Since the release of 2017’s excellent Assassin’s Creed Origins, it feels like the franchise’s audience has been split down the middle. On one side, you have the nostalgic group that prefers the golden era of the series which focused on stealth, parkour and assassinations, while the other group gravitates towards the more grandiose, open-world RPG-lite structure of modern titles established by Origins. There’s certainly merit to both styles of games – and in Ubisoft’s case, more critical and commercial success when leaning into the latter – which is where we find Assassin’s Creed Shadows, in a precarious spot that, rather boldly, gives us more Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla.



Note: This review is completely spoiler-free.

Let me preface the review by stating that I am a fan of the modern direction that the Assassin’s Creed games have taken. I genuinely enjoyed Origins and Odyssey and what they offered: grand open-worlds with lots of RPG-esque features and standard Ubisoft busy work to keep the checklist flowing. As much as some might despise that game structure, it’s like a shot of adrenaline for me. I drew the line at Valhalla when I realised I may never actually finish that game in my lifetime, really feeling the bloat of it all. So I approached Assassin’s Creed Shadows with a bit more enthusiasm while also being a bit concerned about the game falling into the same trappings as Valhalla. Thankfully, Shadows sidesteps most of those issues, but make no mistake, this is an absolutely monstrous game with a formidable length and map size.



As the story goes, Assassin’s Creed Shadows throws players into feudal Japan in 1579. The story largely revolves around two protagonists: Yasuke, the African samurai of legend and Naoe, a shinobi with a score to settle. Both find themselves on opposite ends of a raging civil conflict sweeping the country. Through some spoiler-y circumstances, Yasuke and Naoe’s fates cross which sets in motion a series of events leading to a darker conspiracy brewing in the shadows of the war.

In fact, so much of the emotional backbone of Shadows' story comes from Naoe’s plight. By the time I was re-introduced to Yasuke in the story, I had already grown significantly more attached to Naoe.

Before you’re even given access to freely explore Japan and its varied regions, Assassin’s Creed Shadows hits you over the head with an exhaustively lengthy prologue that sets up Yasuke and Naoe’s journey. However, about 80% of that prologue is almost exclusively dedicated to Naoe, which makes me second-guess just who the actual protagonist of the game even is. In fact, so much of the emotional backbone of Shadows' story comes from Naoe’s plight. By the time I was re-introduced to Yasuke in the story, I had already grown significantly more attached to Naoe’s character journey. As you can imagine, this puts Yasuke in a difficult position that we’ll get more into in a bit.



Once the training wheels are off, you’re free to explore Ubisoft’s vision of Japan. My jaw dropped to the floor when I first opened the map and zoomed out, realising that Ubisoft’s claims about the game length being 30-40 hours long might’ve been underselling it a tiny bit. While it’s certainly not as gargantuan as Odyssey in terms of sheer scale, this is still an intimidatingly large, dense sandbox that will very easily offer over 100 hours of gameplay if you’re itching to explore everything.

That said, the main questline is a lot more freeflowing than I expected. You’re free to tackle the story in any order since your main objectives are primarily to take town a shadowy organisation (again), only this time, you can take them on in any order. However, “free” is used very loosely here since Ubisoft’s open-world design sort of railroads you into unlocking the map due to level-gated regions. Sure, you can technically go anywhere from the start, but you’ll be up against foes than can very easily one-shot you with a sneeze at higher levels.



In between main missions, you can switch between Naoe and Yasuke for exploration. Missions will mostly remain the same between them, but the biggest change is deciding which character to use on a specific mission. More accurately, whose skillset you personally feel is better suited for that type of mission. Since Yasuke’s combat focuses on brutish one-on-one combat and generally being a walking tank, his playstyle is meant for players who like to rush into battle headfirst and obliterate enemies.

My jaw dropped to the floor when I first opened the map and zoomed out, realising that Ubisoft’s claims about the game length being 30-40 hours long might’ve been underselling it a tiny bit.

Naoe’s playstyle, on the other hand, simply embodies the core pillars of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. She’s quiet, very agile and geared for stealth with great parkour skills. For that reason alone, it just felt more natural to play as Naoe for a majority of my playthrough. Sure, Yasuke has his combat benefits too but there was rarely a situation where it felt completely necessary. Couple that with Naoe simply being a more interesting character than Yasuke, and you have quite a dilemma.



Naoe can also, rather easily, hold her own in combat situations. Thanks to a sprawling skill tree that lets you improve her combat and stealth skills, it’s very easy to transform Naoe into a whirling beyblade of death as you slice through enemies before quickly retreating into the shadows. Naoe also comes equipped with a grappling hook that lets her scale high points – something that Yasuke does not have, meaning if you want to scale most towers for those beautiful eagle views, you’ll probably be unlocking them as Naoe anyway.

This is the unfortunate truth I sort of had to wrestle with while playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows. For all intents and purposes, it does feel like Naoe was originally meant to be a sole protagonist because of how much the story and gameplay is built around her. If you can view it through that lens, it starts to make a lot more sense. All of this isn’t to downplay Yasuke as a character, who also has an interesting story to follow, but so much of what makes Assassin’s Creed, well, Assassin’s Creed rests on Naoe’s shoulders. Once I got over that hurdle, I ended up loving so many aspects of the game.



This is the part where I shower Assassin’s Creed Shadows with praise. Ubisoft have possibly crafted one of its best open-worlds to date. Each location, be it a shrine, rural village, bustling town or the scenic wilderness, all comes to life with sublime vistas that never failed to impress me. There were moments that I soaked in, stopping me dead in my tracks so I could just admire how beautiful everything looked. Forests are remarkably dense, dangerous and easy to get lost in, while key towns or villages are lively with NPCs and animals all going about their daily lives. If anything, Shadows is perhaps Ubisoft’s most impressive technical feat to date and that’s saying a lot considering how much I loved the striking world of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

There were moments that I soaked in, stopping me dead in my tracks so I could just admire how beautiful everything looked.

Ubisoft implements a few new mechanics to make the exploration a little more streamlined. While building an expansive hideout in a dedicated base-building mode (it’s a bit more intuitive than the settlements of Valhalla, thankfully), you can enlist the help of scouts to search points on the map. Since most missions revolve around launching investigations to locate key targets, you’re only given a direction to work with – for example, ‘east of the port’ or ‘southwest of the grasslands’ – so scouts do a lot of tracking on the map. Simply point them in a direction and they’ll scour that area, usually unlocking your objective for you. Sure, it’s a streamlined way to “explore” and takes a bit away from singling out targets yourself, but considering how much time is saved in the process, I honestly didn’t mind this feature. However, I can see why some may not like it, which can be ignored if you want to do the investigating yourself.



Combat in Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been given a bit more attention this time. In the past, combat boiled down to mostly button-mashing or tapping into your special attacks once the cooldown wore off. In Shadows, each combat encounter now involves deflecting, guarding, and evading while looking for openings to land killing blows (at least more successfully with Yasuke). It’s punchy and satisfying with a healthy dose of ramped up violence and bodily dismemberment as the cherry on top.

Ubisoft once again implements an in-depth gear system in Assassin's Creed Shadows, really bringing out most of its RPG-lite elements. Naoe and Yasuke can equip various outfits, weapons, trinkets and head pieces that give them incremental buffs to critical strikes, attack power, defence, etc. For the most part, while out exploring, you're constantly tracking down gear with moderately better percentages and numbers. Completing a handful of tasks around shrines can also give you massive XP plus Legendary gear, incentivising you to engage with the world a bit more. For better or worse, it's a very familiar gear grind, but I have to admit, it works because it's addictive. However, this also depends on how much players enjoy exchanging their gear every 15 minutes.



Throughout my 60 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (the last 20 hours were a straight beeline for the story, meaning I didn’t even get to see half of what the world offered), there was never a point where I felt bored. Burnt out on a few occasions, sure, but the game does an excellent job of keeping you hooked, whether it’s through the rewarding exploration or gameplay. A lot of it is your typical Ubisoft open-world fluff with a checklist of objectives and markers to clear – again, not everyone’s cup of tea – but for players who enjoyed the last three mainline games’ flavours of addictive map/mission clearing, you’ll eventually fall into a very familiar groove here too.

To address the elephant in the room, Ubisoft isn’t bringing anything particularly new to the table when it comes to open-world Japan in Shadows. Ghost of Tsushima already did this – and did it a lot better – five years ago. To a lesser extent, even last year’s Rise of the Ronin, for as flawed as that game was, still had a unique edge to its world design and was mostly carried by Team Ninja’s top-tier combat system.

Throughout my 60 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (the last 20 hours were a straight beeline for the story, meaning I didn’t even get to see half of what the world offered), there was never a point where I felt bored.

If you’ve already played the aforementioned titles, you’ll probably see Assassin’s Creed Shadows as yet another familiar Japanese setting with a similar ebb and flow – a beautiful one, no doubt, but one that we’ve already seen and extensively played before. Visually, it’s a notch below Ghost of Tsushima and miles above Rise of the Ronin, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t get a sense of déjà vu as you’re trotting through the world.



On a technical front, I reviewed Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PS5 Pro and found a polished package overall with only hardly any noticeable bugs or crashes. I ran into a handful of annoying framerate dips when entering “memories” sections of the story – think of it as curated slices of the world – but beyond that, it run at a mostly stable framerate. Playing in resolution mode in 4K really brings the game to life and I urge anyone with the right set-up to do the same. Voice acting is solid across the board, though I opted to play in “Immersive Mode” which accurately dubbed the Japanese and Portuguese languages in the game. I strongly recommend playing with Immersive Mode on as the Japanese voice acting is strong, especially Masumi Tsunoda as Naoe.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an absolutely massive experience that’s going to please fans of the Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla formula. Ubisoft has crafted a gorgeous, densely packed open-world in feudal Japan with all of its usual busy work that’s definitely going to cater to a certain type of gamer. A few notable flaws and shortcomings hold it back from being as good as Origins or Odyssey – and in many ways, Naoe’s story and gameplay feels like it’s been given a lot more attention than Yasuke's, but both are compelling characters in their own rights. As long as you know what you’re getting into, you’ll probably have a really good time exploring and making new adventures, but it still leaves a few itches that, in Ubisoft’s own area of expertise, can’t be scratched as well as similar games from the past.

*PS5 Review code provided by Ubisoft