You’re probably familiar with the Japanese art of ‘kintsugi’, quite literally meaning ‘golden repair’. Kintsugi is part-philosophy, part-art form. It revolves around the act of repairing broken pottery or ceramics with lacquer, mending cracks and broken edges with dusted, powdered gold, silver, or platinum. ‘Kintsugi’ aims to expose, emphasize and celebrate the damage that was once done, and find new meaning in the repaired product – an homage to an item’s unique history.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like Ubisoft’s attempt at performing ‘kintsugi’ on its storied, 18-year-old franchise. The imperfections – cluttered UI, map screen icon vomit, clunky parkour, clutzy combat – are all present and accounted for, but it feels like Ubisoft isn’t trying to hide them or tuck them away, or (pardon the phrase) ‘polish the turd’. For all the shonky, irritating elements of the game, there’s something simply breathtaking just around the corner. For every ‘follow this guy’ mission, there’s a jaw-dropping set-piece on par with (or better) than anything else in the series. For every crack, there’s a layer of gold.
One of the best bits of the ‘post-reboot’ Assassin’s Creed era (that’s Origins onwards) is the way you get a nice big objective screen, cluttered with targets you need to take out. The labyrinthine lore of the series has always set you on the trail of one shadowy cabal or another, and Shadows’ Sengoku-era Japan is no different. Except, this time, there are reams and reams of these boards. Circles upon circles of nefarious organisations that you need to root out, assassinate, and plunder.
Yes. Yes! This is the meat on the open world’s bones; this is the reason you don’t mind the eight minute horseride from one prefecture to another. As well as the main narrative – kill 13 bastards in a wanton act of revenge, quelle surprise – the game just keeps ladling side objectives on you. Kill, kill, kill. But it’s compelling; every set of infamous ronin or disavowed shinobi is a bit different, holed up in varying locations, or require creative thinking to pin them down. Sure, it all boils down to ‘find ‘em, kill ‘em’, but I’d rather do that than those miserable ‘tail this priest for a bit’ quests we had in Assassin’s Creed games gone by.
Ubisoft, in giving us both the fragile-but-fast Naoe and the chonky bruiser Yasuke to play with, knows that Shadows’ main draw is in its bloodshed. The combat doesn’t feel too different, honestly, from what we’ve had since Origins – serviceable, but nothing to write home about. But, once again, it’s the connective tissue that makes that work; if you fancy being stealthy and popping headshots with a flick of the wrist and a well-spaced kunai, swap to Naoe. If you want to storm the gates, roar like a madman, and start bashing in heads with a kanabo, choose Yasuke.
Who cares if the AI is a bit wet, or if the collision physics sometimes get a bit turned around, eh? Sweeping the leg of a ronin twice your size and plunging a tanto into his neck feels amazing. Watching someone’s entire life bar disappear because you put the right amount of distance between their defensive footsie-ing and the tip of your naginata is an absurd feeling. Seeing everyone’s hats flying off as visual language that you’ve removed their armour is both funny, and satisfying. All that seriousness glued together with goofyness. It’s glorious.
The story itself is decent, too – though I would recommend you play on Immersive Mode over English language, if you don’t mind subtitles, because some of the English VO is a bit… peculiar. The Japanese/Portugese mix is great, though, and actually puts me more in mind of Shogun than anything else. Ubisoft’s art direction and vision for the cinematics is stellar, and there are a few early cutscenes that are up there in the best Assassin’s Creed moments of all time. Seriously. Special shout-out to Japanese psych-rock band TEKE TEKE here, because the Tarantino-esque vibes they bring to some of the key scenes are remarkable.
But, for every iota of praise, there’s something else to consider. The story takes a while to get going. I think the game really opens up about 12+ hours in, thanks to a meaty prologue and a lot of exposition dumping. It does the job well, though. By the time you’re let loose on the true (huge) open world, you feel competent enough as Naoe, and you just start to get to grips with Yasuke.
From there, the way the game encourages you to swap from character to character is a masterclass in pacing. Whether you’re blitzing the story, or chewing away at the fog of war on the world map, there are constant opportunities for you to swap out and play as someone else. I probably had a 70/30 split Naoe to Yasuke (I like stealth, OK) but every time I had to play as the big man, I found myself grinning, equipping some powerful gear I’d picked up for him as Naoe, and stomping through the ranks of whatever poor militia had thought it could resist this unstoppable force.
Even the most formulaic bits of the Assassin’s Creed formula are toyed with in Shadows. It’s like Ubisoft broke the ‘collectibles mission’ down into its constituent parts, deconstructed the whats and the whys of sniffing out 100 feathers or whatever, and then rebuilt it from there. Yes, you have to find and collect loads of origami cranes, but… well, the way that mission unfolds (no pun intended) is a true surprise. I’ll say no more here, but that alone grants major marks to Ubi in my book.
Then there’s the base-building. You can ignore this, really, if you want to, but the game likes to heap rewards on you for getting involved with prettying up your hideout. As well as revealing little narrative breadcrumbs and exposing some good character work, the hideout portion of the game also allows you to bring more allies into fights, upgrade your weapons, get more efficient healing items, earn discounts in shops, and more besides. You pilfer resources whilst you’re out doing other stuff, so it’s not intrusive (and actually puts me in mind of some of Brotherhood’s better mechanics, too).
Then there are the moments Shadows forces you to slow down. Want to unlock more layers in the RPG-lite system where you dump all your accrued skill points? Well, in order to do that, you need to visit temples, collect forgotten scrolls, and watch 11-second animations of either Ysauke or Naoe praying at various shrines. Rinse, repeat. If that’s not your taste, go and practice meditation as Naoe, or learn katas as Yasuke. These tasks are dull; repetitive quick-time events masquerading as mindfulness techniques.
But you know what? They work! They work because, as a player, you dictate the pace of the game. After slaying a whole retinue’s worth of hired goons in a castle, sometimes it is nice to go listen to the cicadas sing in the woods, hear the water tricking into a pond, see the light from the sun break into one million pieces through the canopy of a pine forest. It’s authentic – as so much of Shadows actually is – to what you’d expect from Assassin’s Creed’s ‘Disney Land’ take on the Japanese isles.
Shadows is beautiful, too. I played on a PS5 Pro, mostly on Quality mode, because I couldn’t stop drinking in the visuals. At least once per play session, I would literally put my controller down and ogle the vistas; I think autumn is my favourite of the four cycling in-game seasons, simply for the colours and the contrast between all the cerise, ombre, bottle green, sky blue… it’s stunning. A love letter to the natural wonder of Japan, and perhaps my favourite Assassin’s Creed setting to date (sorry, Odyssey).
The mechanical use of the seasons is minute, I will say. In the marketing, Ubisoft promised that different seasons would allow you different opportunities in approaching major missions, let you practice new ways of sneaking about, expose you more in the cold light of day, and so on. Nah. Not really. I didn’t find myself changing my playstyle at all, season-to-season – although I would sometimes slip down a steep mountain in the snow in winter, which was irritating. Your mileage may vary, but the seasons at least look very distinct and offer some variation when you’re horsing from A to B to A again.
‘Kintsugi’ is often tied to the concept of ‘wabi-sabi’, which is the practice of accepting the nature of transience and imperfection. I really think Shadows embodies these two principles; it does not try to fix what it knows it cannot mend. There are parts of the Assassin’s Creed formula that are baked-in, inherently flawed, beyond restoration. But that’s fine, because – when accepted for what they are – Ubisoft has made them shine.
There are problems with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, for sure. But it’s so fun to play, it’s telling a gripping story, and there is so much sense of progress and reward for every little thing you do that it actually feels like an open world game that’s taking its cues from a modern roguelike, or something. Every action has meaning, and the breadcrumbs that tempt you to clean up all the icons on the map are moreish. This may be one of the biggest Assassin’s Creed games ever made, but it also feels like the most well put-together.
I’m actually at the point where I’m enjoying finding little problems with the game, because – most of the time – I know that means there’ll be something interesting on the other end of it. That is high praise for any work of art, but in a video game… it really feels like something special.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows comes to Xbox Series, PS5 and PC on March 20, 2025, after catching a last-minute delay earlier this year.
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