It's fine, pick it up on sale. I got about 80 hours in when I realized that all that's left to do is play the story or side missions, and since the story and side missions are pretty boring I gave up. While I like both Naoe and Yasuke, I think the choice to give you 2 playable characters was a mistake - you essentially end up with 2 characters that are half as competent as any other AC protagonist. Naoe takes ages to get through the health sponges in combat, and Yasuke is completely useless in stealth / navigation. This means that if you get caught as Naoe you may as well just reload to save yourself time, and the only times you play as Yasuke is if you know you don't need to stealth / move fast.
Assassin's Creed Shadows - 7/10 A Gorgeous, Hollow Experience Assassin's Creed Shadows delivers spectacular feudal Japan visuals and satisfying combat, but stumbles catastrophically in the one area that matters most for a 50+ hour game: giving you a reason to care. The Setup That Promised Everything The prologue is genuinely strong. Naoe's father dies, her clan is devastated, and the game establishes an emotional foundation through effective flashbacks. For the first 10-15 hours, you're invested. The problem? That's where the emotional development stops. A 50-Hour Revenge Plot Running on Fumes You cannot sustain a massive open-world game on a single revenge motivation from the tutorial. By hour 20, you've killed hundreds of people. By hour 30, you've forgotten why you cared. By hour 53, when the game still expects you to be driven by "remember my dad?", you're running on autopilot. The flashbacks that made you care? They stopped. Naoe's emotional arc? Nonexistent. Her people in Iga are still alive, but she does nothing to help them rebuild - just pursues her personal vendetta. The Yasuke Problem Speaking of narrative incoherence: Yasuke served Nobunaga, the man whose forces killed Naoe's father and destroyed her village - the very thing driving her revenge quest. His lord dies, he saves Naoe once, asks to join, and she just... agrees? No arc of earned trust, no confrontation about his past, no exploration of forgiveness versus revenge. They're best friends within hours despite him representing everything she's supposedly fighting against. The game had gold here - a redemption arc, a meditation on complicity and cycles of violence, genuine character tension. Instead: "You helped in a fight, we're cool now." Villains More Compelling Than Heroes Here's where it gets truly frustrating: the game accidentally creates moral complexity it refuses to engage with. Take the Ox - Bessho Harumasa. He's rallying the disenfranchised after legitimate massacres, giving voiceless people weapons and purpose, offering them Miki Castle as a refuge. His anger stems from real atrocities. You kill him. The game barely acknowledges the moral weight. Naoe and Yasuke offer no compelling argument for why he needed to die beyond "he's on our hit list." They present no alternative for the people he was helping. You create a massive power vacuum, then move on to the next target. This happens repeatedly - targets with understandable motivations reduced to checkboxes, eliminated without your protagonists ever justifying their actions or grappling with consequences. The Motivation Vacuum After Nobunaga dies, what is Yasuke even fighting for? The game doesn't seem to know. Naoe wants revenge for her father... and that's it for 50+ hours. They're not building anything, not protecting anyone, not working toward a better future. They're just systematically killing people - some with paper-thin motivations, others (like the Ox) with disturbingly valid points - while the narrative expects you to accept this is heroic. What It Does Right Combat is genuinely fun and doesn't overstay its welcome mechanically Feudal Japan is beautifully realized The prologue and early hours show the game could have been something special Individual gameplay systems work well What Breaks It Zero character development after the opening hours A protagonist relationship built on a plot hole the size of Honshu Morally complex antagonists the game refuses to engage with 50+ hours asking you to care about a motivation from hour 2 No thematic evolution, no escalation, no reason to stay invested The Verdict Assassin's Creed Shadows is a technically competent game that's narratively bankrupt. It has all the pieces for compelling storytelling - moral ambiguity, complex villains, characters with traumatic pasts - and does nothing with them. By hour 20 you're emotionally checked out. By hour 50, you're questioning why you're still playing. If you want a fun combat system in a pretty setting and don't care about story? You'll have a decent time. If you need narrative coherence and characters with motivations that last longer than the prologue? You'll be as hollow as the game's revenge plot by the end. 7/10 - Polished, pretty, and completely soulless where it counts.
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