After five years of waiting, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is finally hereand the critical reception seems pretty positive. As someone who followed the series passionately during the Ezio days but fell off when Ubisoft transitioned it into sprawling action RPGs, I was hoping for Shadows to ignite that same passion I once had.
In fact, it’s not just that I find this modern take on the series to be run-of-the-mill open-world games; I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re flat-out bad. Trailers forAssassin’s Creed Shadows, however, intrigued me. It seemed like the game was going to be split into two discrete parts that players could choose to engage with: one part where you play as Yasuke, a hard-hitting and combat-focused samurai, while the other puts you in the shoes of Naoe, a stealthy shinobi with a penchant for parkour.
Hiding From The Shadows
As I waited for reviews to drop earlier this month, there was one phrase I absolutely didn’t want to read. If the consensus from reviewers was “If you’re a fan of Assassin’s Creed, you’ll like Shadows, but it’s not going to grab you if you aren’t,” then I knew I’d have to sit this one out.
Now that reviews are here and people have started playing the game for themselves, it sure seems like Assassin’s Creed Shadows is more of the same, and that’s a shame.
Death and Taxes and Assassin’s Creed Bloat
I need to stop getting my hopes up that Ubisoft is going to actually scale things back in a meaningful way for Assassin’s Creed. I’m so done with the absolutely massive maps filled with nothing but copy-pasted busy work(something that “soured” our reviewer in their time with Shadows), an endless number of boxes to check off when I open the map, and combat that’s mastered in the first five hours with no room for progression or experimentation.
To Ubisoft’s credit, it didtryto scale things back with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, but since the game began life as Valhalla DLC before being repurposed into a standalone title, it doesn’t actually count as an example of the studio scaling things back; it’s actually an example of the opposite.
There’s nothing wrong with a good open-world game. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying checking off those boxes either. But when you compare the quality of the experience that Assassin’s Creed has been offering for over a decade toother games in the genre,like Ghost of Tsushima, Metal Gear Solid 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, or The Witcher 3, you’ll see that Ubisoft is lagging behind in frankly staggering ways.
For years now, Ubisoft has doubled down on taking a quantity-over-quality approach to its game design, and that’s just not something I want to devote my time to. If I feel like a game doesn’t care about offering me a consistently high-quality experience, then I’m just not interested.
I’ve been fooled by giving Assassin’s Creed a shot at redemption over and over again as the series has tried to reinvent itself every five to seven years, but I don’t want to be fooled again, not when there are plenty of other great games demanding my attention.
