Brendan Caldwell
Assassin’s Creed is for magpies. These stealth action adventures constantly dangle some glittering side hustle to distract you from the winding road of the main story. They are “while we’re here” games. In town to kill a guy who dishonored your family? OK, but there’s a viewpoint nearby, so let’s go while we’re here. Oh look, there’s a wild heron to sketch along the way, let’s do that, just while we’re here. Hm, squint past the bird and look, a bandit camp full of wood and gunpowder and other useful resources for building your own hideout. Better murder everyone and steal their rocks (while we’re here).
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is another marathon of distraction. A reliably Ubisoftian tourist trap that sequesters you in a hedge maze of history with a packed itinerary and a disregard for the time constraints of adult life. I found the storytelling dull and the combat as sticky-fingered as ever (at least to my grizzled, Sekiro-adoring hands). But it gets a pass from me on the strength of its atmosphere alone, not to mention the commitment to its setting of Sengoku-era Japan, and its impressive (if sometimes overwhelming) scope.
Its beauty lies in details. The wind blusters leaves around in autumn gales, the sun beams through misty bamboo groves, icy fields slow you down as you wade through snow, everywhere NPC extras pray at shrines or perform theatre or sell goods along the roadside. The robes of powerful daimyo flap as they cross their arms, the silk shining in moonlight. Zen monks recite the Heart Sutra on mats outside temples. It is a game of stunning vistas, castle-balanced-on-a-mountain-top compositions, a homage to Japan’s natural beauty offset by refugees of war scrabbling through fresh ruins, scorched hometowns littered with the arrows and ash and corpses of a wartorn nation. It is almost worth playing just to trot your horse through a newly discovered village while dawn breaks over the fields.
These sights and sounds are accompanied by a rote and often humourless revenge story. You play as Naoe, a ninja girl from the countryside whose father is killed by order of ambitious warlord Oda Nogunaga, making her the ninety billionth Assassin’s Creed protagonist to be orphaned by vile misdoers. This only comes after the opening scene, which promises a more interesting character in Yasuke, a slave taken from Portuguese priests and elevated to the rank of samurai by Nobunaga. You play the first few moments of the game as this hulking bruiser with a sorrowful heart. Then Ubisoft put him on the bench for the next ten hours as you play through Naoe’s significantly more predictable origin tale. It’s frustrating, but at least it keeps you playing just to see Yasuke again.
They are sometimes painful hours. Every scene seems to last twice as long as necessary. There are flashbacks to scenes that happened just minutes prior, the first signs of the game’s lack of trust in the player to understand basic subtext. Even as you break out of the belaboured opening, it remains replete with melodramatic dying groans and not-quite-profound last words from loosely sketched characters you have known for thirty minutes. Many vocal performances come across as wooden, sometimes because the flat dialogue gives the performers little to work with. In its worst moments scenes can feel more like stage directions or outline notes than people speaking to one another. Rather than being imbued with personality, the nobles, rogues, and samurai of Shadows often have their conversations bogged down in explanations of who is warring with who, or where the player needs to go next.
This is not a problem unique to Assassin’s Creed – it is a perennial video game curse. But yes, if there is a major weak point of this epic, it’s that the scope of its story has thinned out many characters into quest delivery puppets. Even when you return to Yasuke’s side of the story (it then lets you swap between characters at will) you learn that he too is an ultimately bland nice guy.
It’s not all so dry. One early quest sees you joining a tea ceremony, and it had me laughing at my various faux pas. I made snide remarks to the catty guests. I wore an unfashionable kosode. I turned the tea bowl the wrong direction. It was a disaster, and more interesting for it. I also liked a brief drinking quest, which saw our two protagonists sitting down for campfire sake together, only for Naoe to wake up in the most on-brand place for a hangover assassin to do so: atop a roof. Neither of these quests will impress anyone seeking Butcher of Blaviken-level storytelling, but I learned to enjoy them as rare moments of lightness in an otherwise dry-mouthed tale of plot-plodding necessities.
But how does it feel in your grubby thumbs? Well, aside from the long-established parkour of the series doing its thing (sometimes sticky, sometimes fluid) there exist some movements that are supremely satisfying. Yasuke’s bull rush charge that turns certain doors to splinters is the best example of how he feels to manoeuvre, as a weighty counterpoint to Naoe’s nippy acrobatics, with her own movement exemplified by the 100% unnecessary but 100% cool-as-fuck twirls and somersaults she does while descending from one rooftop to another. These are endlessly gratifying to perform. Climbing upward in an AssCreed game has looked slick for nearly two decades. But this is the first time I’ve considered climbing down just as stylish.
Combat is another matter, and it really depends how you like your action games. I found it hard to establish a suitable battle rapport with the enemies that often cluster around you. There are the usual unblockable hits, reflexy counterattacks, and a selection of your own special attacks to rely upon. But there is just something about the timing and tempo of Assassin’s Creed stand-offs that never feels quite right to me, in any of their incarnations. By the 25th hour, I stopped ignoring my gut instinct and busted the combat difficulty down to its easiest mode. In a junk food game that already threatens to take 50 hours of my life just to complete the main story, every little brawl does not need to be a battle of wits and parries. Sometimes, you just want to behead a dude in two swift hits.
It suffers more transparently when fights break out in tight interiors. One boss battle sees your foe making a last stand in a confined box of a room, where he magically summons waves of shinobi from smoke even as you dodge his blade. This is dramatic and fitting to his persona as a cunning daimyo, but an irksome battle. The lock-on feature can often feel unreliable in such conditions, and your camera can’t keep all fighters in frame. Classic warning indicators help out, but as always they’re a crutch for true spatial awareness. There’s a reason you will learn to approach castle infiltration missions as the backstabbing Naoe, who can often avoid fights entirely.
But even in this brawling dirt there is a shining seam of fun: the brutal yet stylishly animated special moves you can unlock. Both characters get a spread of weapons. Naoe’s stabby tanto and chain-twirling kusarigama are classic shinobi weapons next to Yasuke’s clubbing kanabo or blistering teppo rifle. Each weapon has their own skill tree with fierce attacks that, when used, turn everything momentarily black and white (with a smattering of red) as you impale and hack and slash with lethal abandon. They are a cheap and cheerful means of getting a kick. Quite literally – Yasuke is the proud inheritor of the powerful Assassin’s Creed megahoof. For all the flubbed counterattacking and annoyed dodging, it still feels delightful to bootheel a guy off a bridge.
As for Naoe, she can learn to assassinate people through paper doors, breathe through a straw while lying still in shallow water, and perform double assassinations (all complementing her more sneaky and adaptable moveset compared to Yasuke). You could play through most of the game as one character only, but I enjoyed switching back and forth as circumstances dictated. Loud fight coming up? Put the big lad in, coach. Job sounds sneaky? I know the girl for that.
The sad side order next to these delicious mains is that many skill tree unlocks are the usual piecemeal percentage-scraping. The kind of incremental pseudoboost that I loathe to spend a hard-earned “mastery point” on, because the effect is imperceptible. Getting 2% extra damage to melee attacks might add up eventually, but it is a sort of nickel and diming that rarely excites me and just makes the game longer if you’re a compulsive skill tree pruner. On top of this, said trees are comprised of locked tiers, which means scrounging “knowledge points” from repetitive tasks dotted around the land – rhythm action combat minigames, or long flashback sequences which feel like cut material from a too-long tutorial.
It’s clear these activities are intended as quieter moments – restful and low-effort tasks to do between explosive missions or moreish castle infiltrating (where you have to kill a number of samurai to unlock a tasty reward chest). Repetitive as they are, I enjoyed the side jobs that had me entering Shinto temples to find the correct few shrines at which to pray, or Buddhist monasteries where you simply need to find a hidden scroll or two. These are slower exploratory moments that ask you to navigate and understand your immediate surroundings, emblematic of a greater Assassin’s Creed truth: I always find myself having a better time when I slow down to take everything in. Even so, I can see a lot of players getting annoyed that higher tier abilities are locked behind this deadbolt of classic Ubisoft icon tidying.
Of course, you might look at the huge map of Shadows and think “Holy shit, YES”. In which case, I’m delighted for you. And I agree that the game is at its best when you ignore the main story for as long as possible and treat it as a playground of towns, castles, and country roads to saunter around. This means ninja-dashing across pagoda rooftops, piloting boats down canals, and indulging in the slow-paced historical tourism these games have been encouraging with their extensive Codex entries since the times of Altair. The shrines and temples have been a particular highlight for me, often secreted away in beautiful gardens or deep in some secluded mountain wilderness, a corridor of torii guiding the way. I cannot stress enough how gorgeous this game can sometimes be.
As beautiful as it is, that won’t fool anyone who feels open worlds are cheapened by strict level gating. You may instantly die to a level 35 ronin if you travel slightly south before you’re meant to, which essentially pre-determines your general route through the land. Exploration becomes an odd beast – each province is expansive and detailed, but your path through it is still a curated journey. Yes, this is a game about seeing a distant temple and thinking “I can go there”. But it’s also about seeing a distant icon and thinking “I can get stuff there, I’m a big boy now”. If you play anything like me – a stubborn ignorer of any side quest that begins with a stranger immediately trusting a masked looper with a katana – then you will run up against the level gating. It is the developer’s way of gently coercing you into indulging side quests and doing a touch of Ubihooverin’. Can’t crack that level 30 nut with a level 24 toffee hammer.
Still, you’ll probably need to take that time to collect materials for your hideout. This is a small building and management sub-game that sees you plopping down buildings on a grid so you can recruit more scouts or upgrade weaponry. You can buy decorations for your hideout from shops, or find them in the many loot boxes hidden around. There are sumi-e paintings to unlock, cherry blossoms, fancy European parasols, nice looking rocks with moss. None of this sounds exciting but it will be. It will be.
I spent at least one ill-advised hour gathering the wood needed to build a Buddhist altar at this base, then added a gravel path with trees and lanterns. It was satisfying to walk through my work almost immediately. I can easily see this light but compulsive base builder becoming the de facto core of the game for houseproud players obsessed with decor, landscaping, and pets. For each type of dog or cat you pet in the open world, you will unlock the same animal in your base. If I didn’t feel obliged to almost entirely ignore my headquarters to hit a review deadline, I’d probably still be there, collecting calicos and shiba inu puppies.
I can’t speak to the albatross of “historical accuracy” Shadows has been anchored with for stupid reasons (I know only a single Netflix documentary’s worth about the period). But I get the impression that history buffs will snap their fingers with mild glee at recognisable historical figures like tea master Sen no Rikyū or legendary samurai Hattori Hanzo. Others like me may be left puzzled when the heroes say some character’s name with deep awe, as if we’re supposed to know who they are. (Yes, I furiously wikipedia’d “Ukita Naoie” during one scene and immediately suffered a 500-year-old spoiler.) In keeping with the dual-protagonist nature of the game, there are probably two good ways to enter into your 60-hour relationship with Assassin’s Creed Shadows: either as a dweeb who knows everything about this specific historical era, or as a naive enthusiast keen to learn.
And that’s really it. The setting will largely dictate whether or not it speaks to you. I found it more appealing than the other big Creeds of recent times. I lasted mere hours in Odyssey’s ancient Greece, and the same for Valhalla’s 9th century England, but much longer in Mirage’s golden age Baghdad. That simply comes down to being more into Islamic architecture than Greek myths or Viking longboats. Assassin’s Creed, for all its faults and weaknesses, is as close as video games can get to time travel tourism. I’m glad I went on another trip.
This review is based on a review build provided by the publisher.
ranzware
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