Review: 47 hours with the astounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Arguably the most pivotal game release in Ubisoft's history, AC Shadows is a slow burn that improves upon the franchise's more recent formula

Naoe in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Screenshot: Ubisoft, captured by Game File

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a sprawling, bloody and, once you get used to it, refreshingly slow adventure set across 16th century Japan. It looks better and plays better than nearly any other entry in Ubisoft’s 18-year old series of eagle dives into history’s most colorful eras.

Shadows, out Thursday for PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation and Luna, is a third-person open-world epic developed by Ubisoft Quebec (lead team on AC Syndicate and AC Odyssey). That team has produced this game alongside at least 17 other Ubisoft studios, including one—Ubisoft Osaka—that, in a sign of the times for Ubisoft, saw its production team shuttered late in the game’s development.

This new epic is a tale of two adventurers who are set on a mission to rid feudal Japan of a conspiracy of killers. Our heroes:

• Yasuke is a formerly enslaved Black samurai whose unusual presence in feudal Japan drove much of the intrigue—and a heap of bad-faith online criticism—of Shadows ahead of release. He is the game’s non-assassin, a tank of a fighter for players not interested in sneaking around

• Naoe is a vengeful Japanese shinobi, who quickly becomes the heart of Shadows. Due to how the game is structured and how I chose to wander through its extraordinary world, she was the main character in my game for nearly all of its first 12 hours (other players’ time will vary)

Shadows is a smart refinement of the most recent format Ubisoft has used for these games, circa Assassin’s Creed Origins. And it offers two unexpectedly great touches. Neither is the kind of things that was a big marketing point for Shadows and neither is a spoiler. They’re simply what makes the game special.