Assassin's Creed Shadows Review

"From the Shadows"

Campaign

March 27, 2025 at 7:51pm
By Jason Stettner

Continuing in the vein of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla we have Shadows which is the next massive open world Assassin’s Creed game. It follows dual protagonists as they battle against various foes across Japan. One story with Naoe who is on a high octane tale of revenge, the other with Yasuke who’s the fish out of water perspective.

The former is really the heart of the story and the connection to the land whereas the other is a massive strong presence blistering through foes. It’s quite a shift between the two as Naoe is your regular assassin whereas Yasuke just isn’t. It’s quite an interesting decision as parts of the narrative within the game feel rather disjointed.

Most of it plays like a rather elongated prologue where halfway through you randomly get a prologue for Yasuke where you’re introduced to weapons you’ve already been using for hours and a story that already feels established. It’s really quite weird and something they really need to work on for this series.

Getting the story bits right as that’s really the hold back here as the gameplay really is fine. Like you just randomly stop everything to get back story on Yasuke where he’s just promoted swiftly up the ranks. There’s hard work involved on his part of course, but it feels odd pacing wise. It feels like parts of the narrative were shifted around to give the game a stronger action starting point and I felt that was bizarre.

It works well okay enough but it was still rather odd. That aside it’s a lengthy story that sort of abruptly ends with the pure focus being on killing a circular group of foes and anyone that extends past that. It takes you across this insanely massive world that’s filled to the brim with life and density. It’s by far the most cinematic entries of the series and provides some solid character moments along the way.

There’s also just enough mystery surrounding your elusive targets although you won’t find a whole lot connecting it to the overall story as this felt really detached in comparison to the other previous entries. It really wants to stand on its own with the Creed and surrounding extra narrative being additional content. There is a metric ton of things to do across a massive world and for those activities you really just have to go about exploring.

Gameplay

This is very much the same sort of gameplay loop that we’ve seen developed within the larger open world entries. You get an excessively large world to explore that’s filled to the brim with activities to take part in and folks to kill along the way. There are some shifts for this entry but at its core the game is about the same as usual in this department.

They do a decent enough of job of mixing up your objectives as you play through the main story but there are many areas where you need to stop narrative progression to grind out levels as you’ll find level gaps do sneak up on you often. It’s to encourage you to explore the open world as there’s lots to do but at the same time it feels odd how aggressively difficulty things can scale out of nowhere. You’ll need to gather equipment, enhance existing pieces and build up skill points across your characters.

Naoe being the traditional Creed character focuses on stealth and silent moves. She has a deadly set of weapons to unleash upon enemies and feels like a powerful presence across the story being the heart of its focus. Yasuke is large, like a bull in a china shop sort of situation smashing through the environment. He can’t really assassinate or climb or do regular things and instead focuses on brute force.

You can spend most of your time playing as either but there are forced segments of the story requiring one or the other. There are also many places Yasuke can’t really reach so the vast majority of my time was spent with Naoe. When exploring the regular way to play the game is to find where you’re headed with clues, I found that system sort of confusing and just went back to the regular play after a few hours. I just don’t care for looking about for what I need to do.

The world is also incredibly dense, this is a very impressive open world. It’s far beyond the level of detail that we’ve ever seen from Assassin’s Creed and the developers should be truly proud of what they’ve made. Every inch of the map is filled to the brim with details. If you sit in a forest it’s full of brush, things littering the ground and little critters fluttering about. It’s hard to really capture in writing but some random hill in the middle of nowhere feels like an actual forest for density, it’s not sparse. Then on top of that it rolls the days and seasons with multiple levels for each season to truly make your story feel like a passage of time.

It’s impressive. If I wasn’t coming from Kingdom Come Deliverance II it would even be more so in terms of forest realism. The combat is about the same as usual with spongy health being replaced by blade usage. There are varying levels of enemy power and difficulty with a range of weapons unleashed by them. This is backed by at times some rather intense musical beats.

When it comes to visuals on Xbox Series X I was very happy with what they achieved. The game is featuring some heavy upscaling so it does have elements of being somewhat blurry but that’s fine considering the technical feats it reaches. It’s all upscaling to 4k and then it just hits lower internal resolutions of around 1080p for any of the mode. There’s performance at 60fps, Balanced reaching 40fps and Fidelity aiming for 30fps. The Balanced and Fidelity modes are about the same with global illuminated ray tracing being in the whole world whereas that’s just in the hideout for performance.

The hideout itself being a neat mini city building mechanic that I hope they expand upon in future games as it’s a cool side addition to your main adventures. I did notice some crashes, but that could just be my Xbox Series X console that struggles with new releases.

The Conclusion

Assassin's Creed Shadows features an incredibly impressive world that’s filled with deep levels of detail while still leaning on existing mechanics and a narrative that could have used better pacing. The whole killing of enemies in the circle was a really great setup and the revenge themes were excellent outside of an awkward combining of the two leads.

I think that is one of the weaker parts here, is that they don’t do enough with the two distinct protagonists. It’s clearly a story that’s focused on Naoe getting revenge and in turn I do believe Yasuke’s perspective needed more development. It was super disjointed to do a flashback learning tutorial like elements of Yasuke despite having spent many hours with him already.

I’m not sure what happened there, feels like parts of the story were shifted around or something. It’s a neat entry point for Japan to have an outsider, and not unseen when doing stories based around the country. It just could have been handled more effectively from a story perspective. The world of Shadows is genuinely impressive, the details is insane and the seasons were a very nice addition.

There are tons of people to deal with however you choose and many fun ways to engage with the world. The hideout is something I hope they explore deeper in future entries as well. It’s a well polished game but does lean heavily upon the previous open world games. If you’re a fan of those you’ll like what you get here, if you’re tired of the formula it doesn’t change much.

Read our Assassin's Creed Odyssey Review
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Assassin's Creed Shadows Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Ubisoft

Rating Overall: 8.0