Assassin’s Creed Shadows preview shows what AC game fans have been waiting for

It took me all of five minutes Assassin’s Creed Shadows to get it: We’re so back, all of us.

By “we,” I mean Assassin’s Creed fans who have been pulled in all directions by a series that reinvents itself every few iterations. Based on a three-hour remote preview that Polygon attended last week, playback Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like playing all the best parts of the series at once. The richly detailed cities have it Assassin’s Creed 2 plus the vast land mass of Valhalla. It has pathos and intrigue Origin plus the dual protagonists in Syndicate. It looks to continue the show’s modern storyline, which was largely absent Miragethe most recent post. It’s both an RPG and a stealth sim, a smart action game and a great piece of historical tourism.

In addition: You get a grappling hook.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes place in Japan near the end of the 16th century and you play as two characters. Yasuke is based on IRL’s historical figure from the Sengoku period, a black man who served as a samurai for Oda Nobunaga. The game opens with Yasuke meeting Nobunaga for the first time. Naoe, a fictional shinobi, is the second character you play. Her narrative ties into the Assassin’s Creed plot: she’s tasked with protecting an important item, loses said important item, a family member dies in the process, and now she’s embarking on a tale of revenge and redemption. (The preview showed Yasuke and Naoe interacting in the movie, but didn’t reveal how their paths first cross.)

Yasuke is considered the melee-focused character. In fact, he is an absolute entity. When you miss three parries in a row when playing as Yasuke, you’re fine! Just land a few hits on your enemy and they’re done. And yes, you can do the Spartan kick from Odyssey. Assassin’s Creed games aren’t exactly revered for their non-stealth combat, but Yasuke handles smoothly and accurately with a weight to every hit (both those given and received). Still, while fighting as Yasuke, I found myself longing for the deft touch of the hidden blade.

The more typical “Assassin” (or “Hidden One” if you prefer modern Assassin’s Creed parlance) role is filled by Naoe, who actually has the hidden blade. Her grappling hook allows you to swing across gaps or quickly scale certain structures. You can sneak around the ramparts and throw knives and pick off enemies from afar. But Naoe is fragile in combat – to the point where detection more often than not results in a “reload last save” screen. Every time I died in battle as Naoe, I longed for Yasuke’s armor.

You can customize both Yasuke and Naoe by changing their equipment. Gear is categorized via the ubiquitous loot pool rainbow, and different pieces of gear bequeath marginal bonuses to various stats that I probably won’t fully understand until now Shadows comes out. There are also half a dozen skill trees for both characters. Admittedly, throughout the preview, I didn’t spend much time analyzing these different menus. That said, it all struck me as intriguingly deep and complex, the kind of number-crunching that might, possiblyeven set one Diablo 4 player.

Instead, I spent more time scanning the map, which looked massive. Shadows has nine provinces, each of which is divided into a number of small regions. Very happy to Valhallathe map suggests the levels you should reach before exploring a province. Those shown in the preview ranged from level 23 to 35, though a Ubisoft representative said they range from 3 to 35, suggesting that the recommended level for each province scales as you play. (Yasuke and Naoe were level 25 in the preview.)

Zoom in and you’ll see that the regions of each province are littered with question mark icons, all of which are waypoints for side missions, enemy bases, in-game vendors, and other various optional activities. And you can climb (or grapple!) the tallest structures to scan your environment for anything you might have missed on the map.

From scratch Shadows I played, none of these side quests featured the particularly memorable bit characters that were so present in Valhallalike Ax head or Guy who is definitely One-Punch Man. The variety instead came from approaching the quests as each of the two different characters. In one mission, I played as Naoe, sneaking into an enemy compound to retrieve three items and parking myself out of there at light speed when I was spotted after grabbing the third. In another, I played as Yasuke, crashing through an enemy compound like a tank. While I didn’t feel like much of an assassin, I will say that few things are more satisfying than kicking an enemy through a fence with such ferocity that the bamboo snaps like twigs.

However, flipping between the characters creates some friction. IN Shadowsto switch between Yasuke and Naoe, pause the game, open the menu, scroll over to your equipment tab, and hold the X button for a few seconds. There are also nebulous rules about when you can and can’t do it. From what I could gather, you can switch while standing perfectly still on flat ground when you’re not near enemies. However, you cannot switch between characters during battle. (Fair.) You cannot switch while climbing or jumping. (Also fair.) And you can’t switch when you were in combat a few minutes ago, but then ran really far away from where the enemies last saw you, and now you’re hiding behind a hay wagon, waiting for the game stopped registering you as “in battle”. (I’ll let you decide if that feels fair.)

The lack of flexibility in when you can change characters sounds like a deliberate design choice, as if Shadows denying you the chance to have as much fun in the sandbox as you desire. The series’ titular creed states, in part, that “anything goes.” Well, obviously not everything!

This is ultimately a minor complaint for a game that lets you play hits and is immensely fun while doing it. A telling point: When the preview ended, I wanted to keep playing, to keep probing around its world and see what secrets I could discover. This looks to be the Assassin’s Creed game that Assassin’s Creed fans have been asking for since at least 2011.

But Assassin’s Creed Shadows undeniably comes at a critical time for Ubisoft. Even in addition to the unflattering headlines from the past few years – such as claims of institutional misconductdepartures of senior staff and reports of a potential acquisition — the publisher hasn’t exactly had a banner console generation. While Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a clear high water mark, it’s been mostly downhill from there.

Far cry 6 and Assassin’s Creed Mirage are the latest entries in two of Ubisoft’s flagship series and the company proclaimed both as sales successes, but both rank on Metacritic among the lowest-rated mainline games in their series (second lowest and third-lowest), which suggests stagnation for two of the company’s tentpoles. After years of delays, Skull and bones failed to make a splash. The live service shooting game XDefiant was shut down before it had a chance to prove itself, following in the footsteps of Ubisoft’s similarly short-lived Hyper Scape. The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time the replay was delayed several times before restarting internally. The second Prince of Persia game, last year The missing crownwas truly transcendent, but missed sales targets by such a margin that Ubisoft scattered its development team to the wind elsewhere in the company. And most recently, Star Wars Outlaws launched to such a lukewarm critical and commercial reception that Ubisoft itself cited the misfire as a reason for delay Shadows.

Based on the few hours I’ve played, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a really, really solid game. That is not the question. The question is whether Shadows is solid enough to support Ubisoft when it needs it most. Based on the game I saw – a competent entry in a long-running series that nonetheless does little to reinvent the wheel or bring new players into the fold – I’m not entirely convinced it is. But at least Assassin’s Creed fans will get what they’ve been longing for.