Hogan Reviews

I’ve said before on this site that I’ve been a fan of Assassin’s Creed since the very first game but Ubisoft certainly make it hard to continue to be one, and Shadows is very much a continuation of that. The gameplay is great and the visuals are absolutely stunning, but the story is non-existent and even worse ends on something of a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until paid DLC expansions… Throw in a bunch of online challenges and currency cluttering the map and ruining immersion (that thankfully play no role in completing the game, but still…) and this is mixed bag. Let’s take a look anyway and try and see where it lands…

Background:

Ah, the old leave a body next to a hiding spot so you can kill the person investigating trick…

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows was released on March 20^th 2025 for the PS5, XBOX Series and PC. It was originally supposed to release in November 2024 but it was delayed due to the team wanting to further polish the game before releasing it, a lesson learned from Ubisoft’s Star Wars: Outlaws release back in August…

I’ll also mention here the amount of online backlash from a certain area of the internet over using actual historical figure Yasuke as one of the two main protagonists, doing the usual Assassin’s Creed thing of taking an actual person and playing around with their real world history to have a bit of fun, but of course unlike all the other times they’ve done this Yasuke is different because he’s black. Let’s ignore that he actually existed, let’s ignore that really Asian woman Naoe is the proper lead protagonist (though Asian woman wouldn’t be to these guy’s tastes either, let’s face it) and let’s just hate on something because it involves a non-white person. Caveman-level outdated bollocks, and frankly pathetic.

With that out of the way…

Gameplay:

I think, THINK he might be dead.

As with the most recent Assassin’s Creed games Shadows in an open world third person action game with strong stealth elements, though this time there’s a twist as we have two protagonists we can switch between, and while Naoe has all the usual stealth mechanics Yasuke has none, instead having a move and skill set based purely on combat with no room for subtlety. This was a really fun thing… at the end of the game, for most of it Yasuke wasn’t strong enough to deal with more than one or two people at a time so it made far more sense to play as Naoe and stealth kill whole forts / castles worth of enemies and still fight them one-on-one if your discovered with the ability to throw a smoke bomb and escape if too many opponents arrived. Yasuke doesn’t even have the “Eagle Vision” ability to see and mark enemies through walls making assaulting enemy bases extremely tricky even if he eventually gets silent options like bow and arrows. That being said, once Yasuke was levelled and I’d unlocked a bunch of his skill tree it was extremely fun to just rock up to an enemy castle and boot people through walls and lop people’s heads off like a Terminator-level unstoppable bad ass, it just took three quarters of the game to get there. Still, playing as Naoe was great fun too, not only is the sword combat really fluid and the dodging, countering and parrying extremely satisfying but the stealth options are great, like the usual leaping of ledges onto opponents or crouching behind places and dragging people away, plus new very ninja-ry stuff like being able to hang off roof beams and drop down on enemies when they enter the room, or the good old fashioned hiding under the water with a bamboo shoot or stabbing people through the paper doors. Naoe also gets a grappling hook to climb walls and such faster, which is great fun to use.

You get a selection of weapons and abilities for both, all with their own skill trees to put points into when you level up. Naoe gets the sword, the chain and sickle (that I’m sure has a proper name but I’m blanking on it…) and the smaller knife-like tanto and her hidden blade as a duo, though the latter is completely useless as the regular sword does everything it can do but at a safer distance while the chained sickle can take out whole rooms of people at once with its swinging strikes, so there was never a need to upgrade it. She also has kunai, shurikens, smoke bombs and more, with throwing a kunai to someone’s head being often a guaranteed kill. Yasuke on the other hand gets a larger katana, a massive heavy mace, a spear, the bow and arrow, and a rifle, though as mentioned long-range attacks are pretty hard to do when you’re the size of a tank and can’t mark enemies out. I pretty much stuck to the katana and the spear, much like Naoe as one is perfect for one-on-one combat and the other can strike multiple people at once. They both have non-weapon skill trees which allow you to get more equipment, special moves like leaping strikes, a kick that sends people flying (Yasuke), a roar that makes people fall over in fear (Yasuke), and chaining people up (Naoe) and the throwing your weapon into far away people and essentially teleporting to it as you kill them like the old Spear of Leonidas from Odyssey (also Naoe). Basically I can’t speak highly enough about the actual combat gameplay in the game, but there are things to get annoyed about outside of that.

The destructible environments really make the fights extra fun. Nothing quite like kicking someone trough a paper and wood door!

The first thing that comes to mind is the seasons mechanic. Basically after a certain amount of in-game time has passed the season changes and places you’ve raided re-fill with enemies like in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, fair enough I thought, but it happens so often and every time it does it plays a cutscene that you can’t skip for the first 10 or so seconds of it. I’m not one for using fast travel anyway, but I used it even less here as fast travelling often triggered it. It’s pretty emersion breaking too, as sometimes I’d have killed someone, they’re body is lying in a street with shocked people around, I’d switch to Naoe and that switch caused the season to change, now it was suddenly winter, snow was every where but the body and shocked people we still in place. It was just… weird. The thing is the season system is tied in with the wanted system this time round. Fail to stop someone in the castle from ringing a bell? Well not only will you now have to deal with large kabuki actor looking guards (hello again immersion breaking!) but every soldier in the region will attack you on sight and the only way to stop it to advance to the next season. No pulling down wanted posters, no paying off people with gold, you just have to wait. It was so annoying that the very first thing I did whenever I entered a castle or fort was search for the bells and make sure to throw a shuriken and chop the bell down.

That being said, the castles were the highlight of the game for me. They were often large, full of guards to stealth kill and once you have killed the requisite amount of samurai you get a nice set of new gear or weapon. I suppose I should mention that actually, much like the other recent AC games you get new armour and weapons from chests and they come in a variety of colours signifying rarity, with the rarer ones often having higher stats and possibly special abilities tied to them. The thing is I found new armour and weapons so often it was normally just a case of swapping to a new one every level or two, and given this game once again doesn’t allow you to get too far ahead of the enemies (old areas will never be more than three or so levels behind you…) there isn’t much in the way of rewarding progression. You can choose what the armour and weapons look like so you don’t have to wear something that looks naff because its more powerful, so that’s nice, and you can use your blacksmith to upgrade existing weapons and armour and even add new abilities onto them as well, if your particularly attached to them. Again though, I found so many new ones that were a level or two higher than me that each time I levelled up I normally had a more powerful item waiting for me anyway…

“Bugger, its changed to winter while I was in the middle of walking up a hilly area again… That’s going to make walking around harder!”

Much like some of the older AC games you get to build up a base in this one, outfitting it with places to train, the aforementioned blacksmith and more, but honestly? I couldn’t be bothered. I upgraded the rooms I needed but that was it, I wasn’t interested in the cosmetics or putting rooms and corridors in a nice order. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a rare item colour pop out of a chest only to get annoyed because it was a super rare fern for my base or some such. You can also unlock companions who can jump in and help with in a fight, but once again I couldn’t be arsed. I was fine by myself thanks, you guys with zero personality can just stay at the home base, thank you. The same goes for the scouts you can recruit. You can tag resources that they can bring back to the base but once you’ve use one they can’t be used again until the season changes, and given I wasn’t interested in base building, you guessed it, I couldn’t be bothered. You also need to use scouts to put story map markers on your HUD to find key people to actually start missions but this was so stupid I happily went into the options and turned it off, giving me the mission pointer markers straight away when I start a mission, rather than send a scout or walk around in a general area holding down the focus button hoping to just run into the right person. Honestly, who thought that was a good idea? It just added 5-10 extra minutes onto every activity for no reason. Also for the record you can turn on “instant assassination” in the options as well, allowing you to stealth assassinate any target regardless of their health/level/size, but I didn’t know that until I’d used the skill tree to pretty much get that anyway so, oh well!

Most of the main “story” is assassinating people on a board like the past few games, and underneath this wheel of assassinations were 8 or 10 other wheels of people to assassinate, so variety wasn’t on the docket for this game, that’s for sure. Speaking of which you can choose to play the game with a “canon” mode where all choice is taken from you and you just watch what the creators say actually happened during otherwise multi-choice cutscenes, which… why would anyone do that? Who would pick an option that gives them LESS control and interactivity? Especially when the story is so slight anyway… So when you’re not doing a “story” mission, assaulting a castle or upgrading your base, what else can you do? Well, this is an Ubisoft game after all, so there are plenty of map markers to follow, like viewpoints (that don’t unlock the region for your map, you have to do that by walking which makes the viewpoints functionally pointless beyond adding a few markers to follow), duels, do some poetry that really reminded me of a certain other open world Sengoku era Japan game, visit shrines, do extra missions for or just collect online currency that you can use to buy extra outfits and such in the Ubisoft online “Animus” store, which yes, once again, I completely ignored… and more! You also get side quests but most of them are “kill 25, 50 and 100 of this type of enemy for me please” which was dull as hell so I often didn’t bother, unless I happened to do it by accident, or “collect these collectables” which was a definite nah from me. Basically by the end I just assassinated all targets on all wheels and conquered all the castles before finishing the story. That in itself was plenty of content though, especially as just being in the open world was often so stunning that I took the time to drink in the view, so to speak.

That’s about it, a game full of stuff but so much of it I just handwaved away and stuck to things that involved the really fun core combat…

Graphics and Sound:

How dramatic…

Safe to say the graphics are drop dead gorgeous. Not just the lighting and such but given how densely forested Japan was at the time (and well, still is really) I’ve never travelled through forests and mountainsides that felt so real in a game before. I was frequently blown away, and given how much of the environment is destructible it meant this was a very fun world to inhabit.

Sound wise? Not bad. The soundtrack is fine, low-key for most of the game so you won’t be humming anything but it works for the atmosphere. The Japanese voice acting is good, but the English dub is pretty bad by all accounts and from what little I’ve seen. I actually had it set so the characters spoke both Japanese and Portuguese, which was fun for a little bit more realism.

Story:

Naoe’s father dies trying to take on a whole group of colourfully masked attackers by himself… idiot.

Story? No much! Naoe is the daughter of a Hidden Ones Assassin mother and a skilled fighter in her father, growing up in an Iga village that soon gets wiped out by Oda Nobunaga during one of his “control the locals by killing a good bunch of them” campaigns. Joining Oda is Yasuke, who was an African slave who was brought to Japan by visiting Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries and Oda took a liking to, taking him away from his owners and eventually making him a Samurai. Naoe and her father escape their village and Naoe retrieves a special box that her father ordered her to keep safe, then loses it, then gets it back before losing it again when a group of masked men called the Shinbakufu arrive, shoot her and then kill her father before taking the box. She recovers from her wounds and soon confronts and kills Oda Nobunaga, only to find out that he wasn’t behind the Shinbakufu but the man who betrayed him, Akechi Mitsuhide, was. Oda’s death also makes Yasuke a Ronin, and he soon joins up with Naoe as he trusts her and her goals and is also interested in her Hidden Blade as someone with a similar weapon had saved him from a slave ship in the past.

This is where the story stops dead. For the majority of the game you search for each member of the Shinbakufu and kill them, with occasional side-steps where you meet and recruit really dull one-note characters for your base. There are some missions where Naoe finds out more about the Hidden Ones in Japan (basically a lot of the Portuguese were Templars so a Hidden Ones branch was created in Japan to counter them) and her mother, who we’re told is dead but Naoe refuses to believe it was one of the best of the bunch, while Yasuke finds out that the people who enslaved him and killed his mother were Templars and so he… well, gets revenge and kills them. Honestly Naoe and Yasuke’s respective stories are just revenge killings for one of their parents deaths and that’s it!

Spoilers from here until the next bolded sentence!

Funny to think this cutscene would look completely different if you started this mission during a different season…

The only other thing of interest is that the former Emperor was the man behind the Shinbakufu and he gets to live by giving Naoe and Yasuke information on their respective goals. While Yasuke kills his former enslaver and declares war against the Templars Naoe reunites with family friend-turned-rival Hanzo Hattori and finds out that the box was one of three and each contained the Imperial Regalia, and that Hanzo believes her mother is still alive as well. They have a scuffle (or Naoe forgives him depending on your choice) and then they decide to search for her together. That’s it. We don’t know if her mother is alive, we don’t know if Yasuke declaring war on the Templars does anything, the game just cuts to credits after Hanzo promises they’ll find Naoe’s mother together. It seems like the story will continue via paid DLC, which is proper bullshit and I won’t be having any of it. I don’t pay for a book and then find out I have to pay extra for the final few chapters! I’ll watch the relevant cutscenes on YouTube and won’t give them an extra penny, thank you…

Spoilers end now!

So yeah, just revenge stories for 90% of the game. If you’re wondering “What about the current day stuff? Isn’t the Isu Loki now in the body of a modern day man? What’s he doing?” then tough, there’s next to no modern day stuff in the game at all. A few bits of text from an Abstergo AI before you get started, and that’s it. It’s like the post AC III stuff all over again, I hope we don’t have to wait for a spin-off comic to get our conclusion again… Oh, and yes I am aware most AC games I complain that the modern day stuff gets in the way of the actual fun, but if you’re going to spend three or four lengthy action RPGs setting something up then I want to see the pay-off regardless. THEN you can drop the modern day stuff…

Downloadable Content:

Yasuke takes on the weirdly-dressed Guardians, which sadly you can’t really see in this picture due to motion blur and it being at night, but oh well…

As mentioned the game does have DLC, set after the main game’s story (which, again, is bollocks) The first is titled “Claws of Awaji.” Plus there are some extra free drops and you got a fancy costume and sword if you pre-ordered. Usual stuff but given the scummy practice of continuing the story via extra money I’m not really in the mood to talk about it much…

Thoughts Now:

Yeah… this never got old…

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows isn’t up to much in the story department but gameplay-wise and presentation-wise I can’t really fault it. Well, okay, I should stress combat gameplay-wise I can’t fault it, there are plenty of issues within the game environment… Overall it’s imperfect but was definitely fun, continuing the story via paid DLC has left a very sour taste in my mouth though, so I don’t know if I can bring myself to dive back in again, but with combat and visuals this good a 3 seems too harsh, so…