Assassin’s Creed Shadows review: finding peace and quiet in a merciless world

No, it isn’t historically accurate, but you don’t complain when the ballpark hot dog you ordered isn’t a steak. Same meat, different product. Assassin’s Creed is a series about interpreting history from what scattered memory fragments we have to work with. It accepts that reconstruction can be faulty and bakes that into its alt history premise. It’s made clear here right from the prologue where it introduces Yasuke, one of its two playable heroes. Yasuke, a Black slave who became a retainer under Oda Nobunaga, was a real person, but there are question marks surrounding the exact details of his life. That makes him the perfect lead for an Assassin’s Creed game; he’s a stand-in for the fact that history is a box of puzzle pieces that you could spend several lifetimes rifling through. How did he fit in? Here’s one fictionalized attempt to put the pieces together.

Ubisoft’s interpretation of Yasuke is a compelling one. He’s cast as an outsider still learning Japanese culture. He reveres the country that has given him a new life, but he’s still a bit clumsy as he adapts to its finer details. That’s represented quite literally, as he’s presented as a hulking warrior who tends to accidentally knock things over while sprinting around quiet villages to the dismay of the locals. His size has advantages in battle, as he can smash his way into locked castle doors or bull rush enemies to the ground, but players need to learn how to control him with care in everyday life, lest they disrespect a shrine by barreling through its doors.

Yasuke is counterbalanced by Naoe, the second of Shadows’ dual protagonists. She’s a shinobi on a quest to avenge her father’s death, a task that requires her to find and hunt down 12 masked killers. As a native to Japan, Naoe’s playstyle is much more precise and controlled. She moves like your typical, nimble Assassin’s Creed character, who can scamper up structures silently. She better understands the architecture throughout Japan, as she’s even able to scale buildings with her grappling hook where Yasuke can barely hop high enough to reach a short ledge. It’s a smart physical contrast that tells you about each character’s relationship to the country through body language. It’s only let down by stiff movement that makes it feel like I’m trudging through pudding at times, with stiff parkour that makes it tough to move as fluidly as previous entries.

While it takes a bit for the characters’ paths to cross, Shadows’ finds its rhythm once the two join forces. Their alliance paves the way for a meditative tale about two people who are determined to preserve their country’s identity, but unsure of how to accomplish that without feeding the same bloody power struggles that threaten to transform Japan. Real figures like Hattori Hanzo twist their way into the violent saga, but Shadows isn’t meant to be taken as a pure history lesson. Rather, it asks how we can find peace in a merciless world.

It isn’t thematically new territory. This year’s Dynasty Warriors Origins posed a similar question in a much goofier fashion, and the “blood for blood” cyclical revenge story here has been milked dry by other games at this point. Shadows also careens off a cliff in its final act when it tries to quickly tie up Yasuke and Naoe’s personal stories all at once while awkwardly fitting the game into the wider series. Even worse is the bizarre way Shadows shoe horns its sci-fi element in. The once fascinating Animus has now been reduced to a live service sideshow where players unlock new lore in weekly missions over time and use earned credits to buy silly gear like skeleton armor. Sometimes it feels like Shadows’ story and structure underwent a dozen reactive rewrites to cater to feedback — both the useful and bad faith — and left a lot of bones behind.

It’s messy in moments and dry as paint in others, but Shadows makes good use of a historical period perched on a knife’s edge between modest tradition and rampant violence. A tea ceremony should not end in bloodshed; it should be a sacred moment that we respect and cherish. That’s what Yasuke and Naoe are fighting to preserve.

Blood for blood

Again, it’s Assassin’s Creed, not your AP History class.

Shadows is a literal double down on everything the series has done previously when it comes to action. That’s thanks to its dual protagonist structure, which lets players decide whether or not they want to tackle missions stealthily or bust through the front door. It’s a smart dynamic that adds some much needed variety in the moment to moment gameplay. Whenever I find myself sneaking into a heavily guarded temple full of high rooftops, I grab Naoe and lurk in the shadows. When I know that I’m about to go toe-to-toe with a powerful target, I opt for the more powerful Yasuke.

Shadows does a great job of encouraging players to switch it up too. If a character is spotted and a guard rings an alarm, they become wanted in that region. The status effect makes it so enemies will attack them on sight, so it’s crucial to swap characters when that happens. The wanted status eventually wipes away at the end of a season, another great system here. The world state will change periodically as a new season begins. That doesn’t just wipe the slate clean, but also switches up the environment. Winter means that players’ footsteps will be muffled in snow, while summer will yield longer grass for players to hide in. The world feels ever-changing and responsive here, forcing players to adapt rather than brute forcing every mission the same way.

On the spectrum of stealth and action, the former wins over the latter. Naoe is more exciting to control overall, as her skill tree gives players all the tools to become a ghost. Aerial assassinations and backstabs still feel satisfying to pull off without causing a scene. In one infiltration mission, I was spotted by a guard who ran to ring an alarm. As he approached, I quickly launched a kunai into his head and a second into the bell itself, taking care of the problem from afar. Naoe can also make use of shadows to better hide from her foes, though I was never really clear on when I was actually in one or not. Still, Naoe embodies the acrobatic history of the series with flying colors.

I’m less enthused by Yasuke’s more offensive approach, which puts a lot of work on a run of the mill combat system that can’t hold his weight. This is your basic light-heavy attack and block set up, with special cooldown abilities that can be triggered in between. Naoe can fight like this too, but Yasuke’s attacks are far more devastating, as he can use long katanas, naginatas, and more to hack enemies into pieces faster. By contrast, Naoe uses weaker weapons like tantos and kusarigama, to chip away at enemies slowly if she’s forced to fight. All weapons can trigger gruesome death animations, but Yasuke can cut to the chase much quicker.

That approach does get dull eventually as there’s not much depth to it. Some weapons can inflict status effects and trigger other perks depending on what gear is equipped, but I barely felt my bonuses throughout my playthrough. If you took the visual indicators denoting statues like bleed out entirely, I wouldn’t have known they were there at all. Battles are repetitive and lack the visual identity found in Valhalla, where the brutality on display mirrored the ruthless nature of its Viking story. Samurai and shinobi feel interchangeable with any other Ubisoft action archetype here.

At the very least, I appreciate the road to actually finding those battles. Shadows features several sidequests that have players cutting through different crime rings. Those missions require players to sleuth out who their targets are and figure out exactly where they live, using scouts to reveal their unmarked locations on the map using context clues. Players can either start those quests by finding the right NPC who will brief them on what’s up, or fall into them by accident by stumbling into a target and uncovering that they’re one piece of a wider organization. Those more personal vendettas that have players figuring out how to take down one target make better use of the action systems than 30-person courtyard brawls.

The heart of Japan

With any game built around dozens of hours of bloodshed, I inevitably find myself asking the same questions. Why do I need to kill so many people? What am I fighting for? Not every game has a great answer for that question — many boil down to “it’s just fun, shut up” — but Shadows is the rare game that motivates me to fight. That’s because it shows me exactly what I’m fighting for at every turn: the soul of Japan.

Ubisoft’s take on the country is painstakingly crafted to capture the architecture of the era. The enormous open-world takes players from Kyoto to the deep woods of the Kii region. These areas aren’t just convenient places to set sidequests. In fact, many of the locations I find seem to serve no purpose at all. There are plenty of quaint houses or roadside shrines that don’t feature a single lootable chest or collectibles. They’re just there because they should be. Sometimes I stumble into an area filled with crumbled buildings. What happened here? Why was this place abandoned? Shadows doesn’t answer those questions with cheeky environmental storytelling, because it knows that to understand history is to accept that we can never know it all. There are always gaps to fill in, and the world of Shadows is filled with gaps.

I expect that its approach to open-world design might prove divisive. Perhaps learning from Valhalla’s critical overload of activities, there are barely any distractions in Shadows. You won’t find tons of elaborate platforming challenges out while exploring or fully developed dice games. Instead, Shadows only offers a smattering of very modest minigames sparsely placed throughout the map (and towers to climb, of course). When I find a shrine, I simply have to quietly pray at a few stops to “complete” it. Naoe can meditate with a trance-like button timing minigame, while Yasuke can do some dull Simon Says weapon training. The most intricate side content is the occasional puzzle dungeon to find a treasure chest.

Its message is made literal in its base building component. Early on, players unlock the ability to create a base of operations for the duo and their allies. The intricate system lets players construct buildings, link them together as they please, decorate the surrounding area with plants, and even let animals free in the yard. It’s not just a progression system that gives players a place to upgrade weapons, but an isolated utopia nestled deep in the woods. Yasuke and Naoe are constantly asking what kind of world they would build if they could put an end to the hatred that drowns their country. The base is where players can construct their own answer to that question.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows almost feels like what it would be like if Ken Burns was tasked with making a video game. It’s exhaustive in how it depicts Japan’s feudal era even in fiction, crafting its world with the eye of a historical documentarian. It’s not quite the in-depth slice of life that Red Dead Redemption 2 goes for, but it approaches that same idea with fewer systems. Some of my favorite moments came when I just got bored of stabbing people and got on my horse instead. I didn’t stop every few feet to complete a puzzle. I didn’t stop to open another chest. I just rode, breathing in nature and listening to my own exhale intertwine with the wind.

This is the life we should be free to lead. Free from political power plays with disastrous consequences. Free from the ceaseless whining of angry mobs hell bent on destruction. Free from violence in all its forms. Free to be bored — and happier for it.