was even worse but the systems used in Origins and Odyssey weren’t really the problem, and forcing the player to do this side content is only going to make them enjoy it less.
The Downright Awful
The story is a real misfire, the structure being poor is the tip of the iceberg really. In general, we have the same core idea as Origins, close family member is killed by secretive masked order, main character goes on revenge mission hunting them down. This is fine but the fact that the player can approach many of these targets in any order, mean there is very little development between them, and no major reveals either. The loss of the confession sequences from Origins and Valhalla is significant. Those cutscenes were among the best parts of those games, and their absence here is disappointing. What it results in, is the player learning as little as possible with most conversations with targets going something like this:
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‘Where is the box?’
‘Not here, now I will die.’
Its a real shame because it at least felt like we might see the return of some proper Assassin’s Creed in the ‘RPG’ games but it seems we will have to wait even longer for that.
On Assassins, they are shamefully absent for the majority of the game. The game likes to pretend they are present, but really Naoe forms a brotherhood without any real idea of what the Assassins are and what they do. For some backstory, Naoe's mother was an Assassin, she died and left Naoe with just her father. He taught her some things about being an Assassin but not really much about the brotherhood itself. For that, Naoe finds different remnants of the Assassins throughout the map and pieces together what they do, before finding the final area where someone tells her all the information she needed to know anyway. So the game ends with Naoe sort of accidentally forming the Japanese brotherhood, maybe there will be some actual Assassin-ing in the DLCs, who knows?
The Templars are also present for only the very back end of the game, with Yasuke given 4 Templar targets at the end of his story. This means Naoe, the game’s actual Assassin, kills 0 Templars through the main story. Imagine saying that in 2010. However, there is something I find even more offensive, during Yasuke’s conversation with the final Templar target, Nuno Caro, says this
‘I was sent here because no one else in my organisation cared enough.’
They made an Assassin’s Creed game, a series that has always been about one group (Assassins/Hidden Ones) versus another (Templars/Order of Ancients) where one of those groups doesn’t care enough to even show up. It’s truly mind blowing how stupid this is. We finally got a game set in an era with both Assassins and Templars after having Hidden ones and Order of Ancients for years and the Templars can’t even be arsed to show up apparently. Sorry for veering into rant territory but I truly cannot understand what led them to make this writing decision, essentially saying ‘Remember the primary conflict that drove this series, well one side of that just outsourced their role in it, that group botched it so they showed up right at the end to tell you how much they don’t care.’ I doubt I’ll ever understand why they made this decision.
This also stems from the problem of having a character for each type of player. Its very clear that the two characters were meant to evoke each playstyle, Naoe for the purists like me, Yasuke for the new RPG fans who would rather run through the challenge head on. What this means is that you end up with 1 character the player wants, and 1 character who’s inclusion feels rather pointless, and they both end up under developed. Neither of them can hold a candle to Ezio, Edward or Bayek.
Yasuke’s story feels a little more solid, I enjoyed his development more and found his backstory, especially the reveal surrounding his brushes with Templars, to be really interesting. But it suffers from the fact that I was wondering for a lot of his screen time ‘why is this guy here?’ I would imagine many fans who jumped into the series with Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla were probably saying the same thing while watching Naoe’s backstory. The player is often asked who they want to be during the major missions, and normally you will only do the mission as one of them, never switching. This results in the player feeling somewhat disconnected from the other character.
It’s unfortunate really, I think there’s a version of this game somewhere, where Ubisoft put more effort in, and there’s only one player character. You’re asked when you start a new game which type of experience you’d prefer, stealth or combat, and that’s how you choose which character you play as and it takes two playthroughs to fully experience the story.
I should mention the parkour, its essentially the same as Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla/Mirage, simple, boring and without the contexts that at least made Mirage’s somewhat interesting. At least there’s a proper free-run down button now, something the series introduced in 2014 then removed for no reason, but hey I praised the smoke bombs being back so I guess that gets praise too. It’s a shame because they know exactly what people want. A lot of the marketing around Mirage had the designers saying ‘we looked at Unity, we’re making the parkour like that.’ Then it was nothing like Unity. I think world’s of these RPG games are too big and their cities too small to really benefit from a system like that anyway, but it would be nice if they stopped pretending it was anything more than a glorified climbing mechanic.
Finally, the amount of systems that were oddly removed from previous games is notable too, with meditate and follow road missing, follow road being especially notable given what I said earlier about the map design. Creating a visibility system too, then removing the ability to make it night feels like a misstep as well, giving the player even more encouragement to take on forts at night, similar to the previous games where people would sleep at night making them less defended, but then making it impossible to control if its day or night. It feels odd to see such simple systems removed after seeing upgrades in other areas. There’s also no horseback combat, in fact we very rarely see enemies riding horses at all, I imagine this is why it was removed, no need for it so why bother animating it? It does feel missing and I have noticed it from time to time being unable to attack grounded enemies while I circle around them, a useful feature in previous games.
Conclusion
Put simply, it’s a mess. From great stealth, to fine combat to a terrible story. I really wanted it to be a step in the right direction but I just think this series doesn’t know what it is anymore.
Maybe one day, we’ll get the Bayek sequel we deserve — or at least a game that doesn’t leave me saying, ‘Maybe the next one will be better.’
