I’m still waiting for the pure promise of the first Assassin’s Creed from back in 2007. I still imagine the game series’ three pillars—stealth, parkour, and combat—mixed into a beautiful, brutal choreography, blended with historical drama. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, two of those pillars, stealth and parkour, are inherently broken. The structure cannot hold. I’m still waiting for the one real Assassin’s Creed game I can love for its core tenets.
Pros
- One of the most beautifully-crafted worlds in gaming
- Combat is punchy with surprising depth at higher levels
- Dual protagonists offer some variety in gameplay
Cons
- Parkour is imprecise and causes more frustration than fun
- Stealth mechanics broken by enemy AI that doesn’t want to chase you.
- Overly-long story lacks meaningful characters or themes
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features two protagonists, the lithe shinobi Noah, and the enormous samurai Yasuke. The second protagonist headlines the game’s best pillar, the combat. It’s your typical action game fair but with the addition of of the series’ typical brutal animations and a surprising amount of depth once you dive deep into the skill tree. As for parkour, inputs are so imprecise that travelling is a chore. Stealth includes some of my favorite sneaking systems that I’ve seen since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, but it’s all made pointless by one simple factor: enemies can’t climb.
By hour 10 with the game, I thought Assassin’s Creed: Shadows was shaping up to be an intrinsically flawed but still ambitious attempt to offer a true stealth experience in Ubisoft’s venerable franchise. By hour 20, I was routinely yelling at my screen, stomping my feet, and gnashing my teeth so hard I wanted to wrap my jaw around my controller and snap it in half, just to relieve myself of the tension. By hour 30, I was resigned to the issues, enough that by hour 40 I was enjoying Shadows for what it was: ambitious but intrinsically flawed.
Shadows quickly loses itself under the weight of a crushing number of features, from the size of its world map, the number of necessary side missions, and its wide-spanning, near-incoherent story. “It’s a Ubisoft game” is what I hear from most gamer friends when I describe my irritations with Shadows. I detest this excuse, more so because it ignores the strides Shadows actually makes in terms of stealth gameplay and quest design. At the same time, I can’t argue they’re wrong, either. Ubisoft is still obsessed with open world design, but after playing Shadows I only wish there was less gameplay, and for what is there to be more refined and punchy.
And still, I think you should play it, especially if—like me—you have lingering love for the franchise echoing as a faint heartbeat in your chest. It’s one of the most gorgeous games I’ve played in recent memory. It’s also the kind of game I will be thinking about for long after, even if that’s for all the wrong reasons.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out March 20 and is available for PS5. Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Mac.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Still Can’t Make Stealth and Parkour Work
I’ve played nearly every Assassin’s Creed game up to Origins. At that point in the series, the damage numbers floating up from enemies’ heads on every hit and the pseudo-RPG mechanics turned me off. I desperately tried to latch onto something from Odyssey and Valhalla, but I found they were so obsessed with combat they missed everything of what I wanted from a game about “assassins.” I didn’t get to dive fully into Assassin’s Creed Mirage, but I hoped Shadows would lean on even more stealth gameplay and revitalize its parkour.
Noah, the shinobi, is the only character you can really use for stealth. With his enormous bulk Yasuke isn’t made for sneaking. You can see that in the design right down to how he “assassinates” enemies. He literally spears opponents through their spine, lifts them off the ground as they scream, and drops them broken to the ground. Yasuke cannot climb very fast or very well, either. If you try to take a “leap of faith” into a bail of hay, he will scream and flail as he plummets to the ground, then staggers to his feet with a quip like “I’m getting too old for this.”
Yasuke is able to take on multiple enemies at once with crowd-control abilities. On the flip side, Noah has plenty of combat potential, but she doesn’t have the health pool for a protracted fight. Instead, she sneaks, sprints, and stabs—exactly what you expect from an Assassin’s Creed game. She can also do what no other character can in the franchise: go prone. There’s also the inclusion of a visual meter to indicate how quickly enemies will spot you. This ties into the ability to destroy light sources to cloak yourself in darkness or—cough—shadows. It’s the most depth of stealth gameplay the series has ever seen, at least on paper.
Ubisoft’s latest game still fails at making parkour work and it’s largely because of the controls. I can be at the top of the yardarm on a tall ship, and instead of Noah jumping into the water, she’ll decide she would rather plummet to her death on the deck. I can aim a jump to a nearby building, but Noah will instead jump to the ground, where she can be surrounded by enemies. Hitting the “X” or “A” button on a controller is supposed to be the everything-button for climbing, but hitting “O” or “B” is context sensitive for whether you jump off a roof or drop to shimmy along its edge.
These issues are only slightly mitigated by introduction of the grappling hook. This is only way you can scale some buildings with the pagoda-style roofs. It also lets you go where enemies can’t. But that’s a problem, because the systems built for parkour and climbing ruin stealth entirely.
In older Assassin’s Creed games, enemies would try to climb and follow after you after you escape onto a nearby roof. In Shadows, your opponents stay on the ground, bark something like “she went up there” before eventually losing interest and looking for your character elsewhere. The easiest way to lose enemies is by using a grappling hook or by scurrying up a building.
The roof-hopping mechanics end up making other stealth abilities pointless. Noah can unlock the capability to lie in shallow water, breathing through a bamboo pipe. She can use smoke bombs to disappear and bells to distract enemies (if you’re thinking “this sounds like Ghost of Tsushima,” you wouldn’t be alone). Even when these abilities work (and sometimes, they don’t), they’re made pointless by the fact you can simply outrun opponents and scurry onto a roof where enemies can do nothing but throw rocks at you. As a reminder, enemies could follow you onto roofs in the very first Assassin’s Creed all the way back in 2007.
The game is not easy, especially when enemies are leveled higher than you and all you can do is chip at their health bar (you can change it in difficulty options to automatically assassinate anyone). Still, the enemy AI’s inability to climb makes a third of the game’s main pillars pointless. Assassin’s Creed Shadows shows me how the game should play, and maybe with a gameplay overhaul Ubisoft could fix these flaws. In its current state, the game feels like its missing the opportunity to finally fix the series’ woes. Instead, it makes them worse.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Story is Muted, but This is a Gorgeous Realization of Medieval Japan
Ubisoft told reviewers from the jump that this game is big. Its opening missions may take a few hours while you learn the ropes and slowly get to know the main cast of characters who come form your new assassins club. The main part of the game, after you unlock the ability to play as Yasuke, can easily take 50 hours or more. You can’t simply blitz through the main missions, either. Like all recent Assassin’s Creed titles, enemies and areas of the map are locked by level. You need to do side missions in order to level up and not be one-shotted by enemies four to five levels above you.
For as far as I got in the game, I never felt truly connected to either the two main characters or their mission. Everybody’s obsessed with “freedom” from tyranny. Some characters engage with this idea with some amount of nuance, but the protagonists often express their beliefs with vague overtures to “justice” as they murder incalculable amounts of peasant soldiers and samurai.
Still, I can’t fault any of what Ubisoft has accomplished in its world design. I would gawp at every sweeping vista, of every town village feeling like they were truly lived in. Every few hours of play the seasons change, from bright green summers to autumn where the ground is buried in red and yellow leaves. In winter, the snow piles up and storms wash out the world in white. I’ve witnessed the sky glow pink in sunset, something I’ve never seen modeled quite so perfectly in a game before. I’ve not marveled at a game world as much since I played Red Dead Redemption II or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
I can’t stop thinking about the times I struggled through snowstorms on horseback or battled enemies in pouring rain. Then, those instances of brilliance were dashed as soon as my character jumped from a tall tower rather than the platform a few feet away, or when I defeated a hard boss by climbing a the scaffolding of a castle where he couldn’t get to me, then assassinating him over and over while he searched for me in the nearby bushes. Considering the main tenets of stealth, traversal, and combat, it’s a shame that only one third of the game is really there.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels so close to my picture-perfect Assassin’s Creed game. Then again, I could also turn around and replay Ghost of Tsushima, a game which manages to blend stealth, traversal, and combat more organically than Ubisoft’s latest take. That game also has a story full of pathos and theme, something Ubisoft’s massive game and massive game budget failed to provide. Shadows is inherently unbalanced, as anything is when two of the three pillars that support it start to crumble. Just like a building that’s being leveled to the ground, it’s a sight you can’t not watch and wonder “what went wrong?”
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