The Weird Clunky User Experience of Assassin’s Creed Shadows

A decade of quality of life improvements deleted

The world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is fully beautiful, but it’s harder to navigate than those in the last several installments. PS5 Pro screenshot captured by the author.

It took about ten hours for the gameplay in Assassin’s Creed Shadows to click with my brain, and it’s more because of what the game isn’t rather than what it is.

Shadows doesn’t follow the traditional big budget game sequel approach of building and iterating on the title that came before. Instead, it cherry picks design elements from across the whole breadth of the franchise, but that has the unfortunate downside of missing so many little things that made the last few titles pleasant to play. I’m sure this streamlining was pitched internally as a way to reshape the identity of the franchise and get players more engaged with lesser-used systems, but the changes are stark — particularly if you were a big fan of the most recent “RPG trilogy” that ended with Valhalla.

The most obvious change is all over the marketing. Shadows features two playable protagonists with vastly different skill sets in Yasuke and Naoe, but to me it feels like they’re also each just one half of a traditional Assassin’s Creed character. A major element I enjoy about these games is their fluid combination of stealth and action elements into something greater than either component. You can attempt a careful parkour-filled stealth run, and then…