Assassin's Creed: Shadows - genuinely the worst AC game?
I mentioned in my recent mini-posts post that I'd been playing AC: Shadows, and that I really didn't like it from the first few hours. Well, I've played another 6 or so hours and I'm done with it, it's just a shocking display of unchecked budgets and a complete lack of direction.
More than anything though, it's just incredibly unpleasant to interact with. Every menu has these long flourishes, you're expected to compare trousers constantly but the default pause menu is the map, so you have to tab to the inventory every time.
Gear is just relentlessly thrown in your face, but getting it out of your inventory is genuinely soul-crushing, with a 2s long "ITEM STORED/DISMANTLED/YEETED" animation every single time to make sure you know the game did what you asked using the buttons they provided.
The first "legendary" outfit I got looked really cool but had a """bonus""" ability that made me through a kunai at the nearest enemy anytime I did a stealth kill - which made stealth really fucking hard? For my shinobi????
I had to kill a guy who had 4 health segments, but my assassinations only do 3 segments of damage - then I realised I had a different hat that gives me +1 segments on all assassinations... so I stood in front of him, switched hats, then stabbed him and his friend in the neck.
I later got into a fight and sure, I know the shinobi isn't meant to be doing pitched battles, but I still expect it to be fun. Not here though.
I'm struggling with the targeting - there's no visual reference for who you're aiming best I can tell? So I'm getting my ass beat. I recognise it's getting away from me, so I try to change over to my smoke bombs for a classic escape.
I dodge and hit L1+DDown to change to smokes, L2 to aim and move the right stick... no movement. I'm still locked on, even when I try to manual aim. I click off, try again, and throw a kunai. I didn't change to smokes? I parry and dodge again, holding L1 and realise I can't change item until I have completely stopped moving. I mash DDown to change, try to throw one aaaaand I'm dead. It's all just so hideously unresponsive.
Oh, and then the game crashed.
But it's not just combat. Walking around - using Hold R3 to activate "Eagle Vision" (not lampshaded with an actual bird in this game, btw, gave up on that one already) feels terrible, the camera always feels like it's looking to the side of what I want, the objective screen is an interesting approach but tracked objectives don't auto-update to the next stage of an objective chain, so I've interacted with that screen more than I have with Yasuke 12 hours in!
The inventory stuff above sucks, but also the whole weapon idea is insane - you have 3 weapons and can only equip 2, but you can swap them mid-combat??? And they have special utility that you need them equipped to use, like special assassination methods!
It's drudgery for the sake of calling it a "mechanic". Oh, we have "loadouts" now, make sure to "share" your "build" on "social media". Great "content" to go with the "weekly objectives". Spend 2 "mastery points" for 2% more damage at night. Do it 2 more times. Now do it for 2% extra armour damage 3 times!
| Obligatory tierlist
I had a quick check and this is the 12th AC game I've played properly (i.e. not just a quick check on an emulator for the DS games), and it's only the 2nd I haven't enjoyed for what it is and finished. The previous was Origins, but I didn't necessarily dislike that game - it was just incredibly dull. It was directionless and empty and there were a bunch of ideas that were clearly there to make the game slower and less refined, to make you play more and conceivably pay more, when Ubisoft were first ramping up that approach to their games.
In between I really enjoyed Odyssey and Valhalla - still pleeeeenty of filler and drudge, but they were games with some fucking ideas - Odyssey was just delightful to explore and navigate even if the quest design was bad, and Valhalla did a lot to streamline and improve the questing! While the exploration became dull again... there's not a lot you can visually do with middle ages England.
AC:Shadows feels like a return to that Origins vapidity. The world is incredibly empty for how beautiful it is, traversal feels terrible considering this is a parkour series at its core, and quests are just... kinda thinly spread around it. But worse than Origins, it just plays like shit! And this is on the 4th iteration of this "genre" of AC game! How do you get worse at this over time???
Shadows feels like a game built from the ground up by people who can only communicate by analogy to games that have made $1B+ dollars. Like with Veilguard all the artists are absolutely killing it here, producing some excellent music and beautiful visuals for a game that barely functions.
I don't understand how anybody with a passion for game design could spend more than the 12 hours I did with it.
It confounds me to see these such resources piled onto this expansive, vapid "content".