GordonJAGReview Assassin's Creed Shadows Review

I wanted to like this game. I said it was going to suck when its original release date was still in November 2024. The repeated delays only reinforced that idea in my head. In a way, after all of its recent failings—and there have been a lot of those—Ubisoft was almost the underdog when releasing Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The company needed a huge win, and with the desperation they should have been feeling, I was willing to give Shadows an honest try. Boy, it sure would have been nice for Ubisoft to have proven me wrong when I said it was going to suck. The funny thing about Shadows is that it simultaneously has the core to be the best “assassin” Assassin’s Creed game since AC2, while also being the pinnacle of uninspired Ubisoft slop—Ubislop?—and easily the worst game I will play this year. If this game does not end up at the bottom of my game rankings at the end of the year, I will personally write a letter to Yves Guillemot explaining in great detail why Ubisoft is actually the greatest video game company around and why he’s the best CEO that has ever existed. And no, I don’t care that the gameplay is functionally "fine". I don't care that it’s better than Valhalla. Valhalla sucked and was a miserable slog, so Shadows being marginally better because its environment looks nicer and the stealth kind of matters don't give it a pass anymore, and the bar to clear should have been higher anyway. Yves said that making good, “solid” games isn’t enough anymore. Well, Shadows isn’t even solid, so where does that leave the state of Ubisoft games? Star Wars Outlaws sucked, Assassin’s Creed has largely sucked for a decade, Skull and Bones sucked, Far Cry hasn’t been good since 2012, and Watch Dogs has never been good. Ubisoft has nothing to hang its hat on outside of possibly The Lost Crown. It is baffling how much this company sucks at doing its job. Before I pile on Shadows too much—because there is a lot wrong with this game—I’ll touch on its one good aspect. On its Expert Mode, playing as Naoe is largely enjoyable. The stealth is harder to pull off, which makes the combat threatening if you mess it up, and coupled with massive, sprawling castles and fort maps that are filled with dozens of enemies, it is the closest to feeling like a sneaky assassin that this series has been able to touch in ages. If this game was cut down to Naoe’s gameplay, a handful of the castles and forts, and no useless open world, this game would have been good. But we can’t have that, apparently. Assassin’s Creed just can’t quit the awful open-world design. The series also can't quit doing a poor job of copying The Witcher III's gameplay, a decision that was running thin around the time Odyssey came out. Sure, the world is pretty, but games don’t get points for that anymore, especially when Ghost of Tsushima already did the pretty, windy open world in Japan. That game had good art direction and a nice style to go along with it, something that Shadows is lacking. After the first time you’ve seen the wind swirling through a field of colorful flowers, the visual doesn’t gain anything on repeated returns. So, get ready for a lot of boring horse rides through repeated scenery. Ubisoft thought it was just so pretty that it was worth replacing its already limited fun gameplay with a lot of walking around. Here is some open-world game design philosophy I’d like to impart: think of your open world as a world that is only as good as the method(s) to get around it and how interesting it is to explore. Shadows does not have a fun way to get around, and if you’ve seen one ancient Japanese castle, you’ve seen them all, so exploration is a bust too. It’s completely botched the fundamentals of open-world design, and that’s not even touching on how the level-gating inherently restricts open-world games. The level-gating reflects more of the misguided decision to keep Assassin’s Creed a boring RPG where everything is handled by numbers instead of being able to pull off an assassination. Naoe’s generic revenge story and Yasuke’s bizarre decision to help her simply because she has a blade on her arm have to get held up by the player making sure they’re at the Designated Area Level before they can take on the next zone in the needlessly large open world. An enemy shouldn't have six health bars that determine whether they can arbitrarily survive getting stabbed in the neck. What gets me is that, even with its identity established for four games going back to Origins, it still feels like Assassin’s Creed has no idea what it wants to be. It finally put some focus back on stealth with Naoe, but there’s Yasuke bumbling his way through unfun combat sections. It has the “choices matter” branching dialogue RPG options, but it also has a “canon mode” where the story the writers actually wrote is what you get in the spoken dialogue. It even has a tacked-on, simplistic, and boring base-building mechanic that feels just as out of place as it did when Fallout 4 randomly threw it in ten years ago. This game has less confidence and ideas of what to do than the virgin nerd loser talking to the head cheerleader in a high school romcom movie. And Shadows is inept on a technical level on top of it all. Any points it gained for letting me hit 60 FPS (with frame generation on) on maxed-out settings using a 4070 Ti Super and a 9800X3D are immediately lost when I have to reboot the game over a dozen times to get the DLSS upscaling and frame generation settings to even pop up. And that is not an exaggeration. I had to reboot the game fifteen times at one point just to get both of those settings to pop up at the same time. I wouldn’t have cared as much if the FSR upscaling wasn’t noticeably worse or if the FSR frame generation worked at all. Ubisoft wanted to make a game that I wouldn’t want to turn off and the finger on the monkey’s paw couldn’t curl fast enough. With the game’s love for its DX12 error crash (the crash that made me decide playing this game wasn’t worth more of my time), I got to experience the joy of its 45-second launch over and over again! Yeah, I timed how long it took for me to hit “Play” on Steam before I could get to the menu to even see if the proper DLSS settings were available. Shadows is a mess on nearly every level except for some of its stealth gameplay on its highest difficulty. It represents Ubisoft’s inability to learn and improve. It isn’t worth your time and money, and it certainly wasn’t worth mine. “Slop” gets thrown around a lot for games that don’t deserve it, but Shadows is truly slop with no redeeming qualities to it that can’t be found in better, cheaper alternatives. As a miserable death rattle for a series that desperately needed to bring home a win, it should be avoided at all costs.