After 35 hours, I’ve finally finished Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a game that took social media by storm even before its release. I have absolutely no idea how to describe these 35 hours.
I don’t know what to say about this game. Did I enjoy playing it? Yes. Is it a good game? No. Is it a quality game? Yes. It feels like part of the game was made by the team behind RDR 2, and the rest by whoever made Erzurum.
When developing a game, how do you proceed? First, you create the core mechanics and establish the basic gameplay loop. What will the character do? You set up a structure like sneaking around and killing enemies. Then you design your levels and story to fit this structure. In this game, nothing beyond the basic structure is good. I have an idea why this happened, but I’ll get to that later.
A Vast But Dead Open World
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes you to Japan in the 1500s. We control a samurai and a shinobi. There’s a massive open world, but it’s the emptiest open world I’ve seen in recent times. There are random events, but they’d be better off not existing. The NPCs are completely unresponsive. What is an NPC? A “Non-playable character.” Note the word character. None of the NPCs here have any character; they’re just NPs. No C at the end. I drew my sword to see what would happen and stabbed a random person on the street. Not even the slightest reaction.
What’s the common feature of open-world games we appreciate as a player community? Look at RDR 2 or KCD 2. These worlds exist even without your character. Even the smallest character has an impact on the world they live in, a reaction. But here, that’s absolutely not the case. They just stand there. Two people were fishing on a boat; I went and stole their boat. They didn’t even react. It’s like they have lives wasted on nothingness. Empty. And that’s the game’s fundamental problem. Too many things are empty.
Mission Design
In recent years, game missions have been divided into three categories: Main missions, side missions, and aimless activities. All missions in Assassin’s Creed Shadows fall into the last category. No mission has anything special about it. There’s nothing distinguishing a main mission from other pointless tasks. Go, kill this, come back. Then go, kill that, come back. All missions are so identical and empty that the game doesn’t even differentiate between “main missions” and “side missions.” When you open the mission screen, all missions appear side by side without any distinction. These can’t even be called missions. You’re presented with a target board displaying the heads of targets you need to kill. That’s it. I didn’t do anything different in a single mission. Go, kill this, come back. Go, kill that, come back. Go, kill one more, come back.
The only thing that changes is the location. And don’t think the locations are very different either. A castle, another castle. An area in the mountains, another castle.
Story
You might think that since the missions are bad, perhaps the story and its presentation are good and save the game. But no. The story is also bad. In fact, it’s almost non-existent. Most dialogues seem written just to fill silence. Something happens at the beginning of the game related to the story. Something happens at the end. Nothing happens during the 30 hours in between. (Assuming you focus on the main story without side quests, that’s 30 hours)
Yasuke, a loyal servant samurai, and other samurai burn and destroy Naoe’s village on their master’s orders. They slaughter everyone, young and old alike. Naoe loses his loved ones, including his father, and swears revenge. The game starts here. Through a terrible scene, they form a team with the person who caused Naoe to swear revenge, and they try to take down an organization called Shinbakufu. Throughout the game, we have 12 targets that we can eliminate in any order. What does this mean? There’s no flowing narrative. After about 30 hours of taking down these 12 targets, you reach the game’s finale. In the finale, you complete short personal quests for both characters, and the game ends. When I say “ends,” I mean the credits roll. Otherwise, the game remains incomplete. They don’t even finish the half-baked story. They’re probably planning to continue with DLC and such.
So we have a story at the opening. A story at the closing. The rest is a waste of time. I think this game was initially designed as a co-op game. For example, there are places where both characters need to do something simultaneously. You choose one character and don’t see what the other character is doing. There are clearly areas designed for both characters to be played simultaneously. This project was probably a co-op game at first. You would play as the shinobi while your friend played as the samurai, trying to take down these 12 targets. And each character would have their own short mission trees. This would have been the flowing story I mentioned in the finale.
Everything in the game is designed for this. In this kind of co-op game, you wouldn’t want lengthy cutscenes or complicated missions. You’d want something casual to play with your friend. You’d want time-killing activities with clear objectives, like “go kill this many pirates.” When you approach an NPC, you’d want to get the mission quickly, not listen to an hour-long conversation.
But when you convert this to a single-player game, what you’re left with is dozens of hours of simple, repetitive content with no connection to each other beyond being identical.
A Torment: Character Progression
Despite everything I’ve listed, the most annoying thing in the game isn’t one of these. This is a long game. You develop your character throughout the game. How does this normally work in games? You collect skill points and unlock skills in a skill tree with your points. Ubisoft sat down and thought, “How can we ruin this established system that everyone has accepted for years,” and succeeded. They’ve locked the skill tree behind something called a mastery level. There’s a separate skill tree for each weapon and so on, and each level of the skill trees is locked. If your mastery level is 1, you can only unlock the skills in the first row. If it’s two, you can unlock second-level skills, and so on. There are 6 levels. And how do we gain this level, you ask? By searching for pages on the map. Yes, the game says find 4 pages in this temple, find 3 in this castle, find 2 over here. You find these pages, and boom, you gain 1 mastery point. How many do you need for the next mastery level? 10. And this keeps increasing for subsequent levels.
Fire whoever came up with the idea to lock character progression behind such a stupid mechanic. Whoever is the director of this game, or whoever made the important decisions, is hopeless. They’ve made all the wrong decisions. I’ve thought a lot about this: what’s the fundamental problem with this game? I think it’s the management mechanism. Managing a project is a big job; shooting mechanics, graphics and such, anyone can do these. But choosing between what has been done and what will be done, bringing them together, ensuring they are compatible – that’s a difficult job, and whoever did it in this game has failed.
The enemy level mechanic present in the last few Assassin’s Creed games continues in this game as well. If you want to proceed directly through the main story, you can’t gain levels properly. And enemies higher level than you can one-shot you. The game forces you to engage with the other empty activities on the map. Or you’ll play completely stealth-focused like I did. You’ll infiltrate castles stealthily, incapacitate the target, and escape without engaging in combat. This way, the level difference between you and the enemies ceases to be an issue.
Major Warning for Those Who Will Play
When starting the game, it has you adjust some settings. In the normal game, you can’t one-shot enemies with the hidden blade if their level is higher than yours. Thankfully, they’ve included a setting where you can enable one-shot kills. Otherwise, it’s genuinely not worth the hassle.
Another setting is Guided Exploration. If you don’t enable this, the game doesn’t tell you where the mission is. It gives you an approximate location. Like, south of this city, etc. I’m serious, if you play with this setting off, you’ll lose your mind. It’s not worth the suffering.
Between the difficulty of character development and high-level enemies one-shotting you, I started playing the game completely focused on stealth. At some point, the enemies’ levels were so much higher than mine that I had no choice but to go completely stealthy. That’s why I played almost the entire game with Naoe, our shinobi character.
Two Characters, One Game
While Naoe allows you to play stealthily, Yasuke allows you to charge into enemies like a tank. The gameplay difference between the two characters is truly commendable. Naoe moves very easily in stealth but gets easily dispatched when entering combat. Yasuke is the opposite. Literally like a tank. You move slowly, with no possibility for stealth. But you don’t need it. You enter among the enemies and cut down whatever comes your way. Door in your way? Don’t open it, break it. Such a powerful character.
A lot of effort has gone into the two characters. They have different skill trees, different weapons. Their gameplay feels different. The Ubisoft I know would have made 2 games out of this.
But I played almost the entire game with Naoe. There are two reasons for this. The first is what I just mentioned about enemy levels forcing me to play stealth-focused. The second is speed. Yasuke is a very heavy character. He’s also very slow when moving in the open world. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Assassin’s Creed?
- Hidden Blade
- Parkour
Yasuke has neither of these. I can let the hidden blade slide since he doesn’t need it. But not being able to parkour is a big problem. He can’t climb almost anywhere. For example, you want to unlock a fast travel point on the map. Classically, you need to climb a building. But you can’t climb with Yasuke. So you’re forced to play as Naoe.
Naoe, on the other hand, is probably the most fluid character I’ve seen in Assassin’s Creed games to date. He has a grappling hook, glides like Spider-Man, jumps here and there. He can lie down and crawl. He has a very fluid gameplay.
But controlling the character is a bit strange. No Assassin’s Creed game has perfect parkour mechanics, but it got much worse after Origins. I often struggle to make the character do what I want. I want to jump down, can’t jump. I want to climb somewhere, can’t climb.
Character control is a bit difficult, and the camera controls are terrible on top of that. I’ve never seen anyone praise a game for good camera control. But I’m going to criticize this one for being bad. The character constantly goes off-screen when fighting in small areas. When moving through mountains and fields, the camera gets stuck on bushes and grass. Thanks to the game world, it’s very difficult to move from one point to another. Even if points are close, the terrain is so mountainous that you decide to climb straight up a mountain rather than take the long way around. And even then, bushes and grass make it difficult. Normally, games make objects transparent when the camera goes inside them or gets too close so that the player can see the character better. They didn’t even do that here. A vast world where travel is already difficult becomes even more tiring if you try to play as Yasuke.
Still, I liked having two different characters. Except for a few missions, the game lets you choose which character to play. Even though I didn’t play much with Yasuke, it was good to know I had the option.
Back to the Story: Story Presentation
Let’s return to the story. It falls apart no matter how we approach it, but let’s return anyway. I’m skipping questions like “What is this man doing here?”, there are too many inconsistencies. They said this game would start a new modern-day story. So where is this modern-day story? They killed the modern-day story with Black Flag. So many games have come and gone, and Ubisoft still can’t figure it out.
Nothing happens in modern times, and Ubisoft, not knowing what to do, has you talk to the Animus AI for 5-10 minutes throughout the entire game. That’s it. Ubisoft clearly can’t get out of this mess. This series needs a reboot or something. Mr. Ubisoft, if you’re looking for someone to manage the reboot project, I, Edige Tigin, am at your service.
After Origins, Assassins and Templars began to play less significant roles in Assassin’s Creed games. This absurdity continues in this game. I initially thought Naoe would be an Assassin and Yasuke a Templar. That they would clash in the finale and so on, but that didn’t happen either.
Okay, the story is bad, but perhaps you’d say the presentation is good. Maybe there are nice-looking scenes and such, but no. There’s a scene in the story where we need to lose, how do you design such a scene? You make the opponent’s health very high, increase their attack speed, reduce the controlled character’s health and damage. They didn’t do anything like this. Even if you beat your opponent, a scene plays as if you’ve lost. The presentation is bad, but I’m not entirely sure. No matter how much you dress it up, crap is crap in the end.
I was about to enter a boss fight. The game asked me which character I wanted to play as. I chose Naoe. Yasuke said, “I’ll wait outside.” Okay. The boss fight started, and I saw the boss summoning shinobi to help him. What is Yasuke doing outside? The boss fight ended, a cutscene began. Yasuke is in the room again. What did you do, fall asleep in the back? Did you have an upset stomach?
There are choices in the game, which is good. But their effects are very questionable. What are choices for? To have an impact. Now I have the option to forgive or kill my enemy. I forgive them, they still die. Or I choose to kill, and they’re still forgiven. What’s the point?
Kicking Someone Who’s Already Down?
Wondering if I was being too critical, I reinstalled Assassin’s Creed 2 from 2009. I found a save file online starting from the middle of the game. Despite so many years since its release, that half hour was better than my entire Assassin’s Creed Shadows experience.
I started playing through the game, Ezio and Leonardo da Vinci had gone to a new city. A guide was showing us around the city. At the beginning of the tour, we saw soldiers attacking a merchant in the background.
Then, some time passed, and at the end of the tour, we saw the same merchant going to report the soldiers who attacked him. The soldiers arrested him, inventing a law out of thin air.
Then Ezio goes to investigate what happened. In just half an hour, even 15-20 minutes, more coherent, more organized things happened than in the entirety of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
This is the biggest problem with new Assassin’s Creed games. Instead of trying to tell a coherent story, they try to create something you can sink many hours into. I finished the main story in 32 hours, and then played up to 40 hours to get footage for the review. But if you say, “I’m going to do everything, play for 100 hours,” you’ll probably go insane from boredom. The game has no content variety. Note, I’m not saying there’s little content variety; I’m saying there is none.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is not a terrible game. In fact, it’s very high quality in some aspects. I personally enjoyed playing it. The graphics are very good, the hair is very good. You might wonder why I specifically mention hair. Some things that are very simple in the real world are very difficult to create in a digital environment. Fluid physics, cloth physics, and such. Hair physics is one of them. And I can definitely say the best hair I’ve ever seen in any game was in this one. The game is generally successful in such technical aspects. It has dynamic seasonal transitions. They have small effects on gameplay but completely change the visuals. Especially when it snows, the game looks very, very good.
Conclusion
To summarize, Assassin’s Creed is a game that does a few things very well and ruins everything else. But at the end of the day, this game managed to make itself playable. I think there’s only one reason for this: the Hidden Blade. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing especially special about the Hidden Blade in the game. I just love the concept of sneaking into an enemy base, taking out my target with a single, cool move, and escaping, and Assassin’s Creed games do this very, very well.