Review: Assassin's Creed Shadows: Identity crisis holds back otherwise entertaining entry

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There is a practice in Japanese culture called Kintsugi, where broken plates or pottery can be mended using a powdered-gold lacquer as mortar.  

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has felt broken for a long time. What was once a stealth-focused historical fiction series about a battle between good and evil has been splintered into one full of sub-par hand-to-hand combat and massive game worlds jam-packed with tedious and repetitive activities. With Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft Quebec attempts to stitch the franchise’s modern structure onto its stealth-action roots, like a piece of kintsugi, and while it is golden in many places, there are still a lot of cracks showing.

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The gold streaks are easy to spot — the studio has delivered arguably the most lush and detailed game world ever created, highlighting both the subtle, meditative beauty and the vicious, heart-wrenching brutality that exemplified 18th-century feudal Japan. The landscape is vast and topographically diverse, affected by the weather of the changing seasons. I’ll never forget the first time my horse and I were caught in a sudden blizzard, the frost and snow building up in the crevices of my attire and between the hairs of my horse’s tail. The attention to graphical fidelity and environmental detail is truly outstanding.

The stealth mechanics also work like a dream, and the smartly crafted upgrade system empowers your character over time, letting you traipse across rooftops, snipe unsuspecting enemies with a kunai to the head, and destroy light sources to shroud yourself in darkness. The animations are fluid, and I rarely made an errant movement or clumsily hit a noisy object, with so many of the series’ rougher mechanical edges smoothed down or simplified.

These are a few more positives, like the ADHD-friendly objective board. But once you really dig into the game’s nearly 50-hour main campaign, it’s hard not to notice where the franchise’s dual identities don’t blend well.

The clearest expression of that identity crisis is the differences between the game’s two main characters. You can switch between Yasuke, an African samurai and real historical figure, and Naoe, a factional Japanese woman trained by her father to be a Shinobi assassin. Yasuke helps to destroy Naoe’s homeland of Iga during Nobunaga’s infamous campaign to unite Japan through violent conquest, beginning a nation-spanning quest to discover and eliminate a secret cabal of samurai that turned her life upside down.

They are both compelling characters with motivations and philosophies that could complement each other in contrast, but the story never explores their relationship beyond their shared goals. They also could not be more different mechanically, and it would be generous to say that Yasuke is mostly perfunctory. Don’t get me wrong; he’s an effective bruiser with genuinely entertaining combat abilities, like kicking an opponent halfway across the screen like a paper doll. But his immense power also exposes the rudimentary and simplistic nature of the game’s combat. It’s not Assassin’s Creed without a repetitive, laconic combat sequence where handfuls of enemies attack you in single file, and almost every quest ends in one.

Outside of his brutality, Yasuke’s movement limitations make him a poor alternative to Naoe’s athleticism. He can only climb waist-high objects, and his lumbering sprint is mostly just for smashing his body through doors.

The game seems to know this, too, since Yasuke is unplayable for the first roughly 12 hours of the story, focusing entirely on Naoe’s journey to avenge her father. So much of the game feels designed to constrain him. The first time I took control of Yasuke, I rode my horse to one of the game’s numerous viewpoint markers sitting high atop a castle, only to have him comment that only Naoe could climb it. The first time this type of road block came up, I felt discouraged. The third time, I gave up on Yasuke altogether. I felt no reason to control Yasuke when I wasn’t demanded to. Shadows is, first and foremost, Naoe’s story, and Yasuke is just along for the ride.

There’s fun to be had with Yasuke’s combat power and Naoe’s stealth skills, but they don’t feel like they belong together. The game world is lush and vibrant and a wonder to behold, but most of what you do in it is shallow and superficial, never feeling quite as focused as contemporaries like Ghost of Tsushima. Ultimately, it depends on whether you can look past the cracks to find the strands of gold.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Published by: Ubisoft

Developed by: Ubisoft Montreal

Price: $89.99

Platform: PC, Xbox S/X, PS5

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