Assassin's Creed Shadows review

Before we even knew what it was called, Assassin's Creed Shadows had a target on its back. Culture warriors have been frothing over the casting of historical Black samurai Yasuke as one of the protagonists ever since the first screenshot leaked, prompting several ill-advised attempts by Ubisoft to defang the haters concerned about "historical accuracy." Shadows was also delayed twice at a time when Ubisoft desperately needs a hit, and the scent of blood has industry critics and Tencent's bankers circling.

As analysts ready their takes on what Shadows means for the future of the industry's old giants and their giant open world games, I've got a simpler question to answer: Is Shadows fun?

I'm so glad that one is an easy yes. Shadows is some of the most fun I've had with a stealth game in a decade, and impressively, it also has the best, stickiest combat this series has seen. When I'm Naoe, ghosting past samurai by rooftop or shadow, or I'm Yasuke, charging through a castle gate and nailing every perfect block against a warrior monk, Shadows is peak Assassin's Creed.

But it's not all neck stabs and decapitation by katana. Shadows is massive—I'm knocking at the door of 50 hours having completed the main story and a chunk of side stuff—but its bloated map of breathtaking castles, unending temples, quaint villages, and gorgeous countryside is much wider than it is deep. In terms of stealth and action, Shadows is a successful return to what made early Assassin's Creed great, but it also drags along baggage from Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. It's got quests, companions, and dialogue options clearly designed to resemble a BioWare or Bethesda classic, but the resemblance is only superficial, and I didn't find the characters or stories memorable.

A disjointed main story, bland cast, and barrage of quests that all end the same way has me missing the days when Assassin's Creed was solely focused on the two things it still excels at: infiltrating a place and killing the right guy inside.

New order

As if Ubisoft knew exactly how to get on this classic AC fan's good side, one of Shadows' protagonists has something we haven't had much lately in these games: a direct link to the Assassin Brotherhood. Naoe's story begins much like Ezio's, with family tragedy, the passing down of a hidden blade, and the destruction of her shinobi village, fueling a quest for revenge against a shadowy organization of masked killers.

It's a routine kickoff, but its emotional beats are elevated by Naoe actor Masumi Tsunoda's performance capture, Ubisoft's sharper cinematography this time around, and a ripping soundtrack, a collaboration between traditional composers and Canadian-Japanese rock group TEKE::TEKE.

Confusingly, the first chunk of Shadows is almost exclusively the Naoe show as she checks the first few names off her big kill board. Yasuke, meanwhile, sits on the sidelines after a brief prologue depicting his introduction to Oda Nobunaga as a slave of Jesuit priests and his rise amongst his ranks. All the Naoe time early on centers Shadows' story on Naoe's crusade. While the majority of quests let you play as either character, Ubi never quite builds a case for Yasuke's dedication to Naoe's cause being stronger than "these bad guys gotta go." He spends the majority of the journey as Naoe's dutiful partner, occasionally flexing his status as a respected samurai to get information, while his personal stake isn't properly explored until the story's nearly over. For as much attention as Yasuke drew in the leadup to Shadows, his unique identity rarely even factors into dialogue.

Similarly, the companions that join Naoe and Yasuke's league and hang out at their new shinobi headquarters—a thief, a displaced shinobi, an orphaned child, and more—typically have a stronger connection to Naoe.

Light foot

Shadows' preference for Naoe can also be felt in how you solve problems. Between all the hiding places, rooftops, crawl spaces, and tenshu towers that only she can climb, the world is undoubtedly catered to her stealthy toolset.

I can't say enough nice things about the new Splinter Cell-inspired visibility meter. Visibility is now a sliding scale based on stance, distance, and light level. This is the first time darkness has truly mattered in Assassin's Creed. Where past assassins had to stay glued to rooftops to stay incognito, Naoe can choose to stay grounded, eliminating light sources and becoming nearly invisible in dark shadows. That level of nuance in detection, plus the brilliant addition of prone slithering, claws Assassin's Creed out of the rut of tall grass, waist-high cover, and instakill bows that big-budget games have been stuck in for a decade. We used to be a society that appreciated dynamic shadows and sophisticated patrols—that hair-raising feeling of staying dead still in a hallway praying a guard turns around in the next 10 seconds!

Shadows is a leap in the right direction for stealth, but I have nitpicks. There are three difficulty modes for stealth (combat is a separate parameter, conveniently), and the first two are too easy. I eventually ramped up to Expert, which worked out great at first: guards kept me on my toes with their ability to finally look up at rooftops and see better in low light. But I eventually cranked it back down after grinding against extremely fast detection times that made daytime missions unfun. This is classic post-release patch territory I hope Ubi gets around to, but deeper difficulty settings (or more presets) would've helped a lot.

I'm also conflicted about Shadows' changing seasons. The pitch is exactly the sort of quietly ambitious idea that Ubisoft loves to build entire games around, quirks be damned. Time passes as you complete quests, and every few hours the whole map transforms to fit the season.

Ubi artists actually hunkered down and made four variations of its gigantic map, and they're all absurdly pretty, but the promise that seasonal conditions would change my playstyle never really happened. The differences are there, they're just slight—a few times I hid in some grass that wouldn't have been there in winter, for instance, rainfall dampens noise to a degree (though it'd much much easier to tell if Ubi went the whole way with a Splinter Cell noise meter), and castles walls are easier to scale when their surrounding moats are frozen, but I never had to change up my strategy.

What matters more than anything is time of day: Those pretty shadows can only fully hide you at night, and weirdly there's no MGS5-like cigar that passes the time, so I did a lot more daytime infiltrations than I would've preferred.

The demon

But the day is when Yasuke shines. I expected Shadows' emphasis on Naoe to invalidate the whole dual protagonist schtick, and yet I ended up playing more of the main story as Yasuke. That's how fun Ubisoft's made cutting guys down to size.

There's nothing revolutionary going on with Shadows' light attacks, heavy attacks, blocks, and parries, but this is the first time Assassin's Creed combat has felt great since the chain-killing days of Ezio. Gone are the sauceless, floaty combos of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Blades clash, cleave, or draw blood with every collision. Repeated blows shed armor and send helmets flying, making enemies more vulnerable.

Most objects that aren't nailed down are destructible, which is largely an aesthetic upgrade but is also useful for the occasional environmental assist by launching a bandit into a cabbage stand with Yasuke's kick (an ability that never left my shortcuts).

Combat didn't immediately sing—those first 10 hours locked to Naoe were a struggle. Challenging a roomful of ronin and spearmen with her limited weapon options is signing up for hard mode. She can parry but not block. Her health pool is half of Yasuke's, she deals way less damage, and it takes ages to stagger even medium-sized enemies. I spent most of my Naoe time like I had a sword fighting allergy, which made Yasuke's late introduction cathartic.

Yasuke radiates "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me" energy, shrugging off glancing blows and overpowering low-level grunts with sheer muscle. He sucks at climbing and will snap every tightrope you try to walk him across, but he can also shove guys to the ground just by sprinting at them.

Ubisoft tries to balance Yasuke's one-note playstyle by giving him way more combat options—he has five distinct weapon skill trees versus Naoe's three, and his special abilities are exclusively aggressive. By level 30, I'd unlocked a clutch katana lifesteal move that dealt more damage the less health I had.

It's never quite enough to overcome the reality that maining Yasuke is like playing an easier, simpler samurai videogame versus Naoe's high-stake infiltrations, but the option to swap at almost any time meant I could go stealthy with Naoe when being a one-man-army got dull, then flip to Yasuke when I got tired of tiptoeing around guards instead of plowing right through them.

My flip-flopping between playstyles mirrored how I played Ghost of Tsushima, a game that literally asks, "What if a ninja was also a samurai?" But unlike Jin Sakai, master shinobi and one-man Mongol meat grinder, Shadows forced me to play around Naoe and Yasuke's weaknesses. Some of my best memories with Yasuke involve trying to keep him in stealth using cover, shadows, and special armor-piercing arrows, a Sisyphean task for the lumbering oaf. Naoe's fragility made patient, careful stealth more consequential and exciting.

Numbers game

As a lapsed AC fan who liked how Mirage dialed back the loot craze of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, it took some time to accept how deeply loot-motivated Shadows is. Its open world is overstuffed with raw materials—minerals, hay, cloth, and wood used to expand my hideout or upgrade weapons—that are mine for the taking, even when the context doesn't make sense.

It's easy enough to accept that Naoe and Yasuke's plan to bring peace and balance to Japan involves plundering the nobility's castles Robin Hood-style, but Ubi never sufficiently establishes why it's cool to mercilessly pillage a local trade harbor or slaughter all the guards at some dude's house to steal his prized katana. I guess it's not a leap to imagine our vigilantes are only targeting crooked warlords, though I suspect even that applies more logic to Ubi's world than it intended.

Shadows exhibits a "kill first, ask questions never" approach to questing that would probably go down smoother if I were a Diablo or World of Warcraft guy. Despite the presence of a BioWare-like dialogue wheel, conversations were brief and most NPCs are just vending machines spitting out tasks, allowing no follow-up questions about what I'm doing or where I'm going. Not even my companions could be chatted up in any significant way outside of their recruitment quests.

Maybe I'm feeling the shallow world building harder because of Shadows' proximity to two strong, talkative RPGs in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Avowed, but I'm not that hard to please. I roamed Japan by horse looking to make connections and found only throats to stab. In dozens of hours I can recall exactly one memorable character in a sidequest: a mysterious "yokai" who's actually just a dude who dresses up as a melon every spring and fights his friend. That guy rocked.

Melon man aside, Shadows is just one huge bounty board. There is no traditional quest list or journal tab, only an objectives screen that maps out the dozen-plus factions who need killing in Japan. It never gets more complicated. Shadows is the sort of game that assumes I'm so concerned with XP and legendary gear that it tells me exactly what rewards I'll get before I've started a task. It's the kind of RPG where every region has an NPC who asks me to murder exactly 100 bad guys. The only thing that makes sense in this world is the loot. And admittedly, the loot is strong.

Prize fighter

My eyes were ready to glaze over Shadows' procedural loot the first time I pulled an "Uncommon Tanto" out of a box, but it didn't take long to find Epic and Legendary gear that comes with genuinely exciting, game-changing perks. The very first castle I toppled in Kyoto gave me an armor set that let Yasuke parry unblockable red attacks, an ability so valuable that I kept upgrading that chestpiece for the next 20 hours. Now I'm nearly level 40 and up to my neck in powerful gear competing for my attention. Some favorites:

• Violet Night: A katana that instantly poisons enemies when I deflect an attack
• Death Whisperer: A kusarigama chain blade that deals +200% damage when I knock enemies into the environment
• Hataou Tanto: A knife that lets me drop a smoke bomb after landing a weakpoint attack
• Sage's Reach: A naginata that stacks +10% damage with each block
• Daybreak's Fury: A giant club that shreds enemy armor and turns into shrapnel damage
• Patient Harbinger: A teppo rifle that can shoot twice before reloading
• Minogame's Protection: An amulet that doubles my damage if I'm wearing no armor

I love that Shadows isn't precious about handing out legendaries and even tells me what the biggest prize in a palace, fort, or castle is before I spend 20 minutes tearing it apart. But what ties a nice bow on the whole loot experience is a flexible engraving system I unlocked a few days in. Every new perk found in a chest or attached to a weapon becomes an engraving that I can pay to apply to any other gear. By the time I had dozens of helmets, armors, and weapons crowding my pockets, I'd built up this elaborate library of remappable perks that let me put together some truly overpowered gear.

Ubisoft's interpretation of 16th-century Japan is an achievement, but its locations have more personality than the people who inhabit them. Its cities are dense and appear active, but interactivity is low. The central city of Kyoto has hundreds of civilians, merchants, and craftsmen going about their lives, yet I can interact with just two or three merchants selling rations or horses. City guards patrol the streets, but cutting them down in broad daylight has zero consequences beyond upsetting city folk in the vicinity. There is no concept of crime or a "wanted" status unless you really mess up in a restricted zone, and guards within those zones won't chase me outside of them.

That's the real culprit making Shadows' cities feel artificial. Older eras of Assassin's Creed knew how to make cities one cohesive playground. In nearly 50 hours of Shadows, I haven't had a single satisfying chase because it's so easy to jump over a wall and watch guards immediately lose interest.

Long road

If you're noticing a rollercoaster-shaped review here, it's because appreciating Shadows took some calibration. It had me asking myself what I like about Assassin's Creed and questioning if my gripes with its weak characters and dull storylines were real hindrances or perceived deficiencies I created by holding Shadows to an arbitrary RPG rubric. When I booted up Shadows for the first time since rolling credits a few days earlier, my quest tab was still packed with faces and names to hunt down—warlords, samurai, corrupt merchants, supposed yokai—so I chose a target at random. The ritual was comforting: pick a name, deduce the location, sneak in, and get the kill.

I kept at it for a couple of hours, trying bolder strategies to go undetected, putting new loadouts through their paces, and challenging myself to find targets with minimal clues.

Jeez, this game is so huge that I haven't even mentioned its brilliant navigation. By default, you're only given clues about where people and places are, like "Southwest of X" or "Near a street with red lamps." The idea is to use Scouts, a reconnaissance currency, to search an area and confirm where to go, but if you skip that part, something as routine as riding to a quest marker becomes its own little game of Geoguessr.

It was the best time I'd had in Shadows since the start, and I couldn't quite place why. The fact that the main story was behind me and I didn't feel rushed anymore was a factor, but I wasn't just relaxed—I was reveling in my checklist game, savoring every assassination, and not thinking about what I'd change. It's like I'd finally learned how to like Shadows. On my second monitor, my partner was dueling a lightning dragon in Monster Hunter Wilds, and it occurred to me that we were basically doing the same thing: Picking names, hunting targets, seeking loot.

I don't think Shadows is something to marathon. You could completely ignore the story, come back six months later, and still be up to speed (the heads gotta roll). I know I'll still be picking away at its 30+ castles later in 2025 and 2026, because I get the itch for a great stealth game every few months, and now I have a new one with a whole lot of stuff to do.