Assassin’s Creed Shadows Falls Frustratingly Short Of Greatness

The first time I rode up to a Shinto Shrine in the coastal city of Sakai, I was enamored. The gorgeously rendered red Torii welcomed visitors to pray to deities at altars dotting the surrounding holy structures and manicured vegetation. The trimmed grasses swayed in the seaside wind, adding motion and life to the scene. It was a joy to take it all in as I walked in search of three Himorogi, where I would pray for XP. I can only imagine it’s a scene that perfectly recreates the tranquility one would experience in person. It's a special kind of magic that Ubisoft’s many development teams have become masters of.

Thirty-plus hours later, however, the sheen of visiting Shinto Shrines throughout Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ massive open world lost much of the impact it had the first 10 times. Instead, visiting these sites became a robotic act of tedium. I’d stroll up reluctantly, toggling my Eagle Vision, and begin the slow trot to find the two or three spots I needed to visit to get that XP. It wasn’t my definition of fun. But it was one of the most reliable ways of leveling — without running into the game’s many minor frustrations.

My feelings about the Shinto Shrines can be extended to the game as a whole. While there’s plenty to enjoy about this game, from its stunning world to its genuinely fun stealth and combat mechanics, so many little things get in the way of its strengths. While Shadows is an improvement over the last couple of games in the series, it falls short of becoming a new high point.

A Story, Cut In Two

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set during the 1580s and follows Fujibayashi Naoe, a young Igan woman looking to avenge her father after a group of 12 masked warriors leaves him (and her) for dead during the deadly siege of her homeland. Amid the backdrop of continued civil war across Japan, Naoe uses her skills as a shinobi to track down and assassinate the people responsible for the tragedy.

Along the way, Naoe recruits a cohort of individuals who want to see this mysterious group brought down, including the African samurai and retainer of Oda Nobunaga Yasuke. Together, the duo forges alliances across the land and uses brute strength, espionage, and the measured blade of the assassins, all in pursuit of lasting peace in Japan.

Naoe’s origin is the less interesting of the two, as her path to becoming an Assassin mirrors many that have come before her. Yasuke on the other hand is compelling from the start. He’s an outsider who, despite assimilating into the culture and earning the kind of freedom and admiration he never thought imaginable, still feels like there’s a greater purpose for him out there.

It’s just a shame that the game’s first act is nowhere near as compelling as its opening hour. Once Naoe’s quest begins in earnest, the plot becomes a disjointed back and forth between flashbacks showing her training and close relationships and the pursuit of her first few targets in the present. Each of these story beats is broken up by hours of exploration and getting the player acclimated to the game’s core loop. When early story beats were unfolding, bland writing and middling voice acting from the shinobi lead hindered my investment in these characters and events.

To my surprise, however, this slow and inconsistent start eventually gave way to a rolling boil around the 25-hour mark. Like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, players are provided the majority of the main quest’s objectives right from the start. And for a while, the game is about you taking down the level-appropriate bad guys one by one, ad nauseam. But halfway through your 12 targets, these missions begin to take some memorable twists. It’s here that players also begin making some weighty choices. But over two dozen hours in? I can imagine many players (to their detriment) having long ago strayed from the core story to pursue less fulfilling activities scattered elsewhere in the world.

A Strong Start, Then The Cracks Emerge

Playing Shadows makes one hell of an impression up front. Shadows has the prettiest naturalistic open world in a game since Red Dead Redemption. The ever-changing seasons add even more variety not only to the sights you’ll behold but also to gameplay.

The new visibility meter lets you know how shrouded you are by darkness. But it’s not just about hiding in the shadows. Extinguishing flames can also be used to lure guards into discreet areas. Enemies are sensitive to sound, which means infiltrating an enemy base during a heavy spring rainfall or a gusty blizzard will mask your footsteps.

Naoe’s tools also open up new avenues of stealth in exciting ways. Naoe’s grappling hook can be used to ascend to the top of buildings or to swing to adjacent rooftops and open windows. She can use a bamboo straw to breathe while hidden in ponds (an option that disappears in the frigid temperatures of winter), and a variety of tools like smoke bombs and kunai to even the odds in silence.

“Shadows has the prettiest naturalistic open world in a game since Red Dead Redemption.”

Yasuke, on the other hand, fulfills the power fantasy of being an unstoppable warrior. Yasuke can sneak, but he’s far less equipped to do so without the speed or crafty toolset at his disposal (inversely, Naoe is far less equipped to handle large groups of enemies head-on, unless the player has total mastery of combat). Instead, Yasuke is all about confronting enemies with your weapon of choice. Whatever weapon you choose, be it a katana or a Kanabō, combat is a satisfying flurry of combos, parries, and blocks.

As the hours go on, however, cracks begin to show. When trying to reach rooftops jutting out above you, Naoe’s grappling hook is finicky, requiring precise foot placement to attach it to a point swing point (something that was much more seamless the last time an Assassin had a grappling hook). Occasionally, pressing the assassination button when prompted will inexplicably result in your character doing a light attack instead of capitalizing on a vulnerable enemy. When fighting enemies indoors, the camera will get caught in the environment and obscure enemies off-screen. Legacy issues for the series, like imprecise parkour controls, will sometimes launch your character in unintended directions blowing your cover in the process. These issues aren’t consistent enough to break the game. But during tense moments, the frustrations can be the difference between evading guards and getting caught.

The biggest misstep is the recommended Exploration Mode. By default, Shadows intends to keep players immersed in its stunning world by axing standard map markers. In its place, an objective is communicated to the player through a set of vague directional clues meant to guide you toward your goal.

While exploration mode does work, it can also lead to minutes of tedium when the instructions aren’t specific enough. You’ll have to take a moment in the game’s map to check your position relative to the first few set of instructions every time there’s a new objective. Once you arrive at the right city or village, pinpointing the exact domicile where your contact awaits can lead to a minute or two wandering aimlessly with Eagle Vision toggled. As the story picked up, I decided the extra level of immersion wasn’t worth the additional time it took to kick off the next bit of the story (especially when it meant having to open up the map in the pause menu anyway), and turned off Exploration Mode entirely.

The side activities in the open world are also a mixed bag. While major and minor story missions typically let the game’s fun mechanics shine, side activities get repetitive fast. Many of them, like visiting shrines, finding lost scroll pages, or saving citizens from hairy situations, just aren’t all that fun.

It would be great to ignore these side activities once a player gets their fill, but the level gating of the more interesting missions and regions means you’ll have to engage in these activities throughout your playtime. When the story really begins to pick up in the back half of the game and your characters become more fun to play as they level up, it can be a bummer having to take a second away from Shadows’ strengths to grind unengaging side content to reach an arbitrary number.

Splitting The Difference

The game’s two-protagonist format is a neat novelty at first, as they each specialize in an aspect of Assassin’s Creed’s two distinct playstyles. But issues soon arise when you begin exploring Japan on your own.

Quite often, you’ll face an obstacle in the open world, such as the need to scale a building (which Yasuke can’t do in most urban areas) or break through a locked door (which Naoe doesn’t have the raw strength to do), that requires you to switch characters.

Switching characters is always accessible in the pause menu, but each switch requires a load screen (It took between 5 and 10 seconds for every switch), adding tedium that didn’t exist in the series before. It can be frustrating when the game requires playing as one character for a particular mission (or when you simply want to play as one character for whatever side activity you’re headed to) preventing you from quickly grabbing locked-away loot or unlocking a crucial fast travel point along the way unless you sit through one of these load screens. And if you were doing a character-specific activity before being sidetracked, you’re back to the menu for another switch to resume what you were doing.

While Assassin’s Creed Syndicate also used the two-character mechanic, at least both Jacob and Evie had baseline access to parkour and stealth eliminations.

Managing the gear and abilities of each character can also take extra time. After playing as one character for a long while, switching to the other means spending minutes in the upgrade menu spending the mountain of skill points you’ve accrued, and switching out their now-under-leveled gear.

In the case of the latter, that will sometimes mean tracking down level-appropriate gear that you may not have uncovered as the other character. Finding loot stashes isn’t hard, as every enemy base and camp rewards loot of some kind. But again, it adds a possible extra step that breaks the immersion developers were going for and gets in the way of whatever the player set out to do when switching characters in the first place.

There’s no denying that the two-protagonist approach makes the narrative more interesting. But in the gameplay department, it stretches what all other Assassin’s Creed protagonists can do at any time across two less capable characters.

(Small) Steps In The Right Direction

After the misfire that was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Shadows feels like a step in the right direction for the franchise. Stealth feels as fun as it’s ever been, movement as Naoe feels slick and full of dimension, and combat is bloody satisfying. However, so many steps towards making the open world more immersive don’t quite land. While the two protagonists' approach adds a ton of variety to the game’s story and how players approach story missions, it breaks the pacing of exploration in a manner that feels more awkward than it should. Factor in the series’ longstanding issues with controls, Shadows left me more frustrated than I wanted to be across its lengthy runtime 50-hour runtime.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a beautiful, mostly fun game held back by head-scratching design decisions and nagging issues that have plagued the series for over a decade now. While it's far from a bad entry, it's the latest game in the series to fall short of reaching the soaring action highs of the beloved Ezio Trilogy or the epic RPG adventure of Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey.

7/10

Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches on March 20, 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Mac. Inverse reviewed both the PC version via Nvidia GeForce NOW and the Xbox Series X version.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.