Review: Assassin’s Creed: Shadows

What happens in the shadows, stays in the shadows.

I can not overstate that I was taking a nap to be there at launch, then I woke up early and saw it was shadow-dropped. How appropriate for this game. I already had it pre-loaded, so after it unpacked, I was ready. My katana was sharpened, my tanto was in my belt, my hidden blade I didn’t have yet, so I couldn’t have that on me. I was ready for the adventure.

Animated animus!
First you load into the animus. I believe it was in Black Flag that they mentioned a consumer product just like this. In this hub you can load previous experiences from Origins to the latest, Shadows. You can earn extra’s like gear and is great for legacy play. I love how they implemented it as if you are in the animus yourself.

Agi Adventure!
You start the game as Yosuke and quickly devastate yourself through the Agi forces that are there to defend, after that intro, you get to play with Naoe for the great portion of the game. She really is the fastest assassin. Her new style of combat and stealth is something you need to get used to again after the more action focused entries in the series.

Assassin’s creed is back to form when it comes to stealth, when it comes to Naoe. She is quickly overwhelmed when she meets a considerable force of more than 3 opponents so it’s better to pick of enemies one after one until you thinned out the herd and can attack the remaining enemies.

By far my favourite activity in the game is clearing out the castles, as with each castle you get a certain amount of Daisho you need to dispatch of and the game rewards you with sweet, sweet unique loot you can only get at that castle, so I highly recommend, when you do get the game, to do castles when you can. it has something relaxing about it to just pick of the enemies one by one and before you know it… it took you an hour to clear out a castle.

Vast Japan
Japan in this game is a vast place, about the size of the map of origins, but jampacked with stuff to see. During your travels you come accross so many beautiful places. Shrines, just as castles offer a little side-activity where you either look for scrolls or you pray at certain amount of shrines to get knowledge points

Knowledge is power
speaking of knowledge, to progress in this game, your level doesn’t really matter that much, to unlock new skills and to really progress you need knowledge. You gain knowledge through these shrines and doing activities that are unique to each character. To be honest, at the time of writing this review I only got to do the specific ones for Naoe, those are kuji-kiri, meditation that unlock Naoe specific memories.

To compare it to Ghost of Tsushima, this one has the same effect on me, as I really want to explore the country and comes accross things organically, as the settings allow you both ways: either you look for them organically through exploration or… you just toggle the markers on your map. I have spend hours just wandering around and finding things.

Of course, I have to talk about the Black Elephant of the room. Yasuke. I have seen nasty remarks about him, when I visited the Ubisoft stream on twitch. “Yasuke, white skin, when?” To the people being against Yasuke only for the colour of his skin I have this to say: Fuck your racist ass. We don’t need you to play the game. Go play something more to your liking that has the iconography you are more familiar with.

Yasuke feels like a protagonist from the previous games. Too strong to stealth and his stealth skills are really non-existent either way. Naoe is more like the older games, so perfect for stealth and to be honest my preferred way to play the game. I absolutely love stealth and especially now they added lighting and your use to the game, it feels like I came home again in a game like splinter cell, but then it being an Assassin’s creed entry.

This game feels more like an assassin’s creed unlike the previous few RPG entries and I sincerely hope they bring back the lore, as so far the lore in this game, the real assassin’s creed lore is rather scarce, but I would love to see more of it. I do highly recommend the game on it’s own merit as it’s really fun to play.

Now, excuse me when I go back to Japan!

Thank you, Ubisoft, for gifting me a key for this game, so I had the opportunity to travers Japan in this great game.