1.3 of 5 stars
Verified purchase
I just love with Naoe
well ... friend gifted me a CD key because he couldn’t sell it. I didn’t plan to buy it myself — not only because Ubisoft’s attitude toward players is downright insulting, but also because I had a strong feeling the game would suffer from major design flaws. After actually playing it, I realized my decision not to buy it was absolutely right. === Pros The only good thing about this game — and I really mean the only thing — is its graphics and environmental design. The visuals are undeniably stunning, and the dynamic world-building and environmental detail are impressive. The terrain rendering and lighting system are top-notch, probably the best thing Ubisoft still knows how to do. The map feels alive, and visually it’s industry-leading, but that’s it. Everything else falls apart. === Cons 1. Awful parkour mechanics, terrible controls, and broken climbing detection I never imagined that after Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Shadows could feel like such a massive step backward — I literally laughed out loud in disbelief. The parkour feels heavy, clunky, and inconsistent. You constantly get stuck on random geometry, low fences inexplicably block your movement, and there’s no smooth auto-vault system for simple obstacles. Jumping between ledges often causes misdirection or failed inputs — your character simply doesn’t go where you intend. And the worst part? Most of this could’ve been automated. There’s no reason to mash jump and crouch repeatedly for actions that should be fluid. Playing as Naoe, the grapple mechanic is absurdly overcomplicated — you can’t just climb up or down intuitively; instead, you must toggle weird stances and manually adjust. Why not let W/S control swing and LMB/RMB handle climb and descend like a normal human system? Why overcomplicate everything? Even simple motions — like turning on a rope — involve unnecessary delays and micro-animations that kill the flow. And when dropping from rooftops, why does she have to do a pointless mid-air flip every time? It’s pretentious, adds zero value, and just makes the parkour feel sluggish and disconnected. Overall, Shadows’ parkour is a complete downgrade: the movement is sticky, inconsistent, full of pathing bugs, and plagued by pointless flourishes. What used to be elegant is now mechanical and broken — a hollow parody of what Assassin’s Creed used to mean. === 2. Idiotic combat design and meaningless complexity This is, without exaggeration, one of the most frustrating combat systems I’ve played since Rise of the Ronin. I can handle difficult combat — that’s not the issue. The issue is that this game’s combat is a chaotic, unbalanced mess. Enemies have random super armor, pointless “break” and “stack” states, and their AI behaves like caffeinated goblins — rolling and sidestepping erratically, with zero rhythm or logic. The collision detection and timing are all over the place. Parrying and dodging depend on frame-perfect inputs, yet enemy hitboxes often desync with their animations. Some attacks clip through your guard, others whiff through thin air. Enemies can instantly recover from guard breaks, and if you’re surrounded, you’re basically punished for engaging. The system forces you to play 1v1 mechanics in a 1v6 situation, with no reliable crowd control or spacing tools. Combat flow is a joke — the pace constantly breaks as enemies interrupt themselves mid-attack or freeze because your animation confused their logic. One moment they kick, the next they awkwardly reset their stance. It’s like watching bad motion-capture improv. Both playable characters feel unbalanced — one’s obviously better, making the other irrelevant. The skill trees and weapon types only amplify this imbalance rather than fix it. And variety? Forget it. Enemy move sets are barebones, repetitive, and predictable. You see the same three patterns recycled endlessly. It’s mind-numbingly dull: guard, break, slash twice, parry, roll, repeat. It’s not skillful; it’s mechanical exhaustion. If you wanted to copy For Honor’s combat rhythm, then actually learn from it. Right now, Shadows has the most inconsistent hit timing and worst tactile feedback I’ve ever seen in an AC title. There’s zero sense of impact — just floaty, delayed motions wrapped in bad sound design. This is what happens when a studio tries to “modernize” a franchise without understanding why its old systems worked. You get a Frankenstein’s monster of clunky mechanics, self-contradictory design, and fake complexity. ====== 3. Story logic and missing details Example: When Naoe is about to assassinate Wakasa. Wakasa is suspicious of Naoe, but still invites her home, turns his back, and starts giving philosophical speeches about destiny and ideals. Then he casually starts cleaning a gun while Naoe just picks it up and shoots him. Let’s unpack this: Why would a man who’s suspicious of her bring her home alone? Where’s his basic survival instinct? The gun is a display weapon. How does Naoe know it’s loaded? She doesn’t even check. She fires indoors — and somehow, no guards hear the shot. The streets are full of soldiers, yet no one reacts. Then she just walks away, completely unnoticed. That’s not “cinematic storytelling” — that’s lazy, careless writing. It destroys immersion and logic entirely. It’s like Ubisoft doesn’t even care about internal consistency anymore. Every major story beat feels stitched together purely for dramatic effect, with zero respect for narrative cohesion. === 4. Mission structure and design philosophy are broken Ubisoft clearly forced itself to shove every trendy mechanic imaginable into this game, and the result is a confused hybrid of conflicting systems. They tried to make missions more “open combat” — but that directly contradicts the stealth foundation of the series. So what’s the point of stealth anymore? You’re constantly pushed into loud, chaotic fights that undermine the assassin fantasy entirely. Remember Assassin’s Creed Unity and its multi-approach assassination planning? Gone. There’s no planning, no buildup, no payoff. You just barge in, stab, and escape — with zero tension or atmosphere. Most missions are formulaic to the extreme: infiltrate, loot, kill, escape, repeat. No creative setups, no evolving scenarios. It’s procedural and soulless. The series’ identity has collapsed — what was once a focused stealth-action experience has become a bloated open-world RPG stuffed with redundant systems. It’s no longer about precision or meaning, but about quantity and noise. Ubisoft has turned the series into a playground of meaningless “features” — a Frankenstein of RPG leveling, loot modifiers, clumsy combat, and broken stealth. They’ve buried what made Assassin’s Creed special beneath layers of corporate nonsense. ====== now i have deep respect for Joan of Arc — a soul of purity and conviction. But if Ubisoft keeps rewriting history this way, I half-expect them to twist even her story next: “Joan of Arc was secretly a Templar agent who oppressed peasants and was burned by an Assassin in disguise.” That’s exactly the kind of tone-deaf, lore-breaking nonsense this studio would do at this point. May Joan’s spirit remain pure and at peace — and may she look down upon what her people have become: a nation of hollow consumers, blind to thought, detached from meaning. === overall , assassins Creed Shadows has one thing going for it — the visuals. Everything else is dead on arrival. Combat is stiff, story is hollow, gameplay is pointless — a triple-layer disaster under a pretty shell. Ubisoft, every single person involved from top to bottom seems lost in a self-indulgent dream. You’re not creators, you’re pretend artists wearing diapers, pacifiers in mouth, imagining yourselves geniuses. If it weren’t for the blind loyalists you’ve trained to worship your work, no one would still care about this disgraceful mess.
Recommended, but with reservations. First off I feel like I'm in the movie inception. At one point you are in a memory (the animus - a completely useless plot construct we are just stuck with now I guess) where the character has a memory during meditation where she learns how to mediate and has another memory. I literally broke out laughing. I don't hate the story, but I have started to just spam the space bar because I'm tired of watching a movie. Some movie aspect, okay fine. A lot of movie time ... I'm starting to get bored and I just want to play a game. Every long running TV series will eventually have a musical episode to cater to the ego of creators and it seems for games the equivalent is that every long running game series will eventually have a 3.5 hour movie embedded inside of it. Second. Playing as a samurai is terrible. It's not fun in the slightest. I can't even be bothered to remember the poor guy's name. I put the difficulty on story mode and just wade through that part to get it over with. There is nothing fun about the combat as a samurai at all. He's a lumbering tank and even if one enjoys lumbering tanks, the combat options and the 'strategy' are so limited, it's just not fun. So, ya, I'm having fun playing as Naoe. She's skilled, but fragile so you have to play carefully, run away a lot, and use stealth and I can see it's going to take quite a while to finish it so I feel like I'm getting my money's worth, but I really hate the samurai game play and the movie aspect, is just too much. With skipping and game difficulty settings to push past the samurai parts, the game still remains fun thankfully.
Good game, story is okay, graphics are beautiful and voice acting is good, the movement is a little janky, relatively stable for what it looks like.
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