It’s wild that it took almost 20 years and dozens of games for the biggest stealth action series around to finally bend towards feudal Japan. Assassin’s Creed Shadows makes the most of that theme, with a great pair of shinobi and samurai heroes sharing center stage that are well-written and fun to skulk through giant castles or wade into vicious battles with. Besides the setting, the bulk of the changes this time focus on making smaller tweaks to well-established systems, such as less cluttered maps and skill trees, while also doubling down on things that really worked in 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, like the more focused and tougher combat that accompanies its better paced main quests. It’s not a perfect reset, as imbalances and missed opportunities abound, but I feel more confident than ever that Assassin’s Creed could be back and here to stay.
Like a river in the rainy season, Shadows’ story overflows with cliches that are signature to fiction set in this era. Warriors wander the land to bring honor to themselves and their masters. Absent rulers let wealthy bureaucrats exploit the poor. Bandits hold the countryside in the cold grip of fear. If you’re a fan of James Clavell’s Shogun or the excellent movies of Akira Kurosawa, you have certainly seen the bulk of what protagonists Yasuke and Naoe are made to navigate. This isn’t a bad thing, and morally complex intersecting plots still keep the intrigue high, which is the same trick that made Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s stories work when they did. I don’t think I was particularly wowed by the writing on a regular basis, but there are some standout moments of tense reflection and curious happenings sprinkled throughout. The typical Assassin’s Creed conspiracy woven into it fits perfectly within the war torn Sengoku period of Japan, too, like a hidden blade snugly in its wrist sheath.
The leads themselves are wonderful. You spend a lot of the early game with the sharp-witted and broody Naoe, who is among the last shinobi warriors of the Iga clan, a role thrust upon her by tragedy. That tragedy befell her in part by the hands of the charismatic hulk Yasuke, who is a tireless warrior for justice and peace. When they begin working together, they are frequently each other’s most reliable consul, with sound and often different perspectives on the events going on around them. In other words, they truly do balance one another, and while I don’t think either one would win popularity contests against other series stars like Ezio or Edward, together they serve as the bright light in the center of a largely dark tale of revenge.
The story overall is paced similarly to Valhalla, where the cardinal reason to be in each of the nine regions of the map is to play through a mostly self-contained chapter. That said, Shadows does a better job of making sure at least some story elements and characters don’t just completely vanish when you leave a region the way they did in its predecessor. Not every new lord or business man you meet becomes completely irrelevant after you’ve solved their problems. I also found these sections, and the overall time it took to move from chapter to chapter, to be more brisk and less filled with frustrating filler than past games. It’s still a bit too full of “go here, do that” as bridges between major moments than I’d prefer, but it’s organized in a way that can be enjoyed in pieces and at your leisure without getting too lost between plot points, almost like how one might read a good book.
Most of the missions in Shadows start on the objective board, a bigger and more elaborate chart of people that need assistance and targets that need eliminating adapted from Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Thematically, this approach matches the tone of using all the information you gather to identify hidden members of the secret society trying to plunge Japan into chaos. Functionally, the way it organizes outstanding tasks and the people involved is far more useful than the old bulleted quest lists. It does trade some of the magic of exploration away as a cost of this efficacy, though. More than once I organically stumbled across a jerk that couldn’t be talked down, just to kill them and find not only his crossed out profile tacked to my board, but also the exact number of remaining silhouettes of the gang I had no idea they were a part of until right then. But it’s a trade I would make every time.
Selecting a quest gave me a short list of clues to help discern where the objective was, which is easier to figure out depending on how well I’d searched that part of the map already. Past games have given hints to identify targets like this before, hoping to create some friction between you and the effort to find your quarry, but Shadows is the first one that I felt constantly made me look at my map and actually deduce where the spot in question might be by using those clues and some educated guesses. I could use scouts, one of the assets you can develop at your hideout, to assist in the narrowing process, pinging an area on the map and highlighting unidentified objectives in the zone. This doesn’t reveal hidden locations or features of the map outside of just a marker though, so it’s a bad way to clear fog of war from a distance. It will also cost one scout whether they find something or not, and scouts are replenished in very few ways, so scouting can be a real risk if you’re trying to make progress in the main story – especially early on.
Rather than lighting up your map with a galaxy of tooltips, Shadows mostly relies on sparse point-of-interest icons to push you towards the areas you’ll need to see the finer details of in-person. Even when you climb up to the signature highpoints to take a good long look at your surroundings, what you’ll see is a bevy of nondescript icons that tell you that something is out there, but you’re gonna have to hop down from that perch and go check them out for yourself to know what. I love this – I could feel my brain starting to detangle the checklist conditioning that years of these games had instilled in me. Not only did I feel compelled to just ride through the countryside and genuinely explore stuff without much expectation of grand rewards, I also felt no nagging compulsion to check off every possible thing to do in a region inorganically.
Most of these undiscovered locations fall into one of a number of reliable categories, like castles you can infiltrate and attempt to steal special gear from or any of the many villages scattered across Japan, but you can’t be sure unless you take it in for yourself. A common thing I would always stop to handle whenever I came across them were world activities – these are smaller locations and events that, when completed, add knowledge points to your characters, increasing their knowledge levels and adding new options to their skill trees. Not all of these events are exciting, with running around temples to find missing scroll pages being my least favorite, but they often don’t take too long and the points are worth it in the end. And in the case of something like the horse archery challenges, they can add an interesting distraction from the action for a short spell.
Between outings, I spent some time at the hideout, this iteration of Valhalla’s Ravensthorpe settlement. After collecting minerals, crops, and wood out in the world, you can use those resources to build and upgrade important buildings here that give you access to new assets. I spent the majority of my time at the forge managing my equipment, while other important buildings provide more passive additions or have features that can be managed in places outside of the hideout, like the new summoning ability from the dojo which let me call in help from certain allies I met during my adventure. I’m glad I didn’t have to dote on this place very much as I personally can’t be bothered to decorate a homestead, but for those interested in that sort of thing I was absolutely flooded by the cosmetics I unlocked just in the natural course of completing tasks and looting, so you’ll never be starved for options to spice the place up.
The real sightseeing, though, is out in the world. 1500s Japan is a beautiful place – there’s such a symphony of color over every hill and across every lake. Each season brings with it incredible landscapes, sometimes covered in the reddish brown of Autumn or entombed in deep white snow. In fact, I found the weather to be some of the best I’d ever experienced in an open world. It was hard not to be moved watching powerful winds pick up and bring in rolling thunderstorms, especially when watching how nature reacted to it all in real time, as flocks of birds took flight and ground critters scurry around to find safety. And not for nothing, but in my dozens of hours in Shadows I encountered remarkably few bugs for a game this size.
The main 40-hour story revolves around the dual protagonists attempting to unmask and eliminate members of a deadly organization called the Shinbakufu. Once you’ve chosen a target, the multi-mission arcs give you regular opportunities to handle a situation with either Yasuke’s might or Naoe’s stealth. However, while there are certainly scenarios where one is more useful than the other, in general, there are remarkably few quests where Naoe isn’t better suited for the task at hand. This comes down to how their abilities are divided between them. If the classic Assassin’s Creed playstyle is the combination of exploration, parkour, stealth, and combat, Naoe can do all of these competently and excels at parkour and stealth. Yasuke, meanwhile, can’t climb very well or sneak around much due to his size and general lack of grace. He is a devastating force in combat – maybe the most overbearing and dominant protagonist in the series – but Naoe can simply sneak around most situations that Yasuke would cut his way through, solving them with so much less trouble if done well. As much as I like Yasuke, he’s far more limited and one dimensional in his style, with large parts of this game not quite designed to take advantage of his strengths in a way that feels intentional.
It’s particularly disappointing because Shadows does find ways to tailor missions around both of their skills on occasion, usually in bigger, more pivotal and important battles where both heroes need to operate together to succeed. These special missions are separated into sections that allow you to choose which character to proceed with, changing what’s asked of you depending on your choice. In a later game mission, Naoe is securing the perimeter of the castle walls, taking out gunmen, while Yasuke storms the place demanding to challenge this chapter’s foe to a duel for the lives of his hostages. Depending on who you play as, you’re either weaving through blockades to drop specific soldiers without alerting the whole castle, or you’re having a fierce duel against a powerful samurai. It’s awesome, and made the more homogenous space between these moments a real bummer.
Combat overall is more challenging than in the past. Enemies, especially in groups, are more aggressive, relying on combos and unblockable attacks as often as possible. They also tend to have solid defenses, both in that they block a lot and also in that many of them are armored, essentially giving them a second life bar. Effectively taking them down means having a solid defense of your own, dodging and deflecting their blows to make them vulnerable, and taking advantage before they recover. It requires a more thoughtful execution of your various abilities than previous games have, and I never felt like combat was a chore in and of itself – though the camera really struggled to keep all of the action in frame, and doubly so when inside buildings.
Straightforward combat really sings when playing as Yasuke, whose set of swords, naginata, kanabo, bows, and even guns are all perfect for decimating enemies. He is a juggernaut of a man outside of his toys, being able to literally run through walls and shake the earth with his blows. He’s also tough and can take many more blows before succumbing to his wounds. Naoe is very fragile by comparison, and while capable of doing lots of damage when enemies are vulnerable, she struggles to stagger them without the help of her tools. She gets overwhelmed easily by mobs, especially well-armored bruisers, and when the numbers get above three or four foes, I almost always found it better to drop a smoke bomb and disappear versus attempting to fight them all in an open melee.
On the flipside, Naoe is a menace when striking from the shadows or catching enemies unaware. This Assassin’s Creed takes the “Shadows” in its name seriously, with darkness being a key part of her stealth gameplan. There are some new features that help her out, like being able to crawl and dodge while prone, as well as some returning ones like her Eagle Sense, which lets you see silhouettes of enemies through walls. The long-missing double assassination is back too, and all of these add up to make Naoe one of the most robust assassins in the series. Yasuke can’t hold a candle to his ninja counterpart in this arena.
Enhancing your combat abilities is mercifully less tedious than Valhalla’s skill constellation. Naoe and Yasuke have skill trees focused on their weapons and specialities, with every node feeling far more impactful than simple passive damage bonuses (which still exist, but in small amounts). Gaining new abilities is obviously the most impactful, but some of the real hidden gems add new functionality to weapons, like being able to turn certain attacks with Naoe’s chain sickle into grapples that let you pull enemies into obstacles or off of cliffs. Yasuke and his abundance of weapons made for some skill trees I largely ignored, especially his bow and teppo, as he is such a close ranged juggernaut that I had a hard time justifying spending my admittedly plentiful skill points on a ranged strategy I never embraced.
Speaking of excess, Shadows takes a big step backward from the work done around your inventory in Valhalla and Mirage. There are far too many pieces of randomized, color-tiered gear to pick up from fallen foes or as forgettable quest rewards that have no chance of making it into my rotation. Base stats like damage might make them relevant as last-minute stop gaps to keep your stats in line with bad guys at your level, but only until you find that next piece of legendary gear or earn enough resources to level up a piece you already like. The skills on legendary gear, like a kanabo that turns enemies into shrapnel grenades when you break their armor, are impactful in a way that the generic percentage buffs to XYZ skill that you get from the lower tiers of gear never even come close to.
