assassin's creed shadows preview

Assassins Creed Shadows Hands-On Preview – Everything, Everywhere, All At Permitted

Hands-on with Ubisoft’s next big game

Ubisoft needs a hit. It’s difficult to not feel that knowledge gnawing at the back of your mind as you play through a carefully curated portion of its latest open-world titan, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. It’s a game that radiates with the need, from its long-requested feudal Japan setting to its lofty ambitions to be “the ultimate Assassin’s Creed” experience, Shadows is positioning itself as just that.

With just over four hours of hands-on time with the game, split between a 60-odd minute tutorial prologue and several hours roaming a region of its open world, Shadows’ need to up the ante on Assassin’s Creed is as evident as it is compromising. Akin to a beautiful animal backed into a corner, Shadow is all sleek coat, teeth and raised heckles in its pursuit of more, brushing up against some genuinely fun innovations for the series while still getting mired in the franchise’s now decades old issues.

assassin's creed shadows preview

Set against the backdrop of 1579 feudal Japan, Shadows casts you as dual protagonists Yasuke and Naoe, two dramatically different people thrown against the rocks of the region’s tumultuous political and social upheaval. This is, arguably, the most narratively interesting thing Shadows is playing with and almost immediately introduces potential tension to the core Assassin’s Creed experience by fracturing its systems across two playable characters. Yasuke is a brute, cartoonishly incapable of the parkour traversal and stealth-focused gameplay of the series but a powerhouse in raw combat, while Naoe is lithe and deadly, effortlessly flowing through the world but just as easily taken out of it.

This choice is ostensibly another step toward the kind of experience Assassin’s Creed fans have been clamouring for since the early days of the PlayStation 4- a game that enables both action and stealth entirely dependent on player choice. It’s also a choice that buckles under scrutiny as you quickly discover that swinging a sword well is a poor substitute for engaging with the world as a traversable space, just as grappling up to dizzying heights doesn’t negate the gravity of being overwhelmed by two basic guards. It’s a schism running down the very core of Shadows that speaks to both the game’s admirable goals and potentially unfortunate realities.  

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Yasuke is, plainly, not all that fun to play if you’re having to go further than the backyard in a mission. His emphasis on form and combat is flourished nicely with solid animations and a healthy dose of massive damage special abilities. But he moves like a fridge in heavy armour, clumsily performing only the most basic climbing, and steering about as well in tight spaces as you’d imagine a fridge would. He’s also got the game’s most compelling character work housed in that lumbering frame, kicking off Shadows with arguably the rawest narrative premise and tensions the series has ever dared attempt.

Naoe, conversely, moves through Shadows like water equipped with the sickest Japanese power fantasy weapons but is about as transparent on the character front. Saddled with the requisite revenge fantasy and lore-laden lineage, her tale feels almost antiseptic when contrasted with Yasuke’s charged relationship to the land and its ruling class. And yet, with a kusarigama and hook shot in hand, moving through the world and engaging its challenges as Naoe is undeniably the most engaged in an Assassin’s Creed mechanics I’ve felt since Origins back in 2017.

assassin's creed shadows preview

This is largely thanks to how much effort has gone into making Shadows’ Japanese sandbox more reactive to player experimentation. Finally taking lessons from immersive sims, Shadows allows players to manipulate light and dark in the environment to obscure movement and confuse enemies. While fairly hit-and-miss on which light sources I could actually extinguish, the system is still a nice addition to the assassin’s toolset. These systems are dynamically altered further by shifting seasonal weather that will impact things from sound to enemy behaviour, dovetailing into some revamped NPC AI that includes new non-combatant archetypes and seemingly better detection methods on the part of guards.

Likewise, Naoe is fully equipped for both high and low stealth, the grapple giving quick access to rooftops across which Shadows’ reworked parkour animations and tighter controls collide with those quintessential AC moments of “fuck no not that ledge the other one”. Closer to the ground than ever before, Naoe can also go prone and shimmy her way through underbrush and the like. It all coalesces into a flow state between grappling, mantling, slinking and so on. Or you can play as Yasuke and stroll through shoji like Homer Simpson.

assassin's creed shadows preview

It’s a joke but it’s also kinda not. Yasuke’s pared-back traversal and stealth options actively negate much of what makes Shadows an interesting iteration on the Assassin’s Creed formula. Why bother with the intricate play of light in a room or deftly balancing along a rooftop when you could simply walk into a space and swing a big fuck off sword? Shadows, to my mind, doesn’t have an answer for this question as combat remains no more or less than decent.

Made to look much nicer with refreshed animations but still lacking a critical sense of oomph, combat for either character will follow a familiar loop of light, heavy, block/parry, with the additional option of charging either form of attack to deal posture damage and pressure enemies into vulnerable states. Both characters also have access to some delightfully ridiculous special moves, ranging from whipping Naoe’s chain in a circle to Sparta kicking hapless foes as Yasuke, and while these are a riot to use, they’re also accompanied by a gratuitous black and white filter that splatters the screen with pops of red blood for added effect.

assassin's creed shadows preview

Independent of your character choice, the rendition of feudal Japan that Shadows offers is magnificent to behold. It’s a trite comparison given what sparked it but the open world here calls to mind The Witcher 3 if only for how goddamn windy it is, an environmental touch that does a lot of heavy lifting in the vibes department. Trees whipping about, tall grass craning, rivers crashing, and all manner of wildlife skittering about open plains and densely forested mountainsides make for the richest Assassin’s Creed setting yet.

But it is still very much an Assassin’s Creed setting. Straining against the leaps made in art direction and general animation are a host of franchise staples that linger in quest and system design. The classic walk and talk is back, fortunately allowing you to automatically follow the quest NPC while they doll out exposition but bizarrely requiring you to manually position yourself a few steps at the end of the walk to trigger the next cutscene. Those tiny interstitial moments of gameplay between cutscenes are a frequent occurrence in Shadows too, the game constantly wrangling control away from you and restoring it with rapid indecisiveness.

assassin's creed shadows preview

Much like the distinct split between player characters, Shadows’ efforts to rejuvenate the systems of Assassin’s Creed are solid theory but peculiar practice. A selling point for Shadows is its hands-off approach to the often-criticised series’ marker onslaught, an admirable push toward a more fluid experience that is felt throughout much of the game. Clambering up to a vantage point and doing the camera pan no longer autofills your map but instead pings places of potential interest for you to investigate at your leisure.

You can mark them from up high using the game’s new Focus feature, a soft zoom-in perspective that allows you to mark glowing points of interest in the world and enemies, shifting the onus for cluttering the screen with icons onto a manual player system. Likewise, the game will no longer automatically ping your next destination, instead giving you some hints about a quest location and allowing you to puzzle it out for yourself. Only, the game heavily pushes its new Scouts system too, in which you hover over a section of the map and hold a button to reveal the quest markers in the area. Used in conjunction with the Focus system, Shadows still finds its way back to formula the long way around. Same Assassin’s Creed information, but now with extra steps.

assassin's creed shadows preview

But people, a lot of people, like this formula and for the 20 million odd of them that played Valhalla, Shadows will likely be another fulfilling adventure. From just a few hours in its world it’s not hard to see how much has gone into making Shadows the ultimate version of itself, and that’s not even touching on the return of RPG systems and the base camp building glimpsed in trailers. There’s a concerted effort to push updated takes on weapon mastery over baseline levels, and while our build only offered a glimpse into the skill trees, any Ubisoft fan of the past decade will feel right at home with them.

And there were moments in my time with Shadows where I almost felt that same call to home. Chuckling as Naoe did her fiftieth unnecessary flip off a small ledge, I landed in a small forest clearing and simply decided to follow a creek upstream. Soft ambient music playing, pines crunching underfoot, I nestled into something comforting, just not compelling. Swiftly this moment was followed by a brief interlude of sneaking up to a deer and her fawn, getting close enough to draw a simple sketch and receiving the checklist ping. Further down the trail still, a probably historically accurate shrine beckoned my prayers, rewarding them with one system push or another.

assassin's creed shadows preview

Much ado was made about Ghost of Tsushima effectively eating Assassin’s Creed’s inevitable bento, a bit of noise I never gave much credit to until Naoe performed a studied bow in front of this shrine. I had been here before, not just in Suckerpunch’s streamlined open-world and refined systems but in Koei Tecomo’s bombastic historical fiction and compelling combat variety of Rise of the R?nin. This is a thoroughly tapped well of aesthetic and thematic waters for the genre Ubisoft itself boomed all those years ago and while there are signs of ambition here, they’re often paired with the pitfalls of the same goals. For now, Shadows seems to be what it says on the box— Assassin’s Creed in Japan, no more, no less. 


Assassin’s Creed Shadows releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on March 20th. The cheapest copy is $89 with free shipping from Amazon.