Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review: Successful First Step Into Japan

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Avinash Jaisrani

At Tech4Gamers, I contribute as a News Reporter, combining my skills and gaming enthusiasm to keep our audience updated on the latest developments.

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Assassin’s Creed has a rich history dating all the way back to 2007, and since then, the franchise has seen many twists and turns. From the exotic locales of Ancient Greece to the gloomy backdrops of wartorn Britain, the series has never been one to settle.

Indeed, Assassin’s Creed has always flipped and flopped between different settings and eras, but Ubisoft has shied away from one particular region. For as long as Assassin’s Creed has existed, cries for a Japanese-themed entry have raged on, falling on deaf ears, with Ubisoft choosing to venture practically anywhere else.

This changes with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and in a shocking turn of fate, the Japanese setting has arrived at just the right time. Ubisoft’s recent missteps are no secret, and with the company potentially teetering toward financial doom, all hope rests on this ambitious RPG set in 16th-century Japan.

Following a massive marketing campaign, more than a few criticisms, and two gruelling delays, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is finally ready to burst onto the scene in a few days, but has Ubisoft managed to do enough to save the day?

Story

Having poured more than 50 hours into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I have surprisingly little to say about its narrative. The game plays its hand early on here, giving a solid base to the overall plot after briefly introducing Naoe and Yasuke, but things quickly take a turn for the worse afterward.

Naoe, the series’ latest female lead, is thrust onto an unknown mission following the invasion of Iga and her father’s death, an event Yasuke also plays a role in. From then on, the search for a mysterious box becomes Naoe’s main motivating factor, eventually bringing her face-to-face with Yasuke and Oda Nobunaga.

It’s clear that both of Ubisoft’s latest protagonists have much to learn about feudal Japan at this point, with the land engulfed in a major political struggle, clashing ideologies, and the everlasting quest for more power.

The Characters Are Unremarkable

Both Naoe and Yasuke headline the latest Assassin’s Creed entry, and Ubisoft does an okay job trying to connect you to the newest members of the Creed. If nothing else, these protagonists are serviceable and mildly interesting, but they highlight a growing problem with the series’ latest entries.

After Assassin’s Creed Mirage, I was confident Ubisoft’s future protagonists would be less by the books and more distinct in an attempt to harken to Assassin’s Creed’s rich cast of older protagonists.

Unfortunately, neither Naoe nor Yasuke stood out to me. Both characters share a similar sense of justice and willingness to help those in need, but their personal struggles are seldom used as a canvas to delve into more complex writing.

I expected a sense of tension between Naoe and Yasuke, given that the latter was directly involved in her home’s destruction, but this plot point is brushed aside rather abruptly, with barely any mention of Yasuke’s actions in this specific context afterwards.

The same is true of the supporting cast. Assassin’s Creed Shadows sees both protagonists befriending various characters throughout their journey, but I struggle to think of any that stood out. Even with all these personalities coming together at the Hideout, the place felt devoid of life.

Chasing After The Shinbakufu

As was the case in past Assassin’s Creed RPGs, Shadows gives you a long list of targets from the get-go, dubbing the series’ latest villain faction the Shinbakufu.

This mysterious faction threatens to disturb the apparent stability of 1579 Japan and undo Oda Nobunaga’s unification efforts, or so it seems. As the game progresses, it’s revealed that there’s more to the Shinbakufu than meets the eye, and things aren’t always black and white.

For instance, one member is revealed to have unwillingly fallen under the Shinbakufu’s influence in an attempt to help Japan’s starving population, giving Naoe and Yasuke the choice to spare this particular individual toward the end of the quest.

Others used the age-old debate of control versus freedom as the reason behind their descent into darkness, a core pillar of the Assassin’s Creed story. However, for the somewhat nuanced nature of these themes, I found myself mostly disinterested in the unraveling plot threads of the Shinbakufu.

These missions were mostly defined by a repetitive structure that involved completing smaller quests that felt like busy work to pad out the game’s overall runtime. This problem isn’t unique to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but I expected Ubisoft to bring more substance to the table this time.

The narrative certainly picks up as the focus shifts to Naoe and Yasuke, but these brief glimmers of brilliance are hardly worth the time spent chasing meaningless documents or performing mundane tasks like fighting off the hundredth group of generic ronin or samurai in search of the next forgettable Shinbakufu’s location.

Also, Shadows doesn’t do much with the core Assassins vs. Templar struggle. While both organizations have a role in the story, their influence is rarely given enough time in the spotlight to come into its own.

Japan Is Done Justice

If there’s one thing you can always count on Ubisoft for, it’s the quality of the open world, at least on a surface level.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows presents the same level of detail to its open world as one would expect. The many regions of Japan have a distinct identity, and it’s easy to lose yourself in the serene nature of galloping through a gorgeous sunbathed flower field.

The map on offer is huge, and while it may not be breaking the mould as the biggest in any Assassin’s Creed title to date, it packs just enough visual variety to keep the act of exploring Japan’s many regions consistently engaging.

Stroll through Omi’s bustling districts, and you’ll find locales brimming with activity. Venture into Iga, and you’ll be met with treacherous peaks and a punishing climate, making it all too obvious how it became the home of assassins like Naoe. Everywhere you go, expect to see a different flavor of historic Japan.

Each region is also filled to the brim with shrines, temples, and castles. These places bring to light the brilliance of feudal Japan’s architecture and cultural diversity, which is elaborated upon throughout the main and side quests.

Gameplay

The Assassin’s Creed RPG DNA is prevalent throughout Shadows’ core gameplay loop. To its credit, the gameplay is greater than the sum of its parts and remains engaging enough to keep you going.

Finding new gear and weapons and overthrowing higher-level castles throughout Japan remained interesting till the end of the game, partly due to the satisfying combat system and its many flashy, gory, and brutal finishers.

The Duality of Assassin’s Creed Shadows

For the first time since Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and, to a much lesser extent, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft has introduced two main characters with distinct playstyles. Fortunately, both characters are enjoyable to play, even if you end up leaning more toward one or the other.

Pick Naoe, and you can benefit from her swift traversal and crafty tools, all while blending into the shadows and sneaking through tight spaces to get the jump on unsuspecting enemies. Choose Yasuke, and you give up all of that for an unwavering sense of strength that remains thoroughly satisfying.

These differences aside, the core combat and gameplay loop remain largely familiar in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Combat consists of dodging, parrying, and making use of one of the many rechargeable abilities at your disposal.

Weapon variety is also decent, though Yasuke’s Naginata and Naoe’s Kurasarigama quickly became my preferred means of chopping enemy limbs off and disposing of unrelenting foes. Ubisoft takes an iterative approach to the combat, and it pays off, even if the end result isn’t the most spectacular.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Ahead of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ release, Ubisoft touted major changes to the series’ various systems. One such change was said to focus on the many activities found throughout the open world, an attempt to encourage organic exploration as opposed to quest-marker-driven navigation.

From my experience, the results toward this goal have been hit or miss. You’re certainly not bombarded with quest markers from the get-go, but synchronize a few viewpoints and initiate a few lengthy quests, and the map quickly devolves into the same smudge of icons that Ubisoft has so desperately tried to move away from.

Make no mistake, this is the quintessential Assassin’s Creed RPG experience, although the abundance of markers may not be a bad thing, depending on who you ask. If nothing else, you’re guaranteed to always stay busy, whether it be through a tense castle invasion or a tranquil meditation mini-game.

On the subject of exploration, Assassin’s Creed Shadows introduces the new scouts system, boasting a new way of discovering key locations and landmarks. Every time you initiate a new quest, the game gives you a few clues on a character or an item’s location, leaving recruited scouts to do the rest.

However, this system is little more than a glorified pinging mini-game, and it became particularly troublesome once I realized I had to frequently travel to one of the many safe houses littered throughout the map to restore my scouts for more uses.

Parkour Is Back, Sort of

Following my disappointment with Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s barebones and, frankly, miserable parkour experience, I was glad when Ubisoft confirmed this element of the franchise was being touched up in Shadows.

Gone are the mindless climbable structures of the past three games, with more thoughtful navigation taking their place instead. Naoe also boasts more than a handful of new animations, in addition to a more refined system of moving downwards.

These are welcome changes, but beneath the smooth animations of Naoe’s brisk step from structure to structure lie legacy problems that have plagued parkour for years. Expect to face the same level of unresponsiveness and instances of being stuck on complex terrain as you desperately wrestle with the controls.

The problems are exacerbated further when using Yasuke as his brute-like figure makes an already-dated control system all the worse. I can recall more than a few occasions where my character simply refused to climb down and instead chose to repeatedly swap back and forth between two stances on the same ledge.

On this note, I also encountered a plethora of bugs during my playtime. These ranged from enemies blindly staring into the abyss after spotting me during a stealth segment to NPCs stuck in the same animation loop.

Graphics And Performance

Visually, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a new high for the series. Though not without a few issues, the visuals remain consistently captivating and practically beg you to stop and take in the beauty of feudal Japan every now and then.

The visual detail is accentuated by the dynamic weather system at play, which ensures environments never become stale or repetitive. Once spring arrives, blossoming flowers glisten with life as bright sun rays burst through the many lively forests.

On the other hand, winter transitions into ice-capped mountains and frozen lakes as dense layers of snow engulf all of Japan. These seasonal shifts also impact the gameplay to a small degree, making the changing weather more than just a visual makeover.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the first entry in the series to lean heavily into ray-tracing technology, and the results have been largely positive. Lighting, in particular, stands out for its authentic interplay with the environment, giving the open world a lifelike look. Moreover, Japanese architecture is depicted with immaculate detail, with plenty of detailed textures to boot.

Because of the game’s consistently impressive visual output, Ubisoft’s facial animations and character models stand out as obvious weak points. Facial animations, for the most part, continue to appear stiff and robotic, while the character models themselves can vary from serviceable to poor, depending on the scene.

Even Yasuke and Naoe suffer from these problems, and save for a few very high-quality cutscenes, the facial animations are largely disappointing.

Prepare Your PC

During the review, the game was tested on a PC with a GeForce RTX 3060 and Intel Core i5-12400F. As expected, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was a bit too challenging for this PC, although 60FPS gameplay was achievable with a mixture of low and medium settings, in addition to DLSS.

Ray-tracing takes up the bulk of the blame here, but Ubisoft allows you to dial back ray-traced lighting significantly. Although detrimental to the overall visual outlook, this helps improve performance quite a bit.

Audio And Soundtrack

I spent my time playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows in Japanese, and the game’s voice acting rarely, if ever, missed the mark. The lead performances hit all the right notes, and I could tell that each actor had put plenty of effort into bringing the main cast to life.

As for the soundtrack, Ubisoft presents a blend of various styles of Japanese music here. Certain themes, like Yasuke’s, bring an element of hip-hop into the mix, adding a distinct identity to Shadows’ music in a franchise with no shortage of variety.

Ezio’s family also returns as the main theme, albeit with a new spin on the fan-favorite track. Finally, the game boasts multiple themes with vocals reserved for pivotal moments, such as those depicting Oda Nobunaga’s fearsome combat abilities or Yasuke’s might against an army of armed samurai.

This is something you don’t typically expect from Assassin’s Creed, but I’m happy to say that it’s a welcome addition.

Should You Buy It?

Buy It If:

✅You thoroughly enjoyed everything about Assassin’s Creed’s RPG formula, particularly the implementations in Odyssey and Valhalla.

Don’t Buy It If:

❌You don’t enjoy Assassin’s Creed’s core RPG gameplay and want to try the latest entry solely for the Japanese setting. Waiting for a discount might be worth it in this instance.

Final Thoughts

Assassin’s Creed Shadows does not revolutionize Ubisoft’s RPG formula, but what it does is deliver yet another well-rounded experience. Despite a middling narrative and recurring problems, the game lives up to the core fantasy of an immersive journey through feudal Japan, and for many, this is all the game needs to do.

The combat is satisfying, the visuals are breathtaking, and the open world invites exploration. If any of these elements appeal to you, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is unlikely to disappoint.

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Avinash Jaisrani

[News Reporter]

Avinash is currently pursuing a Business degree in Australia. For more than three years, he has been working as a gaming journalist, utilizing his writing skills and love for gaming to report on the latest updates in the industry. Avinash loves to play action games like Devil May Cry and has also been mentioned on highly regarded websites, such as IGN, GamesRadar, GameRant, Dualshockers, CBR, and Gamespot.