Assassin’s Creed Shadows

hella good

TLDR: The story drags on and on. The voice acting is pure garbage and so is the writing. Visuals are bad too (I'll explain down below). 3/10 (compared to Ghost of Tsushima which i would rate 9/10, which I think is a very fair comparison to make. Go buy that game instead if you haven't played it, and if you have played it, stay far away from this game). DON'T BUY EVEN AT A DEEP DISCOUNT. Review: Probably one of the top 3 most boring games I've ever played. ENVIRONMENT: They've done a lot here technically. i.e. engine / technology wise its great. But actual design is terrible. Meaning its re-used assets all over the place. See one village and you've seen all of it. The entire map. The only thing that makes things interesting is the season changes and weather effects. But even then after the first 5 hours, you've seen everything there is to see. There are no different biomes, no interesting locations, no interesting set-pieces, nothing. The use of environments in story telling is minimal or non-existant. I.e. if there's a boss fight, it takes place in some random street corner or room most of the time. Where as in ghost of tsushima they'd put these boss fights in amazing arenas surrounded by fields of flowers or a lake with lanterns and they always felt special. Here the developers were just bored and wanted to get it over with. Traversal: There are two characters you can play as, a girl, Naoe, and a guy Yasuke. Naoe is nimble and agile while Yasuke is lumbering and slow. So you never want to play as Yasuke. He has none of the cool moves, no climbing abilities and no stealth. The usual finnicky-ness of the Assassins creed parkour system exists here as well. COMBAT: moment to moment: Gets boring pretty fast. After a while, you find yourself repeating the same move just to get it over with. The areas or provinces in the map are level marked. Meaning if you're lower level than the enemies in that area you're going to be doing minimal damage. It's not that combat is hard, it's just a boring slog. The input lag is attrocious at times (I played with graphics maxed out but around 60fps with frame gen on (RTX 4080, 7800X3D)). It's so bad that you find yourself repeating the button thinking that the input didn't go through. Overall: Enemy variety is also non-existant. It's there visually, but not there in a gameplay sense. You don't really have to take into consideration their movesets or use different tactics against them. You get your light attackers, heavy attackers, and bow-men but there's nothing interesting about them. They are dumb as rocks and if you get spotted, you can climb to roof top and they stop following you immediately. Loot is decent and the skill trees look decent enough but you have to collect 'Mastery points' to level up your skills. Which involves going to a random temple, pressing right trigger (basically witcher sense), seeing where the white dots are and walking to the white dots and pressing a button to 'collect documents' or 'pray'. The most boring quest ever designed. Save points are atrocious. Idk how the devs are still living in 1990s. These guys don't know where save points should exist in a questline. You can sneak through an entire village to follow different NPCs and have conversations, get to the end boss fight and if you lose that fight, the save was before all of that was done. And now you have to repeat all of that. STORY: The premise is: 12 horsemen murdering a certain Lord, and the lords daughter and a Samurai team up to hunt down the 12 horsemen. Now from here on out it's not really one story but 12 short stories. And these short stories don't get enough time or developement so you'll hear name after japanese name of characters and they will come and go like the wind until you forget who's who and who you're supposed to fight. Throw into this incomprehensible mess a hundred more fetch quest gibberish and you arrive at slop where you don't even know which quest you just completed. I'm no exaggerating on that. There were moments where I talked to an NPC with a speech bubble and some quest progressed without me knowing what happened or what i'm supposed to do now. UI DESIGN: For some reason, pressing the button for the map or inventory with result in a 2 second black screen. It feels like a mini loading screen. Inventory management is non-existant. Your inventory will get filled with so many items of varying colors its impossible to know which one is which at a glance. And of course, cz it's UbiSoft there's shop screens everywhere. When you load into the game, you basically load into a client which tries to sell you the other games and battlepasses. Good things: You will enjoy the first 5 hrs. The rest is skippable. complete waste of time. If you don't heed the warning and buy it anyway, switch audio to Japanese. As a non-japanese speaker I found it helped with the bad writing and vomit inducing cringey voice acting. I don't usually review games, but this one was so bad, i had to try and save other people from playing this. Don't waste time or money.