Preview: Can Assassin’s Creed Shadows make good on a decade of fan desire?

Fans have been asking for an Assassin’s Creed game set in feudal Japan for almost as long as the series has existed.

The idea of stalking across the thatched roofs and using shinobi skills to take down targets has been something that series regulars have been desperate to see. Now, after almost two decades of Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed Shadows looks to give fans their wish.

The game stars dual protagonists, Yasuke, a former slave-turn-samurai, and Naoe, a female shinobi. Each with their own unique gameplay style, each protagonist is essentially an offer to the player of whether you want to sneak around, or blast the wooden doors off the place.

Our demo saw the pair approach a target from several different angles. Yasuke is a towering presence, with little interest in stealth. Bashing through anything that comes his way, the game becomes very little to do with Assassin’s Creed and more with your brutalization.

It looked fun, but it also felt in someway like Yasuke was there as a failsafe for players who don’t want to sneak through the trees and do the actual Assassin’s part of Assassin’s Creed. When walking through open-world areas, NPCs will bow to Yasuke or react in shocked surprise.

Our demoist mentioned that this is due to Yasuke’s status as a powerful samurai, not the fact that he’s a person of colour in 16th-century Japan. There’s a lot of potential for interesting storytelling coming from that dynamic, but whether it’ll be handled sensitively, or avoided entirely, is yet to be seen.

The other half of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is Naoe. Naoe’s gameplay is literally exactly what fans have been dreaming about for two decades. You’re flying around using your grapple, sneaking around rooftops, the shadows are your friends.

While it feels like literally every Assassin’s Creed game, and every stealth game for that matter, makes a big deal out of using shadows to your advantage, our demo of Assassin’s Creed Shadows made it seem like it’s actually being delivered on.

Knocking out a light source makes the world significantly darker, and there’s a UI indicator to tell the player when they are cloaked in darkness and can approach the target. Naoe is also the smallest protagonist that has ever been in an Assassin’s Creed game according to the developers, and considering her other half in this game is Yasuke, she feels absolutely tiny.

There’s an elephant in the room during our demo that it feels like everyone can sense. In the time since the world has been asking for an Assassin’s Creed set in Japan, someone else made one.

It was very hard to watch the demo of Assassin’s Creed Shadows without thinking about Ghost of Tsushima. While Tsushima itself took many leads from Assassin’s Creeds that came before it, it now feels like it’s sweeping back the opposite way.

Remember when Uncharted took a load of cues from Tomb Raider, then the reboot of Tomb Raider then took a load of cues from Uncharted? It feels something like that. It’s a bit of an identity crisis.

Ghost of Tsushima is a great game, and we’d welcome something very similar to it, but it’s a comparison that we don’t think Assassin’s Creed Shadows will have an easy time shaking, for good or ill.

The demo was full of clever flourishes, like when Naoe hides underwater, she will produce a bamboo reed to breathe through, allowing for more time undercover. Similarly, for the first time, players will be able to go prone with Naoe, a feature that has been strangely absent all this time.

Naoe’s signature weapon, a kusarigama, slices through trees as she whips it around, creating from dynamic chaos which added to the combat scenes we got to watch. Similarly, when Yasuke sent an enemy flying into a shopkeeper’s reserve of oranges, the were sent launching into the sky.

Yasuke can also run shoulder-first through the bamboo doors of some temples, making for a not-so-subtle entrance.

It wasn’t made clear just how much freedom you’ll be able to have to play as one or the other character. Will we be able to play the whole thing as Naoe, or will we be forced to switch between them? It almost feels like there are two separate games here, in order not to scare off anyone whose doesn’t want a harder stealth edge.

What also isn’t clear is the scale of the game. Considering this is from the team behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which famously features a map bigger than the known universe, we expect that most of Japan will be recreated to scale.

We’re torn here as, although we’re much more in favor of the smaller, tighter experiences of early Assassin’s Creed titles before the RPG switchover, we acknowledge the fan desire to explore Japan far and wide.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has a huge weight of fan expectations to live up to. When you finally do the thing your community has been asking for, you have to nail it. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t really revisit locations anymore, so this is potentially the only chance they have to deliver the Japanese AC experience that people have been desperate to see.

While the Ghost of Tsushima comparisons will flow, from the gameplay we’ve seen, they’re not massively similar, especially on the Yasuke end of the spectrum. Ubisoft has the potential to tell an extremely interesting dual-protagonist story here, which we hope it delivers on.

You don’t make one of your characters a real historical figure unless you have huge ambitions around what you want to do with him narratively, and we hope it follows through.