It’s pretty strange to think that it’s been almost half a decade since Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Sure, there was Assassin’s Creed Mirage as a back-to-its-roots palette cleanser, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the first ‘full’ new game in the modern action-RPG style since 2020, though with Ubisoft Quebec as lead developer, it’s more a successor to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. With such a passage of time, you’d hope for some big changes to the formula, shifting the focus point and tone of how the game plays. We’ve been hands-on with a few hours of the game, its prologue and a more open mission from later in the story.
Running through Assassin’s Creed Shadows are its two contrasting characters – Naoe a female shinobi assassin, and Yasuke, an African samurai based on the real historical figure. The opening of the game introduces them separately, with Yasuke coming to Japan as an enslaved bodyguard to a Jesuit missionary who rescued him from drowning, and who is in Japan to try and receive Oda Nobunaga’s favour. Nobunaga, much like the historical account, is fascinated by seeing a black man for the first time, but also spots the potential in him as a warrior and breaks him from his servitude to fight for him, giving him the name Yasuke – he’s called Diogo prior to this. The prologue skips around his timeline, jumping ahead to a siege by Nobunaga’s army, with Yasuke able to charge through in the hunt for the enemy leader as the castle burns around him and the battle rages.
On the other side of this fight is Naoe, whose path to becoming a member of the Assassins is much more straightforward and obvious, but also significantly more tragic. There’s a great Tarantino-esque reveal of the cabal of bad guys at the end of the prologue – apt when considering how heavily inspired by Westerns he has been through his filmmaking career, and some of the crossover and blending of ideas they had with Japanese cinema.
Eventually, the pair are united in their cause, to track down this cabal one by one, unravel their nefarious plot and retrieve whatever mystical macguffin they plan to use to enact it. Following the prologue you can play as either of them, pretty much whenever you want. During open-ended sections you can switch between Yasuke and Naoe from the pause menu, and through narrative missions you’re regularly given the choice to choose which character you’ll play as through the next 5-10 minute section. Both approaches are equally valid because of this, but there’s a thematic style that I feel will dictate most players through the game’s story – you also have an option to have the canonical story auto-pick for you at any narrative decision points, which is a nice touch.
The pair of them provide great contrast in their approach. Naoe is all about stealth and striking from the shadows, much like the original core fantasy of the Assassin’s Creed series, while Yasuke is more of a brawler, able to wade into the fight. Both are more than capable of clambering around the world or holding their own in combat against many enemies, but their abilities skew one way or the other. Naoe has a grappling hook so she’s much more able to reach high up vantage points and scope out the world, while Yasuke has mighty kicks and attacks that bring to mind the 300-esque kicking frenzy that was Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Combat is naturally related to the action RPG stylings of Valhalla, Odyssey and Origins, and it’s satisfyingly punchy, though you do have to gradually whittle away enemy armour and health bars. It strikes a good balance between feeling like 1-on-1 fights where all the other enemies watch before taking their turn, and allowing multiple enemies to gang up on you together, leaving you to dish out counter attacks in that Batman: Arkham style.
Yasuke can wield large katanas, yari spears and brutal looking kanabō war clubs – he’s also capable of what’s branded as a brutal assassination, which really lives up to the name as you barrel into combat. At range, you can pull out a bow and arrow or an arquebus, one of the earliest firearms. Naoe, by contrast, is much more traditional as a shinobi, coming with smaller blades, throwable shuriken and kunai. Both then have special attacks on a cooldown, whether it’s a quick samurai strike to dash and slash forward, or the aforementioned kick that can send smaller enemies flying.
You can also call upon allies recruited to your network of spies and contacts. This helps maintain your concealment in stealth, as an NPC shinobi dashes in, attacks a target and then smoke bombs their way outta there, or can just give you some backup when battling.
Coming back to the vantage points, while these serve a similar function to previous games, letting you get up high, spot nearby points of interest and then leap from a ludicrous height into a hay bail. The key difference here is that, instead of a quick pan around of the camera that immediately marks and highlights everything for you on the map, telling you exactly what’s in each location, you’re instead presented with a big bunch of question marks. You now have to manually look at and mark each one, where you’re given a coloured highlight that suggests what it might be – a location, an activity – and from that you’re given a bit more agency in the adventure you’re undertaking. Chasing down a marker is more engaging when you don’t know exactly what’s at the other end, and when you’ve chosen this particular rabbit hole to venture down.
Something similar is true for the missions and quests in the game, which can feel much more like an active investigation than a string of waypoints that you need to sprint between. Trying to piece together the events that led to an attack on a group of nobles and the kidnap of a child that threatens an alliance, you have to follow various leads, but they’re not all as specific as “go and talk to the trader by the docks”, and even when they are, the next step isn’t necessarily as clear cut. Instead you’re often directed to a particular area, like the west or south of a city, and told to look for a particular person’s home, a shrine or temple, and the like. Here you’ll often have the choice of fighting your way in to find the person or next clue that you need, or be able to take a stealthier approach.
It’s a great change that feels less clear cut and guided, but as Ubisoft toe this delicate line, they point their feet toward still presenting you with a quick solution. When looking at your next objective, the three clues quickly make it very clear what you need to do and are presented all at once instead of being doled out as you might need them. More fundamentally, as soon as your character sees the objective, they talk about it and they can be immediately highlighted, or a location can be found and marked well before you actually need it. It means that means if you’re looking for a particular guard in an area that doesn’t quite fit in, this crucial final step to solving the puzzle feels like it’s being handed to you on a platter instead of actually testing you to spot the character that’s acting funny.
This is, admittedly, a very difficult thing to get right, and we’ve seen various games take quite different approaches – most recently, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle drew plaudits for its use of the camera to give hints as players request them, and Sony Santa Monica added a hint timer setting for God of War: Ragnarok. I hope that Ubisoft Quebec can tweak things just a little bit in this regard to really follow through on this philosophical shift.
Visiting Japan in any time period has been high on pretty much every series fan’s wishlist, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going to fulfil that dream for many. We’re still riding the cultural tidal wave that is so keen to explore Japanese history, whether it’s with the Shogun TV series or the handful of major video games that have beaten Ubisoft to the punch. It certainly isn’t the first to get here, but I’m very encouraged by my time with Assassin’s Creed Shadows that Ubisoft are going to strike a lot of the right notes with this long-awaited game.
