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  Emanuel

  1.1 of 5 stars Verified purchase

  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?

  The combat is extremely unbalanced. If you're fighting a higher level character your attacks are sort of like if a 5 year old was hitting the rock. it feel completely futile if you are using the girl main character. You could use the Black Samurai main character but then your big and sluggish. Also its not why most people bought the game. I definitely did not want to be a samurai, I wanted to be the Shinobi. Which is why it was so disapointing that they made her so weak. I'm surprised because prior AC games were more balanced. Not sure what happened with this game but save your money.

  nr1 thefuk

  ITS AC VALHALLAH BUT WITH A BLACK GUY WHO CANT DO PARKOUR
  
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  Itchyaboyy

  2.3 of 5 stars Verified purchase

  I really want to love and enjoy this game but it's just impossible. After pre-ordering and rage deleting i gave it another chance.. Start was somehow solid but playing at hardest difficulty is so painful due to encountering bug or other sh*t every fight, every damn thing you do. You want to use abilities? Nope sorry i won't work right now without reason. You want to dodge? Yes you can ofcourseeee but you see this 2cm high rock? Too bad now you are stuck and you will probably die. You want to fight with some inner calm? Okay you need milion squre miles for no camera glitch, dodge shit, roll stupidity and even then enemies locked in animation move/slide 3 more meters after your roll 'cause you're fucked and they just want to hit you. Heeey, did you tried our quicktime minigame? Yeeaaah? Fuck you! Shift+LMB will not work either! And things that worked at launch somehow magicaly stopped working.. congrats I know Shadows trying so hard to be skill based game but you know what? F*ck you Ubisoft. I have no problem paying for good game but did you even tried play your own game and see what are you making? What about testing and polishing .. i know CRAZY... For me THE best AC games are still Odyssey and Black Flag. Probably will be for ever 'cause my hopes for Ubi is lost and Shadows is last AC game i play and probably Ubisoft game too... Edit: Sooo i should start with something positive. Game looks really beautiful. Hideout can take a lot of time and makes you wanna buy all cosmetic sh*t, but that's probably all. Most of quests are painfully boring, quest log is bad and i mean really baaaaaaad. Sorting quests for specific location is non-existent. I am so sad i don't record by default 'cause bugs and eroors i encountered.. just wauuu. "Hit box" is retarded and enemies that missing you by meter still hit you. They can sometimes see ya at 50m through wall during blizzard, AI acting strange.. no problem chase you 500m shoot one arrow and than just turn around and don't give a shit. If you want to play this game play it on normal difficulty. You don't need take so serious approach in fights and just rip though them.

  yes!

  I haven't had this much fun since the Ezio Trilogy. I really love the Japanese culture as well the Samurai, and anything that came up from watching animes. I really love this game.

  I completed the game on Playstation (around 50 hours of playtime) and the cross-save allowed me to pick up where I left off. Unfortunately logging into Ubisoft's app is a must which is annoying especially as the Steam Deck may prompt you to login every time you start the game up. The game runs surprisingly well on Steam Deck and it can look beautiful. The game is fine and fun, but it isn't groundbreaking or memorable. The problem I have with these RPG AC games is that I find them very long and chock full of side missions, activities, etc... AC: Shadows is the first of the RPG titles I've managed to finish, but around the end of Act 2 I started to feel quite fatigued at the idea of finishing it. Oddly, I'd still recommend it because it plays nicely, it's gorgeous and I enjoyed the first 30 hours.
  
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  Kawã Victor

  3.4 of 5 stars Verified purchase

  While the surrounding controversies are understandable, this game is absolutely stunning. The graphics are breathtaking, and the combat feels smooth, powerful, and super satisfying — probably the best in the whole series. A lot of people didn’t like playing as Yasuke, but I actually enjoyed it. He’s a beast in combat and just wrecks everything in his path.

  GREAT GAME

  This is my personal favorite installment since origins as I have been wanting this theme since brotherhood. The dev approach to this game has been noticeably improved, but has much room still. What is clear is they are not phoning it in here. The new in-house graphical tech looks good, performance is mostly stable, the free content is appreciated, and the gameplay is solid, if not eventually redundant. But I even found fun in the repetition, because The art in this game is so damn beautiful. The story is serviceable with Japanese VA, but hardly profound. The team is listening to feedback and looking for ways to meaningfully improve their product while advancing the formula, and that feels refreshing. Maybe this was true in the past, but was becoming increasingly difficult to trust. Combat can be fun when mastered, and leaves space for some player expression, while there are enough options available to create a more immersive, and difficult experience which is welcome of course. Unfortunately, the team still fails to solve for repetitive scenarios and minimal solutions, as the current design formula again demonstrates its desperate need for complexity. The onus is once again on the player to experience the game with variety. Otherwise, it becomes very samey, as what works, always works. And of course, I still yearn for a parkour as good as or better than unity so many years later. 7.7/10 This is a solid step in the right direction, showing that the team understands the assassin fantasy MUST stay center. Wants: Reintroduce the abstergo vs assassins modern day themes, and well as multiple options to manipulate NPCs (sleep, berserk, etc) - this tech in 1960s New York, 70s Berlin or Prague, or 80s Hong Kong or Moscow (focus verticality), with a priority on parkour, and more dynamic AI/NPC behavior. The way this game evolves is in movement, stealth, and npc "intelligence". Also, The story MUST give meaning to the level design and combat "zones" - NPC variety is how combat and stealth become more dynamic. NPC varitey can be more than just HP, equipment, skills, aggression, parry window, attributes, animation set, etc.. What changes everything is "personalities". A set of "choices, and behaviors" NPCs will make that sets them apart from others. Which will fight to the death or give in to cowardice? Which will patrol vigilantly, or abandon responsibility? Which will fight you alone, because they are that confident or immediately call for backup? Maybe some investigate more aggressively, and some are too lazy? Maybe some investigate more cunningly, laying traps, and using deception, and others more obviously. This is how combat zone methodology changes little, but experiences within them become various and alive. What if there were different combinations of intelligence (FOV, listening radius, increased strat options available and likelihood of deception), confidence (very low-very high; likelihood to engage frontal, without backup, or ignore protcol), vigilance (probability of rule-breaking), and skill level (accuracy, damage, # of "cooldowns", etc) for each NPC which generated a number of possible choices an NPC with a given "personality" will make?? an ICVS profile, if you will. Different zones, and story progression would determine the likelihood that certain ICVS types would be present in a given combat zone, shaping ones tactical approach but offering room for surprise in every scenario. -- Imagine being stalked by a character with a similar skill set to yours throughout the game, having to always mind your six, and minimize the trail you leave behind.

  This game is terrible... The controls are so wonky and I cant seem to play for more that 30min... i've tried but its honestly terrible