Six hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the biggest shake-up of the series in years

It might have just been delayed for another month, but I’m pleased to report that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is shaping up to be one of the most promising games of the series so far. Having played around six hours of it at developer Ubisoft Quebec’s offices last week, Shadows doesn’t just look the part of a next-gen Assassin’s Creed game, but everything – from its revamped combat, customisable base-building, and its effective use of having two very different protagonists to play as – all comes together to make this feel like a tangible step forward from what’s come before. If you’re a long-term fan of the series, don’t worry – this is fundamentally still the same Assassin’s Creed you know and love, just with some playful new twists that come from some unexpected places.

For starters, there’s a new Immersive Mode option you can select before starting the game that automatically switches to the Japanese voice track, mixed with the period appropriate Portuguese – good news for those of you who want to go full Shogun ahead of its second season, as Shadows effectively covers exactly the same period of history here. It’s the kind of thing that probably always should have been in Assassin’s Creed games – and one I fully enjoyed during my playthrough – and game director Charles Benoit tells me it was in part inspired by watching Shogun himself. “It’s more immersive. So why not do that, and put it more [at the] forefront [of the game]?” he told me, saying it would be “a good thing” if future games in the series carried this forward.

The biggest new wrinkle in the series, though, came partway through my preview, when I realised I hadn’t yet taken the time to climb up to one of the series’ trademark viewpoints. Having spent the first hour of my playtime trundling through the game’s thrilling, albeit linear prologue (which deftly sets up the back stories of both Yasuke and Naoe with the kind of dramatic flair the series probably hasn’t seen since the days of Origins), the next part of my preview brought me to the castle town of Himeji, now almost mostly fully tooled up and boosted all the way to level 25. I played as the samurai Yasuke to begin with, though a quick dip to the menu screen let me swap to the nimbler shinobi Naoe at any time. The story itself will also offer up several separate points to pick between the two of them as well, giving you the option to decide who to take forward in the main missions.

In fact, climbing up the shrine as Yasuke did actually prove a little challenging – or at least, not quite as quick and easy as simply zipping up there with Naoe’s grappling hook, which will latch onto appropriate surfaces with a squeeze of the left shoulder button. Once perched and in place, that classic Assassin’s Creed panorama spin kicked in immediately, revealing a gorgeous scene below.

The detail and fidelity of Himeji’s surrounding, waterlogged rice fields already looked like a significant step up from Valhalla at ground level, with the paper lanterns wafting and bucking in the breeze while spring trees rustled with pink cherry blossoms that had been kicked up in the wind thanks to the game’s freshly beefed-up physics engine. But viewed from up here, there’s a scale to this visually packed landscape that still makes your breath hitch in your throat a bit. Farmland stretches out into rolling forests and mountains on the horizon, and the silhouettes of other camps, castles and shrine landmarks several kilometres away perpetually draw your eye further across the map.

Soon, courtesy of Shadows’ dynamic new seasons system, those pink blossoms and tiny, spring shoots in the trees and fields will give way to verdant greens and lush bushes when summer eventually arrives (as well as mud and barren branches when winter comes calling). But that initial transformation, at least, is still a few hours away for me at the moment, as each seasonal change is governed by a dial in the menu screen that can either be triggered manually once full, or automatically when you change characters or hit a key story beat in a cutscene. For now, it’s impossible to tear my eyes away from Himeji Castle itself – one of more than 30 unique castles in Shadows, which towers above me in the foreground – though not so high that I can’t still sneak a glimpse of its many intricate layers and living quarters nestled behind the imposing and unscalable walls rising up from its watery moat.

The main story mission in my preview session will take me right into the heart of Himeji Castle in just a little while, but as the camera came back under my control, a series of question marks dot the horizon. Like Valhalla before it, you won’t know what these points represent until you go and see them for yourself. They could be sidequests or hostile areas stuffed with valuable loot to find, more shrines where you can pray to the gods to gain all-important mastery points to enhance your growing skill set, or they might be new characters to meet who can teach Yasuke and Naoe additional techniques to use in battle.

Rest your cursor on them for a second, and they’ll be marked on Shadows’ large and expansive map, which stretches from Himeji’s Harima Province in the west right across Japan’s central flank of Kyoto and Osaka, before ending with Lake Biwa and the enormous temples of Nara and Mount Koya in the east.

So far, so Assassin’s Creed, you might think. But then something unexpected happened. With everything I needed gleaned from Saifukuji’s viewpoint, I swapped back to Yasuke and spied one of the series’ telltale hay bales down below and – almost on autopilot – started that well-worn process of bringing Yasuke back down to solid ground with a trademark Eagle Dive. Only Yasuke isn’t a born and bred Assassin. He’s a slave turned samurai, whisked away from his former Portuguese Jesuit masters and brought into the service of the well-known historical Japanese daimyo Oda Nobunaga. Yasuke doesn’t know how to Eagle Dive, and as I nudge him into a leap, he yells and flails his arms about in mild terror, crashing down on the hay with a mighty thud and rolling straight out of it with a grunt and a groan. As he staggers to his feet with the same weight, heft and burden of middle age as Indy did in last year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he mutters that he’s getting too old for all this while he dusts himself off.

In some ways, I should have seen this coming, as Yasuke feels palpably different to Naoe in almost every conceivable way. Whereas Naoe has that familiar and automated Assassin’s Creed muscle memory coursing through her veins, Yasuke takes a little more effort. His run, for example, is slower and heavier (probably, no doubt, thanks to all that samurai armour he’s wearing). Tightropes will also break underfoot, blocking off certain routes that Naoe could traverse with ease. His leaps through the treetops are clumsy and unsteady, and he scrambles for purchase as he heaves himself up over scaffolds and rooftops. He also casts a larger profile in hedges and tall grass – though not quite to the point of actually making him more visible to nearby enemies. Where Naoe can crouch or go prone, so, too, can Yasuke without much consequence, it seems.

His bulkier frame is a little harder to hide within patches of shadow, though, and the interplay between light and darkness does play a much more important role here when it comes to staying out of sight. Lanterns can be cut down and candles snuffed out on the move, and a new open and closed eye interface reminiscent of Skyrim helps to provide a clearer view about just how concealed you are when sneaking about. Expect that eye to remain open a lot during the winter, too, when trees will be barren, and bushes are devoid of leaves to hide within. Maybe you’ll get lucky with the fog, though, as this will naturally obscure enemy vision just as effectively as a good summer grass patch.

Sound, too, plays a bigger role in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, as even moving slowly, Yasuke will make more noise than Naoe. The dynamic weather will impact your sound, too, with heavy rain helping to mask louder footfalls, but that won’t be much help with you step inside its castles and encounter their brilliantly realised nightingale floors, which were historically conceived to creak deliberately underfoot to alert inhabitants to any unwanted intruders. Even Yasuke’s assassinations are loud and messy affairs, the word ‘Brutal’ fixing itself to the front of every so-called stealth kill, and which will attract the notice of nearby guards and ronin warriors if they’re performed in close proximity. However, while the eye icon works well for adapting to line-of-sight alerts, there isn’t a dedicated noise bar to really help you gauge how loud you’re actually being. This is a bit of a shame if you ask me, and it feels like Shadows still has something to learn here from the stealth games of yore like Thief and even Ubisoft’s own Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

Then again, it’s not exactly a problem if Yasuke gets spotted. With his larger health bar and more powerful attacks, he’s effectively Eivor and then some, taking Valhalla’s Viking taste for blood and vengeful violence to a whole new extreme. While his classic long katana remained a staple throughout my playthrough, his naginata spear also made for an effective limb trimmer, while his bow and teppo rifle make him just as lethal at long range. My favourite, though, ended up being his kanabo club, which has a special move that can crush spines like dried spaghetti. These moves are mapped to your right bumper like they were in Valhalla, though with mastery points to plug into all of Yasuke and Naoe’s respective weapon trees, it will certainly take a while before you’re able to use them at their deadliest potential.

Naoe, meanwhile, operates with a smaller number of weapons – a regular katana, a shorter tanto blade, and a spinning scythe on a chain known as a kusarigama. But her main strengths lie in stealth, harking back to the more traditional Assassin’s toolset found in earlier games. These include special bells to draw attention to corral enemies to specific points on the map, smoke bombs, throwing daggers and more to take out foes silently. She’s also the only one who can pull off a double assassination and use a close-quarters version of Eagle Vision to detect nearby foes behind doors and walls. Yasuke, on the other hand, must make do with just his wits and a whistle, waiting to see if foes emerge from sliding chambers within without knowing if it’s truly safe to advance or not.

Admittedly, Naoe’s blows don’t hit nearly as hard as Yasuke’s, and I found myself dying a lot more when faced with multiple enemies with her. The urge to flee and run for cover (or hoist her skyward with her grappling hook) was much greater in these moments, but that’s not to say Shadows’ overall combat is necessarily worse than previous entries. In truth, this feels like the series’ most engaging combat system yet, and fighting with Yasuke in particular regularly felt like a bit of a secret treat. This is largely down to each of their new ‘stance’ moves – even if what they actually amount to are more like traditional charged attacks rather than actual sword stances a la Sekiro and Ghost of Tsushima, say.

By holding down the right shoulder or trigger buttons, both Yasuke and Naoe will assume a special attack posture that, if timed correctly, can break through guard defences and deliver deliciously gory finishers. The latter will drench the screen in a sudden monochrome, followed by a violent red slash of blood as heads fly and stomachs are skewered – a visual flourish that owes more to the team’s love of anime and manga than the films of Akira Kurosawa, Benoit tells me, but one that nevertheless adds a welcome sense of style to every encounter.

Perfect dodges for Naoe and perfect parries for Yasuke also force enemies into a dazed and vulnerable state now, too, adding a little extra rhythm and nuance to its traditional light and heavy attacks. It also reinforces and rewards what each character’s good at – evasion for Naoe, and full-bodied aggression for Yasuke – making them feel even more distinct depending on who you’re piloting under the thumbs. The enemies, too, feel more defined than before, and you’ll need to regularly swap between the two main weapons you’ll have equipped to deal with smaller, faster foes that easily leap out of the way of Yasuke’s kanabo club, for example, as well as the more heavily armoured samurai daisho guards.

Alas, one thing they’ve both been robbed of this time is an accompanying eagle companion. Though perhaps impractical to either share or have two eagles following them around all the time, the good news is you can still tag enemies and highlight nearby loot and objectives using their new Observe ability. It functions exactly the same as having a bird, albeit from ground level rather than overhead, but Benoit tells me this change came about because “sometimes, I feel we don’t look at the world [enough] as a player”. He cites the game’s 30-plus castles as an example. “If you have the eagle and you can just scan and reveal everything, everything will look a bit the same. But if you look in your perspective, with Observe, you feel more inside the game. You look at the walls, you find things with your own eyes and with the character, so I feel it’s a bit more immersive”.

He’s not wrong, and I did feel like I was taking in more of the world’s fine detail than I ever did in Valhalla or Odyssey. But in those games, I’d argue, a lot of their more memorable details came from the little incidental questlines I found out and about in their respective worlds. Valhalla’s Alice in Wonderland homage, for example, or its riff on the viral Fenton the Dog meme. These sorts of quests and side stories were in sadly short supply in my particular preview build. Sure, only a small slice of the Harima province was available to me last week – with Animus walls aplenty thwarting any farther flung exploration – but I do wonder whether Shadows will feel quite so alive between its major story beats.

There were some side activities to get stuck in with, though both of the major ones I was able to try were limited to Yasuke – a slightly limp horse archery challenge, and a rhythmic QTE-style kata exercise, the latter of which are fixed move sets in traditional kendo practice (and ironically do fit the QTE model of mini-game quite well, I think). Naoe will have her own equivalent activities to help improve her respective skills, too, including kuji kiri meditation points, which also sees the player memorise rhythmic button press sequences, a little like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s summon shrines.

A lot of activities are open to both Yasuke and Naoe, though, and my favourite was probably sumi-e painting, where each hero can whip out a scroll and ink brush to quietly capture a little scene in nature – boars bucking tusks, for example, or birds trying to crack open clam shells – once they quietly creep in for a closer look. It feels a little daft in the moment (and perhaps a touch pedestrian compared to Valhalla’s nutty Fenton antics), but in a particularly nice touch, these scrolls can later be hung on walls back in your customisable hideout, while other paintings and animal interactions unlock pet-able animals you can place (and then pet) at will in its freeform building mode. And yes, I did go and fill mine with cats and tanuki pups – of course, I did.

The building itself is basic, but intuitive – you can find out more about it in my more thorough hands on with it – and altogether it’s a neat evolution of what Valhalla did with its Ravensthorpe homestead. And much like that base of operations, you can visit your Shadows hideout in person on the map, or fast travel to in order to rest, recoup and catch up with your recruitable allies.

Allies are something I’m keen to find out more about in the final game, as they each have their own questlines you can succeed or fail at in order to bring them back to your hideout, and you can assign up to two of them to come and help you out on the battlefield. They acted like extra special abilities in my preview build, and had a substantial cooldown time after being deployed. Luckily, Shadows has purloined the safehouses from Mirage – known here as kakurega – so you can more easily manage these allies in the field, as well as take on extra quests and contracts in the local area. You’ll need to pay a paltry sum of in-game cash to unlock them, strangely, but they can also double up as handy fast-travel points when there isn’t a nearby viewpoint to warp to instead.

In many ways, then, Shadows feels like a culmination of Assassin’s Creed’s past and present, a game that pushes the series forward with its more complex approach to combat and refined (albeit still heavily guided) exploration, while also doubling down on its stealthy foundations. Yes, you can still steamroll everything in your path if you prefer a more action-oriented approach, but I liked how much choice there was in each of the missions in my preview build. While the layout of the various buildings and spaces I had to infiltrate regularly felt tailored to specific characters, the multitude of tools I had to play with for both Yasuke and Naoe also encouraged me to experiment a lot more with different approaches than I ever did in Odyssey or Valhalla. It feels good to have an Assassin’s Creed that feels surprising again, and not just another tired iteration of what’s come before (sorry Mirage). Barring a few technical hitches and a couple of hard crashes I encountered, Shadows looks to be very much on track to become that feudal Japanese fantasy we’ve long been hankering for. If Ubisoft can stick the landing on this one, it will be worth the extended wait.

This article is based on a press event in Quebec, for which Ubisoft covered travel and accomodation.