Assassin’s Creed Shadows review – new ideas drowned in repetition and flat drama

There’s a good idea at the core of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It stars a pair of main characters, the samurai Yasuke and ninja Naoe, who not only play differently from one another but also represent the series’ distant and more recent past. Yasuke, who arrives in Japan during the game’s introduction as an African-born slave to Portuguese traders, is best suited to direct combat, slashing at enemies with a long katana and crashing through doors at a sprint. His movement and combat style are reminiscent of the bruisers featured in more recent Assassin’s Creed entries, like 2020’s Valhalla and 2018’s Odyssey. Naoe, on the other hand, is a more direct heir to the sneakier, fragile protagonists of the first Assassin’s Creed games from the late ‘00s and early 2010s. She’s adept at quietly slitting throats, scrambling up walls, and slipping away from confrontation in the billows of a tossed smoke bomb.

Combining these design styles seems like a smart decision for Assassin’s Creed, which now spans 15 main entries, a bevy of spin-offs, and nearly two decades of regularly launched games. Unfortunately, despite its solid setup and ambition to look to both the distant and recent past for inspiration, Assassin’s Creed Shadows struggles to either make a case for itself or establish a new path forward for Ubisoft’s premier RPG series.

Its opening hours are promising enough. Naoe and Yasuke are introduced on opposing sides of Japan’s bloody wars of unification waged, in their time, by late 16th-century lord, Oda Nobunaga. Yasuke, fighting for Nobunaga, participates in brutal battles of conquest that leave him considering how much violence is permissible in pursuit of peace. Naoe, in a more classic take on the revenge story, belongs to the Iga Republic conquered by Yasuke and Nobunaga as she’s coming of age. An extended prologue sees Naoe’s homeland ravaged, and its people massacred – wrist blades and mystic creeds, of course, pop up during this process – before she’s left for dead after being attacked by a group of mysterious figures, their faces hidden by masks. This introduction is filled with intriguing story setup, and the first few missions that come after it are propulsive and novel, following Naoe as she learns to use her training as a ninja to terrorize enemies, pick up the trail of the masked villains (soon dubbed the ‘Shinbakufu’), and recruit allies at a customizable home base.

Where Shadows begins to deflate is Yasuke and Naoe’s inevitable meeting, which is rushed through in a sequence that ends with their dramatically unearned decision to collaborate and trust in one another. From there, the game’s rhythm is quickly established, and the duo works to hunt and kill each of the Shinbakufu leaders in turn. These targets are, naturally, scattered across different, variably dangerous regions of Japan, and must be uncovered by exploring a given area and taking on missions that gradually reveal their identity. At the hideout, named allies (some of whom you can call upon to lend support in combat) mill around, you can upgrade gear, and you can change the look and feel of the area’s structures and decorations.

Outside of this base, Shadows uses a new investigation system to narrow down leads. Mission sites – the location of enemies to assassinate or characters to meet – are described through hints pointing toward a general area. You’ll uncover an exact location by combing the appropriate area, holding down a button to scan your surroundings, or by sending one of a limited number of allied scouts to search a region and mark the target on the map. Once the game world ‘resets’ with the regular change of seasons, the number of available scouts fills back up. Because scouts are limited, requiring either the passage of time, completing quick side missions, or spending money to replenish, Shadows incentivizes learning a bit about its setting’s topography and paying attention to accompanying landmarks – or at least studying its map with more care than is usually given to open world games, where dashing for the next glowing icon accomplishes the same goal.

Once you’re in a mission location, you’ll often start by sneaking around and scoping out your enemies. The stealth is about the same as usual, but, when playing as Naoe, welcomingly fluid. Trying to avoid enemies, especially when exploring sprawling castles and fortresses, involves stealth game staples like throwing audible distractions, whistling to direct attention, climbing out of sight, and dragging bodies into bushes or dumping them in hiding places. For all but the most committed sneaks, though, outright combat is bound to break out before long.

As in the most recent, role-playing focused Assassin’s Creed games, Shadows’ combat is a solid mix of blocking, dodging, parrying, and striking that, as the characters level up and enemy move sets become ingrained, devolves into relatively simple health bar whittling. Both Yasuke and Naoe have discrete skill trees, focused on fighting style or individual weapons, that see them unlocking new moves or boosts in power as they gain skill points. Both characters start with the ability to use short or long katanas, but their arsenal splits from there. Naoe can wield weapons like shorter tanto blades, the whip-like kusarigama, and throwing daggers and stars, while Yasuke uses a naginata polearm, kanabo club, bow and arrow, or teppo firearm. Though the variety is welcome, there are only so many skill points to go around, meaning the best option, inevitably, is to pick one or two to use at the expense of others.

There’s a similar utility to how you’re likely to approach swapping between Naoe and Yasuke. After experimenting with both characters for long enough – and given how repetitive the process of sneaking through or clearing out yet another castle becomes – it begins to seem like the ideal way to play Shadows is to always explore and scout as the nimbler Naoe and then switch her out for the sturdier Yasuke when it’s time to fight. The game affords playing as either character in any scenario, but its design is still rigid enough that easily climbing to vantage points is always smoother as Naoe, whereas chopping down groups or more powerful enemies is easier as Yasuke.

Regardless, the baseline pitch for each new Assassin’s Creed entry still remains that, no matter what occurs in the game, exploring a lavish portrayal of a given historical setting is worthwhile in its own right. This remains the case with Shadows’ 16th-century Japan. Its landscape ranges from small seaside towns looking out over a horizon of gray waves through to bustling urban centers, ancient pagodas nestled into stone mountains, and dense green forests, pines blanketed in snow during winter or dying leaves flaming red and orange in autumn. There are stunning vistas to see and humble tableaus of a bygone way of life to observe, which, like the best of Assassin’s Creed, fulfill the promise of touring through a sort of living virtual museum.

It’s the look and sound of the game, generally, that does the most to make Shadows stand out. Some action scenes are scored to a mix of guitar-driven tracks where genres like rockabilly and Morricone-style spaghetti Western blend with traditional Japanese instruments to unique effect, lending Shadows a musical personality Assassin’s Creed hasn’t managed as well since Austin Wintory’s lush Syndicate score back in 2015. The genre movie influences continue in flourishes like boss fights that end with the screen draining of color, the killing stroke splashing bright red across a screen otherwise turned suddenly monochrome.

The narrative isn’t nearly as confident or singular, though. Shadows begins by positioning its dual protagonists as both victims and perpetrators of the seemingly endless brutality that characterizes its war-torn setting. It gestures toward a larger point about systems of control, whether those systems involve the feudal obligations of a samurai to their lord, the family legacy a child carries for their parents, or of the violent subjugation of a people through slavery or military domination. All of these threads, unfortunately, are still hanging loose by the game’s end. Some of the side missions and the stories surrounding various Shinbakufu targets help illustrate the above themes, but they come to such general conclusions – and the game concludes so abruptly – that Shadows feels hollow at its end, with its characters’ stories only partially told and its most compelling ideas unexplored.

This would be easier to forgive if Shadows was more compelling on a basic plot level – if the many hours spent guiding Yasuke and Naoe to the end of their mission resulted in more than fairly predictable twists and a curt, rug-pull of a conclusion. But there’s little worthwhile drama to support the game’s repetitive structure. The vision of 16th-century Japan that Shadows presents is gorgeous and its ideas for how to bridge the gap between Assassin’s Creed’s distant and recent past are worthwhile, but everything that should enliven these successes is bland and disjointed, like two protagonists who never feel much like they have a reason for coming together in the first place.