The Assassin's Creed series excels at depicting history but falters with its own. Assassin's Creed Shadows is a victim of problems Ubisoft already solved, haunted by the series' past.
Shadows finally takes us to Japan's feudal Sengoku period, where players can explore a huge chunk of the central landmass, from the towns and cities to the woodland between. It's massive and beautiful. Get up high and somehow the slow pan of the camera as you scale a viewpoint still impresses, capturing the majesty of this gorgeous natural landscape, from endless fields of pampas grass to dense woodland undulating to the horizon. It's the most stunning world Ubisoft has ever made.
As with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, there are huge swathes of land between the major trade hubs, ports, and towns. Except here, instead of rolling green hills like a Windows screensaver, it's thin dirt roads snaking through mountain and forest trails, surrounded by bushes, plants, and trees on all sides. Where it was viable in Valhalla to cut across the landscape on horseback, here you're surrounded by obstacles that bring your mount to a halt every few seconds -- every little bump sends it spinning into a frenzy like a racer pulling off donuts.
Assassin's Creed 3, set during the American Revolution, solved the same issue of wooded environments by creating a new parkour system for trees, allowing you to clamber up them and hop between branches. Shadows instead implements a pathfinding system that draws a line on the floor to your destination. If you don't follow that, you'll be forced to track the outline of your avatar, lost in the thickets, as you Skyrim-hop your way up and over invisible topography. It seems completely random which mountains the game will let you scale.
Like with Assassin's Creed 3's tree-hopping, Ubisoft's series is usually good at creating solutions to problems. Take Black Flag, set during the Golden Age of Piracy, which developed sailing tech to allow exploration across Caribbean islands. Shadows has a different issue to solve thanks to the setting: parkour across pagoda-style towers with upward-curved roof eaves. The solution? A grappling hook. Perfect for an agile ninja. Job done. But only one of Shadows' playable characters fits that description.
Shadows has dual protagonists: samurai Yasuke, a real historical figure, and Naoe, a female shinobi. Naoe is a classic Assassin's Creed protagonist with a hidden blade on her wrist and the ability to parkour smoothly across rooftops. Yasuke is a giant who can brute force his way through combat, but pulls himself over waist-high walls like a middle-aged man trying to get out of a swimming pool. Stealth isn't an option for Yasuke. Neither is parkour, because he's lumbering and unable to use the grappling hook, which makes him almost useless for exploring the world.
The AI enemies know how he feels.
There was a specific rhythm in the series' very first game. You'd get intel, find the target, assassinate them, then escape. Escape was where the parkour mechanics came in. You'd bound across rooftops and cut a clean line to lose your pursuers -- themselves hopping and climbing after you -- before diving into a haystack or some other hiding place when you broke line of sight. In Shadows, the enemies can't climb. Even the shinobi. You can evade capture in Shadows, every single time, by scaling any rooftop (it doesn't have to be high) and laying prone on your stomach, at which point the AI will react like a labrador watching their master perform a disappearing magic trick behind a bedsheet.
It's such a shame because it breaks what's otherwise the best stealth system the series has ever had. I've wondered since Assassin's Creed Syndicate why Ubisoft didn't take its knowledge of working with light and shadow stealth on Splinter Cell and apply it to this series. I could see them creating a dark and dingy Victorian London, where players creep across the cobblestone streets while avoiding gas lamps. That's finally materialized in Shadows. You can sneak between shadows in the dark as lanterns sway in the breeze, or snuff out candles before driving your blade into a target's neck. But even this is undermined by yet another missing mechanic.
You can not force it to become nighttime in Assassin's Creed Shadows, a game where some systems only come alive at night. There's no button to wait for the sun to go down -- you have to actually wait. You won't ever do that, so you can only engage with the best part of the game around half of the time -- and only with half of the characters, so more like a quarter of the time.
Presumably, this is because of the seasons. Shadows flits between the seasons as you play, changing the weather and transforming the landscape after a set number of days have passed. Allowing the player to skip forward to night would likely have made it too easy to manipulate this (since it also fills the number of scouts you have, which can scan the map for objectives), but it seems like a bad tradeoff.
It's cool seeing icicles form on eaves and lakes freeze over in the winter -- especially as both of these things have gameplay implications, with falling ice alerting enemies and frozen lakes becoming a slipping hazard. It makes nature feel alive, how the wind cuts through and blows lanterns, casting dynamic shadows across courtyards, or how rooftops drip after heavy rain. The world transforms as the year progresses. Again, it's cool, but it's not worth preventing players from engaging with the most meaningful gameplay change -- light and shadow stealth -- intentionally.
People have been asking for an Assassin's Creed game in Japan since the dawn of time, and Shadows fulfills that and plenty of other wishes. You can parkour down once again, flipping down from rooftops in a slick way we haven't seen since Assassin's Creed Unity. It has decent combat -- the best in the series -- where you can actually read enemy attacks, cancel moves, and parry reliably. It doesn't have you being murdered by random Level 50 chickens like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and focuses on a more grounded setting and a story focused on, you know, assassinations.
Still, it's the idea of what players want seen through the lens of a bloated role-playing game. There are so many people to bump off that you often lose track of who you were hunting -- the game doesn't automatically choose the next quest in a chain from your massive board of targets -- leaving the story feeling disjointed and impersonal. There are a few flashes of inventiveness, like one early mission that sees you social engineering your way into a tea ceremony to identify a target. But otherwise, it's mostly either a fight or an infiltration, and they're hard to distinguish from each other. It starts to feel like a checklist, especially when so much of the story and cutscenes are placed right near the end of the game.
Then there's the modern story, which still can't decide what it wants to be. In Shadows, you stand in a digital expanse and listen to people talk. Nothing pushes forward the ongoing conflict between Templars and Assassins, and it feels like it's become an inconvenience for Ubisoft to even try. This modern sci-fi part of Assassin's Creed has appeared in many forms, and this one's the worst since those first-person Abstergo sections in Black Flag.
It's hard to give a definitive verdict on Shadows. Stealth is the best it's ever been on the ground, but it falls apart as soon as you climb anything. The parkour is smooth and mostly reliably interprets player intent, though it still makes you dive in the wrong direction occasionally, and it falls apart when you're not in a town or switch to Yasuke. The world is astounding and the seasons are inspired, but they stop you from engaging with the stealth mechanics. Everything comes with a caveat.
In Japanese culture, there's the concept of the "hidden face", which suggests every person has a public persona, a face they share with friends and family, and a hidden face that harbors all of their secrets. It's a roundabout way of saying that the only person you can ever truly know is yourself. Assassin's Creed has worn so many masks at this point that even Ubisoft's hidden face doesn't recognize itself in the mirror.