Assassin's Creed Shadows

Steam Reviews

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• Not recommended Posted February 14, 2026 on Steam What an incredibly frustrating experience this is. I was actually a fan of the new open world rpg-ish direction Ubisoft took with Assassins's Creed, and remain a resolute fan of Odyssey and even Valhalla to a degree. But my god whatever the f*ck they did with Shadows, it does NOT work. 4/10 - The game world, while pretty, is as empty and boring as it gets. There is almost nothing to do aside from conquering enemy camps. Imagine Valhalla's map, but everything except for the enemy bases, the viewpoints and those stone stacking puzzles is removed. That's what Shadows' world feels like. - The characters are about as wooden and unlikable as can be, both in writing as well as in performance. Some truly horrible AI af facial animations and stilted performances are the norm here. And the protagonists are not exempt from this. Many criticized Eivor of being wooden compared to Alexios and especially Kassandra, but even Eivor is miles ahead in terms of personality and emotional range compared to either Naoe or Yasuke. - The story is confusing, disjointed and frankly exhausting. Ubisoft decided it was a good idea to ditch a coherent main plot in favor of little mini-stories in the style of Odyssey's cult of kosmos, or Valhalla's order of the ancients. This means the game has no leading narrative, events happen out of order and are each highly localized without tying into a wider story. It is dull, illogical and tedious. - The combat has evolved somewhat and is now less hack and slash and more tactical, yet I find myself more frustrated than engaged by it. Stronger enemies can take forever to fight as Naoe, and often kill you in seconds if you dare to lose concentration over the minute-long hacking sessions. So it seems like the combat was clearly designed to be tackled with Yasuke, that's his thing being a samurai after all. Stealth and exploration on the other hand practically mandate the use of Naoe, since Yasuke is hilariously inept at doing anything an Assassin's Creed protagonist would do on a regular basis, aside from fighting head-on. Okay, all well and good, so the idea is: you go in stealthily with Naoe and if discovered, you switch to Yasuke for the fight, right? WRONG. For some god forsaken reason Ubisoft decided that switching characters would entail a loadscreen and could only be done out of combat. So no matter what you're doing, you're never given the right tools for the job, and it makes the entire character switching thing look like some tacked-on gimmick that never works in your favor. What a mess. - The loot and equipment is just straight up worse now. They took the worst aspects from both Odyssey and Valhalla and combined them into whatever this system is supposed to be. Odyssey had an almost arpg-esque loot system, with multiple rarities, frequent upgrades and deep build crafting; but that lead to loot-spam and constant fiddling with items that barely changed anything. Valhalla then employed a morer souls-like approach with fixed unique weapons that can be upgraded and customized; but that also restricted variety and made exploring for loot less rewarding. Shadows now decided to combine the random loot spam of odyssey with even more restrictive build crafting than Valhalla, and reduced the amount of gear slots by 75% on top of that. It's the most unengaging loot system I have seen in a bit. - While the game certainly looks pretty, this comes at an unacceptable cost of performance. Shadows barely runs around 50 fps on my supercomputer, while often looking similiar to Valhalla or even worse thanks to aggressive upscaling. It's both hilarious and sad to me that this game can look exactly the same as Valhalla in parts, while literally running at a quarter of the fps. I can play Valhalla on 120 locked, NATIVE, and that game is humongous; yet I have to use framegen in Shadows to even approach 90 on a good day; what the f*ck happened? - Final thoughts: this game is a mess. It's dual protagonist approach backfired epically and works neither in gameplay nor in narrative. The open world, while smaller than Valhalla, feels somehow larger, and not in a good way. The combat and equipment systems are either worse than previous entries where they overlap, or just plain bad where they are new, and the story is by far the least interesting and least engaging one they have done for this franchise yet. Going back into the game now I can barely manage an hour before shutting it down again out of boredom or frustration. The initial bulk of playtime I was mostly wowed by the graphics and world design, but that wanderlust has since worn off, and what's left is a hollow shell of a game with no direction, no emotion and no story to tell.
• Not recommended Posted October 12, 2025 on Steam I was enjoying Assassin’s Creed Shadows at first, even though it has a lot of performance problems. I’m running an RTX 5090 and still struggle to reach 60 frames per second. It’s ridiculous — I can play Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4K with 120 FPS, but this game barely manages 30–50 FPS at the same resolution. Like most Ubisoft titles, it’s a massive map filled with repetitive tasks and endless collectibles that have little to no impact on the actual gameplay. For the first 10 hours, I was enjoying it, but after that, it feels like I’m doing exactly the same thing over and over again. I’m just pushing through to complete it, but without any real enjoyment. This has become a recurring pattern in Assassin’s Creed games — each entry gets bigger, but not better. For reference, I platinumed Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla on my PlayStation account, so I’ve given this series plenty of time and patience. But I don’t see myself continuing to play Shadows, because it simply isn’t fun anymore. Then, after losing internet access for about 4-5 days, I discovered that I couldn’t even launch the game. The Ubisoft Connect launcher refuses to open it without connecting to Ubisoft’s servers — even for the single-player campaign. This means I cannot access a product I paid for, which from a consumer standpoint is ridiculous. It’s a shame that these companies bury the experience under DRM and force online checks for single-player content that should be playable offline and doesn’t affect anyone else. This will be the last Ubisoft game I will ever buy.
• Not recommended Posted March 3, 2026 on Steam Ubisoft has truly mastered one thing: selling the same game over and over again, just with a different postcard in the background. This time, the postcard happens to be Japan. If you’ve played Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla, you already know exactly what you’re getting. Climb towers. Reveal the map. Clear icons. Repeat. The progression system, quest structure, loot treadmill — it’s all comfort food at this point. Very familiar. Almost aggressively familiar. Somewhere around the halfway mark, I realized I no longer cared about the story. Not because it’s terrible, but because the gameplay loop slowly numbs you into autopilot mode. You spend most of your time commuting from point A to point B. If fast travel had a personality, it would be the real protagonist of this game. Strip away the padding and the experience would shrink dramatically. Yes, visually it’s an improvement over older entries. But “better than before” is not the same as “impressive.” Facial animations still feel oddly lifeless. For a series with this budget, that’s hard to ignore. And then there’s the timing. An Assassin’s Creed set in Japan sounded revolutionary years ago. But after Ghost of Tsushima delivered such a focused and polished experience, this feels less like a bold move and more like Ubisoft finally turning in homework that’s already late. Even The Witcher 3, a ten-year-old game, still offers a stronger sense of adventure and atmosphere. I’m not angry. I’m just exhausted. Exhausted by the formula, the predictability, the safe design. If this is your first Assassin’s Creed, you might genuinely enjoy it. But if you’ve been here before, this isn’t evolution — it’s muscle memory with better lighting.
• Not recommended Posted April 24, 2026 on Steam Bought a single-player game and got an always-online gatekeeper instead. Assassin’s Creed Shadows refuses to launch offline because Ubisoft Connect needs constant authentication. That means no internet = no access to a game I already paid for. This isn’t about multiplayer, this is basic single-player functionality. I travel and don’t always have a stable connection, so this design choice makes the game unreliable at best and unusable at worst. If you’re going to require online checks, be upfront about it and provide a real offline mode or a grace period. Right now it feels like I don’t own the game — I’m renting access depending on server mood. Would not recommend unless you’re permanently online.
• Not recommended Posted February 14, 2026 on Steam Pretty, yet shallow and falls flat, wasting the massive potential it had. 80% done with the game: - Game is too big, as in the literal sense; a LOT of areas to explore, with nothing to do. Does make a good photo capture game though? - Combat is reduced to monotonous button smashing and parrying is VERY generous. - Stealth is without a doubt the best part of the game, but Yasuke has none. - Naoe starts of as an interesting character, but loses all credibility and integrity in act 2. - Yasuke is the power dream, and he maintains his integrity - but he feels VERY out of place in both setting and context. - Music ... sheeesh, oh boy. Ubisoft had the perfect setting with extremely well crafted sceneries, but they chose to inject a LOT of lofi mixes? Immature choice. - Story starts with a bang, I liked it. It was dumped after the first act, sad. A very MODEST and HUGE thanks to my dear friend who gifted it to me, unironically made me very happy and I've been anticipating this game since Unity. I had fun the first 25 hours :) Just a shame Ubisoft drops the ball enough to crack the floorboards.
• Not recommended Posted August 21, 2025 on Steam I very rarely thumbs down a game. I'm not the type of person to just pick up and try a bunch of different games and I don't buy many games on release before I can do extensive research and hear what my favorite reviewers have to say. But I just can't recommend this game. It has some quality aspects, which I will mention below, but overall it suffers from many of the same fundamental problems as Valhalla. That means it's almost impossible to avoid getting bored of this game after about 20 hours. I'll start with the good parts because it'll be short. I actually like Naoe as a protagonist with the Japanese voice actress. The world is incredibly beautiful visually and the performance is quite good and scalable. With a 5070ti and 5700X3D I was able to get 100 fps consistently with frame gen on but with everything maxed out (including ray tracing). In terms of gameplay, the only thing I really had fun with throughout the entire 60 hours was the improved stealth. With going prone and the shadows/visibility mechanic, they really deliver a decent shinobi/ninja fantasy. Naoe's animations are especially satisfying to execute, even if they get old after a while. I would suggest using the expert stealth difficulty because it's still not too difficult but forces more thoughtfulness about how you approach situations. They set up a decent, if unoriginal, vengeance story within the first 10 hours. The problem is that the game totally blows the lead by opening up into a mostly nonlinear narrative progression that felt similarly tiring and discontinuous as Valhalla. This is probably the biggest issue with the game because once the gameplay starts to feel repetitive (as open world games almost always do after a certain point, even the good ones), you need a narrative hook to keep you progressing. Shadows just presents you with a million different short, contained, regional stories that don't give you enough time to even care about the characters. Once you finish one story, all the events and characters are instantly deleted from your memory because the narrative structure prevents them from impacting what comes next. There are a handful of ongoing characters (your "allies") but they are so disconnected from the larger narrative that they never felt worth pursuing. Now this is a good time to talk about Yasuke and the dual protagonist system. Yasuke is fine enough as a character and his backstory was decently interesting, so the problem wasn't anything to do with "wokeness" or whatever else people are crying about. It's just that he feels horrible to play with compared to Naoe and the dual protagonist system waters everything down. I never volunteered to play with Yasuke and that is in large part because the combat in this game doesn't feel good. I played most of the game with expert combat difficulty to add more tension to the stealth, but I ended up lowering it back down to normal towards the end because there are more forced Yasuke missions and it felt like a slog on expert. Yasuke doesn't give you the proper samurai fantasy because they designed him as a giant, overpowering warrior. Comparing the combat to Ghost of Tsushima is night and day. GoT makes you feel slick: graceful but also brutal. And nothing demonstrates that clearer than boss battles, which are just clunky and unfun in Shadows but in GoT they could deliver proper atmospheric and fast-paced sword-fighting duels. To top it off, they basically make assaulting castles with Yasuke a miserable experience because they have an alarm system that floods the area with these "Guardian" enemies that do little more than just make the whole thing take forever. It's always quicker and easier to infiltrate with Naoe. But even then, the level design is so repetitive that even though the locations are only different in a way that feels like a procedurally generated maps in an ARPG. The fact that so much of the game is large, open environments also means that both the parkour and shadows/visibility system weren't utilized as much as they could've been. This game, perhaps even more than the last few major RPG AC games, would have benefited greatly from denser city environments. Speaking of the world, I said it was beautiful but there's literally almost nothing in it. All the locations feel the same and there's such limited interactivity in the environments that they generally just feel like backdrops as you ride from one assassination target to another. I get that they were trying to introduce some open world activities that would be more meditative, with the idea being that you improve your "knowledge" through these activities and that allows your character's skills to progress. But all these side activities are so shallow and lack any real gameplay to them, so it never achieves that desired effect. In fact, all the RPG elements are lacking and I think this is another area where the dual protagonist system really hurt the game. Because you have to have an entire skill tree and item economy set up for Yasuke, Naoe's options felt limited. I really wish they would have stuck with only Naoe and devoted all the development time to her. Just think of all the effort spent developing animations, skills, dialogue, weapons, and armor for Yasuke instead of Naoe There's basically little choice in the RPG systems other than what weapon do you want to focus on and the combat was so tedious that I didn't really care to experiment too much anyways. Another thing that removes the desire to explore and engage in the world is the terrible side quests. Nearly everything is just, "here's a new list of assassination targets". And really what else could there be? There's really no gameplay in Shadows other than stealth and combat, and because they let you choose between Naoe and Yasuke most of the time you know that the side quests can't really care that much about your character. I also hate the hideout. I think people always treat these systems as "well I know some people will like this and there's no harm if I don't engage in it." But again, they spent time and energy developing this system and all that it does is tie different progression systems to a singular location that you have to fast travel to all the time. For example, it would been better to have forges in the cities to at least give you something else to do there without having to fast travel back to the hideout just to upgrade your gear. Seriously, who thinks that in the game that lets you be a ninja what I really want to do is arrange buildings and decorate homes?