i honestly did not enjoy ac shadows at all the story start already felt weird like they just throw some hiphop music and i felt like i was in some modern japan universe even though its suppose to be old period. the gameplay is really bland same combo over and over and the dialogues feel so lifeless i couldn't even get into the characters. for this much price it is not worth it maybe if it goes down to like 20 bucks then i can say ok but other than that its just waste of money. i would even prefer playing ac 1 again because at least that has better atmosphere and feeling except the leap of faith. the only thing i can say is fine is the scenery it looks decent. the funny part for me was when the vram budget screen said 7 gb but in game i checked my performance metrics and it was almost 14 gb maxed out and i was just thinking what is this xd
I very rarely thumbs down a game. I'm not the type of person to just pick up and try a bunch of different games and I don't buy many games on release before I can do extensive research and hear what my favorite reviewers have to say. But I just can't recommend this game. It has some quality aspects, which I will mention below, but overall it suffers from many of the same fundamental problems as Valhalla. That means it's almost impossible to avoid getting bored of this game after about 20 hours. I'll start with the good parts because it'll be short. I actually like Naoe as a protagonist with the Japanese voice actress. The world is incredibly beautiful visually and the performance is quite good and scalable. With a 5070ti and 5700X3D I was able to get 100 fps consistently with frame gen on but with everything maxed out (including ray tracing). In terms of gameplay, the only thing I really had fun with throughout the entire 60 hours was the improved stealth. With going prone and the shadows/visibility mechanic, they really deliver a decent shinobi/ninja fantasy. Naoe's animations are especially satisfying to execute, even if they get old after a while. I would suggest using the expert stealth difficulty because it's still not too difficult but forces more thoughtfulness about how you approach situations. They set up a decent, if unoriginal, vengeance story within the first 10 hours. The problem is that the game totally blows the lead by opening up into a mostly nonlinear narrative progression that felt similarly tiring and discontinuous as Valhalla. This is probably the biggest issue with the game because once the gameplay starts to feel repetitive (as open world games almost always do after a certain point, even the good ones), you need a narrative hook to keep you progressing. Shadows just presents you with a million different short, contained, regional stories that don't give you enough time to even care about the characters. Once you finish one story, all the events and characters are instantly deleted from your memory because the narrative structure prevents them from impacting what comes next. There are a handful of ongoing characters (your "allies") but they are so disconnected from the larger narrative that they never felt worth pursuing. Now this is a good time to talk about Yasuke and the dual protagonist system. Yasuke is fine enough as a character and his backstory was decently interesting, so the problem wasn't anything to do with "wokeness" or whatever else people are crying about. It's just that he feels horrible to play with compared to Naoe and the dual protagonist system waters everything down. I never volunteered to play with Yasuke and that is in large part because the combat in this game doesn't feel good. I played most of the game with expert combat difficulty to add more tension to the stealth, but I ended up lowering it back down to normal towards the end because there are more forced Yasuke missions and it felt like a slog on expert. Yasuke doesn't give you the proper samurai fantasy because they designed him as a giant, overpowering warrior. Comparing the combat to Ghost of Tsushima is night and day. GoT makes you feel slick: graceful but also brutal. And nothing demonstrates that clearer than boss battles, which are just clunky and unfun in Shadows but in GoT they could deliver proper atmospheric and fast-paced sword-fighting duels. To top it off, they basically make assaulting castles with Yasuke a miserable experience because they have an alarm system that floods the area with these "Guardian" enemies that do little more than just make the whole thing take forever. It's always quicker and easier to infiltrate with Naoe. But even then, the level design is so repetitive that even though the locations are only different in a way that feels like a procedurally generated maps in an ARPG. The fact that so much of the game is large, open environments also means that both the parkour and shadows/visibility system weren't utilized as much as they could've been. This game, perhaps even more than the last few major RPG AC games, would have benefited greatly from denser city environments. Speaking of the world, I said it was beautiful but there's literally almost nothing in it. All the locations feel the same and there's such limited interactivity in the environments that they generally just feel like backdrops as you ride from one assassination target to another. I get that they were trying to introduce some open world activities that would be more meditative, with the idea being that you improve your "knowledge" through these activities and that allows your character's skills to progress. But all these side activities are so shallow and lack any real gameplay to them, so it never achieves that desired effect. In fact, all the RPG elements are lacking and I think this is another area where the dual protagonist system really hurt the game. Because you have to have an entire skill tree and item economy set up for Yasuke, Naoe's options felt limited. I really wish they would have stuck with only Naoe and devoted all the development time to her. Just think of all the effort spent developing animations, skills, dialogue, weapons, and armor for Yasuke instead of Naoe There's basically little choice in the RPG systems other than what weapon do you want to focus on and the combat was so tedious that I didn't really care to experiment too much anyways. Another thing that removes the desire to explore and engage in the world is the terrible side quests. Nearly everything is just, "here's a new list of assassination targets". And really what else could there be? There's really no gameplay in Shadows other than stealth and combat, and because they let you choose between Naoe and Yasuke most of the time you know that the side quests can't really care that much about your character. I also hate the hideout. I think people always treat these systems as "well I know some people will like this and there's no harm if I don't engage in it." But again, they spent time and energy developing this system and all that it does is tie different progression systems to a singular location that you have to fast travel to all the time. For example, it would been better to have forges in the cities to at least give you something else to do there without having to fast travel back to the hideout just to upgrade your gear. Seriously, who thinks that in the game that lets you be a ninja what I really want to do is arrange buildings and decorate homes?
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