Assassin's Creed: Shadows

Assassin's Creed: Shadows's Five Main Problems

By Disgusting Men — Published 4 days ago

The biggest issue that can't be helped though is Assassin's Creed. We fell in love with the series as it evolved, experimented, and searched for itself. But it found it a long time ago. Now it's a specific game for a specific audience every time. Today it's like soccer, Madden or UFC, its biggest fans buy a new installment every couple of years, and almost never buy anything else. There's simply no reason for it to change.

But that won't stop us from talking about the problems of the series once again from the perspective of “normal” gameplay and author's taste.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is a run-of-the-mill game

Even more so than the obscenely immense Odyssey and Valhalla. The new installment relies unexpectedly heavily on the Mirage systems, which was a “little” spin-off for fifty. There we had a sort of victimized circle. The same story repeated with each one: a little investigation around, done as a series of tasks (follow, steal, fetch), then a quick elimination. It's all very mechanical and primitive, but for a 15-hour game it's tolerable. And the very first installment, which Mirage methinks was in the vibe of, was pretty much the same.

In Assassin's Creed Shadows you have to spend 40 hours on the story alone, and everything is done in exactly the same way. And even almost all side-quests are organized in the same way: a formal pretext in the spirit of “I had ten students, but now they have become evil and scattered around the world - remove all of them” and again the same circle with victims. Only the investigations are even more primitive. There are dozens of such circles in the end. Bottom line: 40 to 100+ hours of such entertainment with zero gameplay.

And Shadows works this way on all levels, simplifying everything down to a set of simple repetitive actions. Instead of variety, it takes quantity and rewards, this time often tied to building and decorating an assassin's hideout. Sound like a mobile game? But those are the mobile metrics Ubisoft is thinking in terms of player numbers, retention, engagement. Don't get carried away - you'll get an email with statistics on how many pets you've collected. All this boredom begins to load already at the tenth hour, and this is just the beginning.

Assassin's Creed Shadows keeps its own mechanics from being revealed

Stealth mechanics are really pumped this time. Enemies can spot you on the roof. Light sources can be destroyed to hide more effectively in the shadows. Weather affects visibility and audibility. Tools are plentiful, all work, and the cat hook is especially good. Enemies are slightly less stupid than before, and the alarm system is more honest - if a guard has spotted you, his colleagues on the other side of the castle won't automatically get the signal. Within the mechanics everything seems to be cool, though the developers have not gotten rid of all the conventions.

The problem again is the lack of gameplay production. Shadows is always an open sandbox with no limitations. The simplest aggressive path is always found, and most of the stealth mechanics are simply not utilized. For example, I worked with light sources literally a couple times throughout the game. It's there, but why? All this freedom quickly stops creating unique situations, even though it seemed to. Everyone's behavior patterns are elementary, locks are the same, and stealth becomes a chore. Like everything in Assassin's Creed.

Slightly more staged levels in the vein of Splinter Cell, forcing you to use all the mechanics, could have saved the day. Infuse the game with emotion. The potential is there, but it's not being utilized. That said, a fair one-hit kill from the shadows is a shameful option in the settings. It's like a cheat that breaks the developers' idea and the system of loot with pumping. What kind of stealth are we talking about here?

Japanese architecture is beautiful, but too monotonous

There are minimal questions to the artistic side of Shadows. That's why there are no questions to those who buy games of the series solely for the sake of virtual tourism. The game is damn beautiful: the best realization of the changing of seasons, fantastic weather effects, excellent lighting, sakura petals twirling, maple leaves rustling, animals running, everything is authentic and postcard-like. Sometimes even too much! Pagodas and temples on the background of all this beauty sometimes make you freeze, even in Ghost of Tsushima it was not so beautiful.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is smaller than Valhalla, but it's still a colossal game, where you can jump around the map for hours. And on this journey you will see dozens of castles, villages and temples, which you will soon stop distinguishing. Because they're really the same. Maybe deep connoisseurs of oriental architecture will disagree with me, but for most people it will be just like this. Landscapes don't get boring, but we are not going to act in forests.

And for parkour pagodas and huts with thatched roofs are not suitable. Climbing is either uncomfortable or boring (because again the monotony of tasks and movements), or uncomfortable and boring. Add to that “complex” control, when everything is automated and each button is responsible for a hundred actions, thanks to which the characters are constantly jumping the wrong way, grabbing the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing. The game sometimes feels like it's trying to play itself and it's not very good at it.

Yasuke is a boring character

There are no others, though. But at least Yasuke has a story and motivation that you can tentatively believe in. And if Ubisoft had been clear about that in the presentations, it wouldn't have gotten so much flack. But even so, Yasuke is such a stereotypical, defiantly condensed samurai with a bushido brain that there's not much to latch onto. His personal history is a drama for freshman theater students. But at least his fictional samurai status and imposing appearance play into the story. But not always.

But even so, Yasuke is far more convincing than the maximally functional Naoe, to whom the game is more devoted. She has nice looks, but lacks opinion and character. She can only say the obvious things so that we don't get confused about what to feel in what scene. And there's nothing to say about the “avenging my father” motivation. But he cries convincingly.

However, it's much more interesting to play as Naoe, who is fragile but agile, with a full arsenal of shinobi tools, stealth, parkour and cat hook. Yasuke has only basic climbing skills, all sorts of big weapons and mass. He kicks down doors and blows heads off. It's more interesting to do this than in Valhalla, but in general fighting on dodges, parries and squeeze skills without soulborne precision and complexity is so-so fun. Entertaining, but very simple and monotonous (the credo of the series). Especially considering that the enemies are all the same - they have literally several sets of attacks and familiar moves are often used even by bosses. It's better to be sneaky.

The plot is bad

There's the plot, there's the ending - it's literally several hours of dense, meaningful action involving assassins and Templars. And there are dozens of hours of Japanese feudal squabbles, presented in a jagged fashion and without any coherent exposition. The developers clearly studied the “late Nobunaga” period, but they literally dumped Wikipedia on us. A gaggle of unspeakable names and titles, complex kinship entanglements, ambitions and dubious plots that we fit into for nothing. All of this dissolves into the morning fog after an hour or two with the death of another target and never resurfaces again. There are isolated exceptions, but that's what they are.

These kinds of near-historical works, no matter how much fantasy and fanfiction they contain, still have to work with narrative and setting. To make riveting dramatic stories out of historical chronicles, and characters out of figures from the past. Shadows doesn't do that. It succeeds only in drawing the image of Oda Nobunaga - the ambiguity of his personality is vividly demonstrated. But his role is small. Otherwise, it is hampered by a holey script, a lazy production with rare but pathetic attempts at “Kill Bill”, or technical problems. The picture in general is crazy, you can't take your eyes off, but the animations are mostly nightmarish - especially the faces.

Bonus - literally ripped off for finalization and release as DLC the ending. Now the story just doesn't have an ending, it's cut off right before the denouement. It's not enough for us to have action figures and stores with skins.