When I visited Ubisoft Quebec last year to see Assassin’s Creed Shadows for the first time, I was encouraged by the development team’s enthusiasm for stealth. While I’ve enjoyed Assassin’s Creed’s foray into RPG territory, after hundreds of action-heavy hours I think it’s about time the series rediscovered its sneakier genes. Not by way of Mirage’s “back to basics” approach, but by reaching forward to provide some much-needed evolution in the series’ stealth design. Shadows’ promise of a Splinter Cell-style lighting system had me excited, but after playing a three-hour demo build, I’m not quite convinced that it’s delivering a meaningful change for Assassin’s Creed.
The demo’s quest chain, set in Harima Province, had me infiltrating a variety of strongholds, from small gardens with just a couple of guards to towering castles packed with opponents. If you’ve played an Assassin’s Creed before, the fundamental approach to all this is practically unchanged; you’ll be scaling to highpoints to identify guard placements, using simple distraction techniques to create opportunities, and stabbing a lot of people in the neck with a hidden blade. All of this can be achieved using the same techniques you’ve relied upon for years, and many of the flaws that have previously hampered such techniques also make a return. For example, the hidden blade can once again be foiled by high-level opponents, neutering planning and positioning in favour of skill points and upgrades. Incredibly sticky environments continue to be the norm, which ensures you never fall from a rooftop or slip during an ascent, but being glued to surfaces often proves catastrophic when it comes to quickly reacting to enemy threats. Emergency escapes feel like you’re fighting against a magnetic leash that really wants to lock you in a bad place.
If you’ve read IGN’s recent hands-on preview you’ll know that our writer, Alessandro, really enjoyed Shadows’ revamped take on stealth. While I feel differently, having left Ubisoft’s playtest room somewhat disappointed, it’s important to note that Shadows is fulfilling its promise of taking stealth seriously. One of its two playable characters is Naoe, a ninja wholly dedicated to stealth. Aside from the prologue in which I had to play as combat-focused Yasuke for tutorial purposes, I was able to play as Naoe for the entire duration of the demo. While Shadows often asks if you’d like to switch roles, it had no issue with me choosing Naoe every single time.
Standing notably shorter than her heavily armoured companion, Naoe is able to avoid enemy sightlines more easily. Her slender frame allows her to do things the bulkier Yasuke can not, such as slip through narrow gaps and hide in boxes, while her grappling hook opens up access to rooftops and ledges that have no climbing handholds. Playing as Naoe opens up new routes and pathways through Shadows’ world… or perhaps, more accurately, playing as Yasuke closes the door on many established Assassin’s Creed traditions. He’s unable to perform any of the series’ staple stealth actions, aside from using his bow for silent ranged attacks.
Those stealth staples become more interesting (at least on paper) thanks to refreshed ideas. Shadows’ title partly refers to its new approach to detection. Staying in the dark renders you invisible to enemies, and the closer you move towards a light source the more visible you become. This is clearly spelled out by a meter on your HUD that fills and empties as you move around. The clever bit, though, is that you can manipulate the environment to create advantages. Lanterns can be destroyed with blades or thrown shurikens, plunging rooms into darkness so that you may draw blood completely unseen. It’s an idea that was prevalent in the era of Thief and Splinter Cell, but has fallen by the wayside since stealth largely became an optional approach in action games rather than its own dedicated genre.
The adoption of this approach sounds like a complete game changer, but in reality it had minimal impact on a playstyle I’ve honed across 13 prior games. I don’t doubt that, under the hood, the engine’s enemy AI routines are influenced by this new simulation. But when it comes to actually playing Shadows, I found the presence of light rarely impacted my progress or forced me to devise smarter methods of approach. I could stand on rooftops with a full visibility meter and no one would see me. Traditional sightlines seemed to be the only factor I truly had to consider.
This sense of same-but-different persists across many of Shadows’ ideas. Naoe is able to lie prone and crawl on her stomach, which certainly did make a difference when it came to invisible repositioning. But the environment I encountered in the demo made little creative use of this ability. For example, I was disappointed to discover that a tunnel beneath a house didn’t have a hatchway into the room above. Instead of acting as an alternative entry point, all this crawlspace offered was the same pathway that could be faster accomplished by simply scaling across the rooftop.
A more positive shift can be found in the positioning of enemies, with encounters offering an increased challenge over Mirage’s overly-simple arrangements. I was caught out more than a couple of times by overlapping vision cones and patrols, and the resulting high alert state does seem to make guards more persistent in their hunt for you than in previous games. Simply hiding on a roof and tracking foes using eagle vision did seem enough to easily avoid them, though, at least on the default difficulty.
Because of the better guard placements, there is an increased and welcome emphasis on assessment and planning. Gone is the drone-like bird of the last few games, replaced with an over-the-shoulder zoom, meaning scouting and marking enemies can only be done from your own sightline. It’s a good change, one that forces you to explore an area on foot and spend more time considering your angles of approach. But when it comes to executing a plan, things return to the very familiar.
Naoe’s toolbelt holds kunai throwing knives for insta-kill headshots and smoke bombs for concealing attacks and escapes, both of which are necessary but vanilla stealth tools. The same can be said for repositioning guards, which is done either by luring them to your position with a whistle, or baiting them to a specific spot with a thrown bell. There’s the obvious combos, such as encouraging a guard towards an explosive barrel that you then detonate with a throwing knife. But beyond that, at least in this demo, there didn’t seem to be the canvas for anything more experimental or exciting.
Shadows seems reliant on a lean and familiar set of abilities, at least as far as stealth goes. Even options that initially seem to be fresh are repackaged tools from the past; you can call on an allied brawler to charge at a designated target, which works as both a distraction and a method of remotely eliminating enemies, but this is really just a thematically different take on the berserk darts that have appeared in a number of prior Assassin’s Creed games.
Naoe does have a detailed skill tree, allowing you to build and hone her abilities beyond those standard tools. But all the exciting options are combat focussed, such as the elaborate nine-strike Guard Breaker, or Eviscerate with its kick-flip finisher. When it comes to stealth, the most exotic option I could find was the ability to slow down time for a few seconds. As far as this demo was willing to show me, there’s nothing along the lines of traps, disguises, or other more advanced stealth ideas. Perhaps the changing of the seasons, which I didn’t get to experience and is promised to change the landscape considerably, is where Shadows’ more interesting stealth challenges lie.
Instead, the toughest challenges I faced were direct clashes. Shadows effectively has two combat systems; Yasuke’s feels like a direct continuation of Valhalla, but tuned up to feel significantly swifter and a little more tactical. I liked it a lot, at least as far as I could tell in the limited time I played as him. Naoe, meanwhile, is nowhere near as strong as her samurai counterpart and so takes considerably more damage and cannot block as effectively. This forces her fight style to prioritise dodging and staying nimble. I really like the concept that drives this – that each character provides a distinctly different version of the same experience – but on the battlefield I found myself frustrated. Playing as Naoe, it feels like the rhythm of combat runs at a different tempo to the attack animations, and so I constantly tripped up over awkwardly-timed dodge and parry windows.
In most instances, the brutal punishment inflicted by combat forced me to take stealth seriously. Its classic carrot vs stick stuff, and an effective stick at that. What I’m less enthusiastic about is my pure stealth playthrough being derailed by mandatory bosses with huge health bars. I wish, when playing as Naoe, these bosses were reconfigured as stealth-focused assassination challenges in the mould of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s centrepiece missions. Instead I’m forced to defeat my foe in a one-on-one duel that’s clearly designed to fulfill the samurai fantasy side of Shadows’ offering. I appreciate that Shadows always gives you the option to switch to Yasuke (and prior to one of these fights even prompted me to), but to choose a stealth character and then be forced to engage in direct combat does feel like being told your decision is invalid. Maybe, with several more hours of practice and a combat tune-up prior to release, duelling with Naoe will feel less like a punishment.
After three hours of play, I’m fairly confident in saying that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the best stealth experience of the series’ RPG era. Having a character and toolkit entirely dedicated to the approach signifies that Ubisoft is taking this fundamental part of the franchise seriously for what feels like the first time in many years. But, as dedicated fans will know, stealth never actually went away – it was just eclipsed by the action. Shadows lets that stealth step back into the limelight. However, just because stealth now has prominence doesn’t mean it’s undergone any meaningful change. For all the studio’s talk of Splinter Cell-like detection systems, Shadows feels like Assassin’s Creed getting back to business as usual rather than exploring a new, sneakier frontier. For many exhausted by the reign of Spartans and Vikings, that will likely be enough. But if what I’ve played is representative of Shadows as a whole, I think Ubisoft has missed a huge opportunity to capitalise on the advanced stealth potential of one of history’s most recognisable clandestine assassin groups.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
