Good, Not Great
In the end, the outcome was predictable. Despite the massive hate campaign directed against Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, early reviews as of this writing place Shadows at 81% on Metacritic, indicating “generally favorable reviews” from a sample of 71 reviewers. As Paul Tassi at Forbes has noted, this is totally in line with the historical reception of previous AC titles, which have fallen within a range of the 71% to 89% over the years, with the most recent major installments reaching the low 80s. In parsing a number of reviews, I’ve found the consensus seems to be that Shadows is a perfectly solid entry into the franchise which breaks very little new ground but improves all around on the basic Creed mechanics.
That does not mean it will appeal to everyone, and some significant criticism has been directed at both the intro section and the game’s script, which like most AC titles leaves much to be desired. But nobody comes to a Ubisoft game expecting anything like Crime and Punishment, and if the game to which AC Shadows will inevitably be compared, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, generally did a better job of crafting a culturally authentic and compelling narrative, it’s sidequests were infamously underwritten and its story was often better in terms of plot than characterization or line-for-line dialogue. Yes, “Honor died on the beach!” was a standout, but what else do you remember?
Can Ubisoft Be Saved?
Over all this hangs an overwhelming question: is Shadows enough to save Ubisoft? Despite it’s impressive roster of IPs, the company is teetering on a buyout and change of leadership as investors rebel against the developer’s catastrophic loss of value since 2020, which has seen its share price decrease by nearly 80%. While it’s too soon to fret that Shadows will be the “last” Assassin’s Creed, a Fallout-like situation, where corporate insolvency puts the IP up for grabs and delays new releases by quite a while is perfectly possible. This would probably entail a major creative retooling of Creed as well, just as Fallout‘s acquisition by Bethesda after the demise of Black Isle Studios fundamentally reshaped the tone of its fictional universe. My gut tells me that Shadows is bound to be a commercial success that still falls short.
Consider Morgan Park’s criticism at PC Gamer:
“Ubisoft’s interpretation of 16th-century Japan is an achievement, but its locations have more personality than the people who inhabit them. Its cities are dense and appear active, but interactivity is low. The central city of Kyoto has hundreds of civilians, merchants, and craftsmen going about their lives, yet I can interact with just two or three merchants selling rations or horses. City guards patrol the streets, but cutting them down in broad daylight has zero consequences beyond upsetting city folk in the vicinity. There is no concept of crime or a “wanted” status unless you really mess up in a restricted zone, and guards within those zones won’t chase me outside of them.”
In Search of a Better World
This shallowness, he notes, is endemic to the game and jarring in the context of recent open-world masterpieces like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (not to mention previous greats like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt). Indeed—compared to Warhorse and CD Projekt Red’s creations, this statement is damning, considering that The Witcher’s Novigrad already felt thrillingly alive with characters and sidequests ten years ago, and even the less-realized urban universe of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 had a reasonable degree of depth that deepened with every subsequent update over its four-year redemption arc. While the attraction of Sengoku Jidai Japan seems even more universal than ever after 75 years of Kurosawa, Shogun, and various other samurai epics, the bar for Action RPG games has risen tremendously in the last decade and only continues to grow.
In The Shadow of Shōgun
As Tassi and others note, Ubisoft is rarely, if ever, mentioned in contention for GOTY (Game of the Year) lists, but based on initial reviews, Shadows strikes me as particularly retrograde. Once the main quest line is exhausted in any great ARPG, gaming inevitably devolves into crafting, killing, and questing for loot, but it’s concerning, based on Park’s assessment, that this is basically all Shadows has to offer from the beginning. And no—despite attempts to ride Shogun’s coattails with an “immersive mode” that has every character speak in their native language to mirror the late Sengoku Jidai’s linguistic diversity, this has no resemblance to James Clavell-cum-FX’s epic, where translation nuances and language and cultural barriers are intricate parts of the plot, not mere window dressing. This is regrettable, since realistically, we can assume the historical Yasuke, as an East African freedman of Portuguese slavers in Japan, was probably trilingual to an imperfect degree reminiscent of William Adams or John Blackthorne.
All and all, I’m excited to play Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and review it for The Path, but I’m not expecting anything revelatory.
The Spiel
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