Assassin's Creed Shadows isn't the Ninja Splinter Cell game I hoped for
Blog Andrew Joseph 27 Jan , 2025 0
When I visited Quebec last year First time seeing Assassin's Creed ShadowsI'm inspired by the development team's enthusiasm for stealth. While I loved Assassin's Creed's move into RPG territory, after hundreds of action-heavy hours, I think it's time for the series to rediscover its sneaky DNA. Not via Mirage’s “back to basics” approachbut by reaching forward, it provides some much-needed evolution in the series' stealth design. I'm excited about Shadows' promise of a Splinter Cell-style lighting system, but after playing a three-hour demo build, I'm not entirely convinced it brings meaningful changes to Assassin's Creed.
The demo's Quest chain, set in the province of Halima, had me infiltrating a variety of strongholds, from a small garden with just a few guards to a towering castle filled with opponents. If you've played Assassin's Creed before, the basic approach to all of this is virtually unchanged. You'll use simple distraction techniques to identify high spots to identify guard positions and stab many in the neck with a hidden blade. All of this can be achieved using the same technology you've relied on for years, and many of the flaws that previously hampered such technology can be returned. For example, hidden blades can be thwarted again by high-level opponents, neutering plans and positioning to support skill points and upgrades. Incredibly sticky environments are still the norm, ensuring you'll never fall off a roof or slip during ascent, but being stuck to surfaces can often prove disastrous when reacting quickly to enemy threats. Emergency Escape feels like you're fighting a magnetic leash that's really trying to lock you in a bad place.
If you've read IGN's latest Hands-on preview You see, our writer Alessandro really likes Shadows' improvements to stealth. While I had mixed feelings, leaving Ubisoft's playroom a little disappointed, it's important to note the shadows yes Delivering on its promise to take invisibility seriously. One of its two playable characters is Naoe, a ninja dedicated to stealth. In addition to the prologue where I got to play as the combat-focused Yasuke, I was also able to play as Naoe throughout the demo. While Shadows often asks you if you want to switch characters, I have no problem choosing Naoe every time.
Naoe is much shorter than her heavily armored companion, allowing her to more easily avoid enemy sight. Her slender frame allows her to do things the wider Yasuke can't, like slide through tight gaps and hide in boxes, while her grappling hook can get onto rooftops and ledges without a climbing hand. As Naoe opens new routes and paths in the world of Shadows, or more accurately as Yasuke closes doors on much of the established Assassin's Creed tradition. He's unable to perform any of the series' staple stealth moves, other than using his bow for silent ranged attacks.
These stealth staples just got a lot more interesting (at least on paper) thanks to refreshed ideas. Part of Shadows' title refers to its new detection method. Staying in a dark render invisible to enemies, the closer you get to the light source, the more obvious you become. This is made clear by a gauge on your HUD, which fills and empties as you move around. However, the clever bit is that you can manipulate the environment to your advantage. Lanterns can be destroyed with blades or thrown shurikens, plunging the room into darkness so that you can't see the blood at all. The idea was common in the days of Thieves and Fragment Cells, but has fallen into limbo since stealth became primarily an optional method in action games rather than its own specialized genre.
The adoption of this approach sounds like a complete game-changer, but in reality it had minimal impact on the playstyle I'd honed over the previous 13 games. I have no doubt that under the hood, the engine's enemy AI routines yes Be affected by this new simulation. However, when it came to actually playing the shadows, I found that the presence of light rarely affected my progress or forced me to devise smarter methods. I can stand on a roof with a full visibility meter and no one will see me. Traditional sight lines seem to be the only factor I really want to consider.
In many shades of thought, this same but different feeling remains. Naoe is able to lie on her belly easily which really makes a difference in terms of invisible repositioning. However, the environments I encountered in the demo made few creative uses of this ability. For example, I was disappointed to find that one of the tunnels under the house had no hatch into the room. All crawl spaces are provided not as alternative entry points but as a means of completion by simply extending across the roof, which can be completed more quickly.
A more positive shift can be found in enemy positioning, and the challenge of encountering Mirage's overly simplistic arrangements increases. I got caught a few times through overlapping vision cones and patrols, and the resulting high-alert state seemed to keep defenders in their pursuit of you longer than in previous games. However, simply hiding on rooftops and using Eagle Vision to track enemies does seem to make it easy to avoid them, at least on the default difficulty.
The emphasis on evaluation and planning is increased and welcomed as there is better guard placement. Gone are the drone birds from recent games, replaced by a cluttered zoom that means scouting and marking enemies can only be done from your own line of sight. It's a nice change, forcing you to explore an area on foot and spend more time considering the angle of your approach. But when it came time to execute the plan, things went back to being very familiar.
Naoe's Toolbelt uses Kunai throwing knives for insta-kill head avatars and smoke bombs to cover attacks and escape, both of which are necessary but the vanilla stealth tool. Relocating guards is done by luring them to your location, so to speak, either by baiting them with a bait, or by baiting them to a specific spot with a bell. There are obvious combos, such as encouraging guards to shoot explosive barrels and then detonate them with throwing knives. But beyond that, there doesn't seem to be any more experimental or exciting canvases, at least in this demo.
Shadows seems to rely on a lean and familiar set of abilities, at least as far as stealth is concerned. Even options that initially seem fresh are repackaged tools from the past. You can call in an allied brawler to charge up at a designated target, which acts as both a distraction and a way to remotely eliminate enemies, but it's really just a thematic departure from the berserker darts that have appeared in many previous Creed games.
Naoe does have a detailed skill tree that allows you to build and hone your abilities beyond these standard tools. But all the exciting options are combat-focused, like an elaborate nine-hit guard breaker, or standing out with a kick-shooting finisher. When it comes to stealth, the most exotic option I can find is the ability to slow down time for a few seconds. As far as this demo was willing to show me, there was nothing about traps, disguises, or other more advanced stealth ideas. Perhaps the change of seasons, which I haven't experienced yet and is promised to drastically alter the landscape, is where Shadows' more interesting stealth challenges come in.
Instead, the toughest challenges I faced were direct conflicts. Shadows effectively has two combat systems. Yasuke's feels like a direct continuation of Valhalla, but tuned to be significantly Swifter and more tactical. I enjoyed it very much, at least as far as I know, and in the limited time I had, I was like him. Naoe, meanwhile, is far less powerful than her samurai counterpart and therefore deals more damage and cannot be effectively blocked. This forces her fighting style to prioritize dodging and staying agile. I really like the concept driving this – each character offers a distinctly different version of the same experience – but on the battlefield, I found myself feeling frustrated. Playing as Naoe, it felt like the combat was at a different pace than the attack animations, so I was constantly tripping over awkward dodges and parry windows.
For the most part, the brutal punishment imposed by combat forced me to take stealth seriously. It's the classic carrot versus stick thing, and the stick that works. I was less than enthusiastic about my pure stealth gameplay, which was derailed by mandatory bosses with huge health bars. I'd like to see these bosses reconfigured as stealth-centric assassination challenges while playing as Naoe, in the mold of Assassin's Creed Unity's core missions. Instead, I was forced to defeat my enemies in one-on-one duels that were clearly meant to fulfill the samurai fantasy aspect of Shauswos' devotion. I appreciate that Shadows always gives you the option to switch to Yasuke (it even prompted me to go before one of the battles), but choosing an invisible character and then being forced into direct combat does feel like your decision is invalidated. Maybe, with a few hours of practice and combat adjustments before release, a duel with Naoe won't feel like a punishment.
After three hours of play, I'm pretty confident in saying that Assassin's Creed Shadows will be the best stealth experience of the series' RPG era. Having a character and kit fully dedicated to this approach shows that Ubisoft is taking a fundamental part of the franchise seriously for the first time in years. But, as dedicated fans know, stealth never actually goes away – it's just overshadowed by action. Shadows brought invisibility gradually into the spotlight. But just because stealth has prominence now doesn't mean it's undergoing any meaningful changes. For all the studio's talk about a Splinter Cell-like detection system, Shadows feels like Assassin's Creed returning to business as usual rather than exploring a new, more cunning frontier. For many who were exhausted by Spartan and Viking rule, this might have been enough. But if what I'm playing is representative of the Shadows as a whole, I think Ubisoft missed a huge opportunity to capitalize on the advanced stealth potential of one of the most famous covert assassin groups in history.
Matt Purslow is IGN's senior features editor.
