Assassin’s Creed Shadows is good, but not great. Is that enough?

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, out Thursday, is a good Assassin’s Creed game. But “good” may not be good enough to save one of the industry’s biggest companies.

“It’s dire times for Ubisoft,” says Stephen Totilo, founder of the online publication Game File. “They were expecting a Star Wars game last summer to be a huge hit, and it bombed and set the company into crisis mode.”

Ubisoft has since laid off hundreds of workers. Citing a need to refine the game further, it delayed Shadows from November 2024 to February of the following year. Then it pushed the release date again — to March. The company hopes the extra development time will result in a much-needed hit.

“I don’t think Shadows will flop, but I think even a mediocre performance could lead to significant changes at Ubisoft,” adds Totilo. “This is a company doing a lot of emergency cost-cutting — it’s considering different ways to break the company up.”

Meanwhile, controversies loomed over the game. Elon Musk tweeted that “DEI kills art,” about its inclusion of an African samurai in its feudal Japanese setting, presaging a self-proclaimed “anti-woke” boycott campaign. Some Japanese gamers objected to the French studio’s loose interpretation of their country’s history.

But Ubisoft’s biggest hurdle might be fatigue. The original Assassin’s Creed game debuted in 2007 in medieval Jerusalem. Acclaimed sequels followed with settings ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the Golden Age of Piracy. Yet review scores slowly declined over the past decade. Innovators like Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring drew praise precisely because they bucked conventions that Ubisoft had popularized. After 2023’s promising but small-scale Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the franchise still needed a fresh start.

Cut to the quick

So, is Shadows the bold revision I imagined?

No. But it has grown on me.

The game starts strong before taking languid detours. Within the first hour, Shadows deftly introduces its two protagonists. You first play as Yasuke, a towering Black man who attracts stares wherever he goes, as he leaves his Portuguese masters and transforms into an honor-bound samurai dedicated to the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Moments later, you play as Naoe, a young shinobi who desperately fights to save her village from Nobunaga’s forces, only to watch mysterious masked figures kill her father and leave her for dead. Unoriginal as these motivations might be, it’s a faultless setup for a revenge story where a well-placed blade can solve most problems.

But then Shadows turned achingly slow. I puttered around the Japanese countryside for the next eight hours as Naoe. I befriended a dog, meditated to uncover flashback sequences, and attended a tea ceremony steeped in intrigue. The game didn’t feel like it had truly begun until Yasuke reemerged, first as a foe and then as a friend.

While Naoe is a Swiss Army knife, Yasuke is a hammer. The game habituates you to Naoe’s typical Assassin playstyle — aerial parkour, stealthy takedowns, deadly tools, etc. Once you unlock Yasuke, you can swap to him when you’re not around enemies, trading flexibility for sheer power.

At first, I saw little reason to deviate from Naoe. While she’s best suited for most circumstances, one experience taught me the value of strategic switch-ups. I’d infiltrated a castle in Kyoto as Naoe, stalking a corrupt samurai before a wary archer blew my cover. As soldiers flung themselves over my path, I desperately fought and killed two assassination targets. Marked as “wanted” by local authorities, I scrambled to safety with a mostly depleted health bar.

Switching to Yasuke, I returned to the castle. Unable to rely on my usual stealth, I barreled into enemies and shrugged off their blows. Attacks that had nearly crushed me now barely dented my heavy armor. Naoe had already conquered most of the castle; Yasuke finished the job. Rarely had payback felt so sweet.

I still have dozens of hours left with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but moments like that spur me forward. I can’t decide if the game’s fundamentally boring — that, for all its beauty and sleek systems, it’s still a little too safe and tired. But there’s something in the push-and-pull between Naoe and Yasuke’s playstyles that feels just novel enough.

Time will tell if these two heroes are popular enough to rescue the company that spawned them.