Assassin’s Creed Shadows is excellent, but can it save Ubisoft?

It took me all of five minutes with Assassin’s Creed Shadows to get it: We’re so back, y’all.

By “we,” I mean Assassin’s Creed fans, who’ve been pulled in all directions by a series that reinvents itself every few iterations. Based on a three-hour remote preview attended by Polygon last week, playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like playing all of the best parts of the series at once. It has the richly detailed cities of Assassin’s Creed 2 plus the sprawling landmass of Valhalla. It has the pathos and intrigue of Origins plus the dual protagonists of Syndicate. It appears to continue the modern-day storyline, which was largely absent from Mirage, the most recent entry. It is both an RPG and a stealth sim, a slick action game and a stunning piece of historical tourism.

Also: You get a grappling hook.

The game is set in Japan near the end of the 16th century, and you play as two characters. Yasuke is based on the IRL historical figure from the Sengoku period, a Black man who served as a samurai to Oda Nobunaga. The game opens with Yasuke meeting Nobunaga for the first time. Naoe, a fictional character, is the other character you play. Her narrative hews to the Assassin’s Creed blueprint: She’s tasked with protecting an important object, loses said important object, a family member dies in the process, and now she’s off on a tale of vengeance and redemption. (The preview showed Yasuke and Naoe interacting in cinematics but did not reveal how their paths first cross.)

Yasuke is billed as the melee combat-focused character. Indeed, he’s an absolute unit. When you miss three parries in a row playing as Yasuke, you’re fine! Just land a few hits on your enemy and they’re done. And, yes, you can do the Spartan kick from Odyssey. Assassin’s Creed games aren’t exactly revered for their non-stealth combat, but Yasuke handled smoothly and precisely, with a weight to each hit (both those given and received). Still, while fighting as Yasuke, I found myself longing for the deft touch of the hidden blade.

The more typical “Assassin” (or “Hidden One,” if you prefer modern Assassin’s Creed parlance) role is filled by Naoe, who indeed wields that hidden blade. Her grappling hook allows you to swing across gaps or rapidly scale certain structures. You can sneak around ramparts and throw knives, picking off enemies from afar. But Naoe is fragile in combat — to the point where detection more often than not results in a “reload latest save” screen. Whenever I died in combat as Naoe, I yearned for Yasuke’s armor.

You can customize both Yasuke and Naoe by changing their equipment. Gear is categorized via the ubiquitous loot pool rainbow, and different pieces of gear bequeath marginal bonuses to various stats that I likely won’t fully grasp until Shadows comes out. There are additionally half a dozen skill trees for both characters. Throughout the preview, I admittedly didn’t spend much time parsing these various menus. That said, it all scanned to me as intriguingly deep and complex, the sort of number-crunching that could maybe, possibly, even sate a Diablo 4 player.

Instead, I spent more time scanning the map, which appeared massive. Shadows features nine provinces, with each province further broken into a series of small regions.. Much like in Valhalla, the map suggests the levels you should be at before exploring a province. Those shown in the preview spanned from levels 23 to 35, though a representative from Ubisoft said the levels for each province range from 3 to 35, suggesting that the recommended level for each province scales as you play. (Yasuke and Naoe were at level 25 in the preview.)

Zoom in, and you’ll see that the regions of each province are littered with question mark icons, all of which are waypoints for side quests, enemy bases, in-game vendors, and other various optional activities. And you can climb (or grapple up!) the tallest structures to scan your environment for any you may have missed on the map.

From the sliver of Shadows I played, none of these side quests featured the particularly memorable bit characters who were so present in Valhalla, like Axehead or Guy Who Is Definitely One-Punch Man. The variety, instead, came from approaching quests as each of the two different characters. In one mission, I played as Naoe, snuck into an enemy compound to retrieve three items, and parkoured my way out of there at lightspeed when I got discovered after grabbing the third. In another, I played as Yasuke, crashing through an enemy compound like a tank. While I didn’t feel very assassin-y, I’ll say that few things are more satisfying than kicking an enemy through a fence with such ferocity the bamboo snaps like twigs.

Switching between two characters, however, creates some friction. In Shadows, to switch between Yasuke and Naoe, you have to pause the game, open the menu, scroll over to your equipment tab, and hold down the X button for a few seconds. There are also nebulous rules about when you can and cannot do so. From what I could gather, you can switch while standing completely still on flat ground when not in the vicinity of enemies. You can’t, however, switch between characters during combat. (Fair.) You can’t switch while climbing or jumping. (Also fair.) And you can’t switch when you were in combat a few minutes ago but then ran really far away from where enemies last saw you and now you’ve been hiding behind a hay cart waiting for the game to stop registering you as “in combat.” (I’ll let you determine whether that feels fair.)

The lack of flexibility in when you can change characters reads as an intentional design choice, as if Shadows is denying you the chance to have as much fun in the sandbox as you’d like. The titular Assassin’s Creed creed stipulates in part that “everything is permitted.” Well, clearly not everything!

This is ultimately a minor gripe for a game that lets you play the hits and is exceedingly fun while doing so. A telling point: When the preview ended, I wanted to keep playing, to keep probing around its world and seeing what secrets I could discover. This appears to be the Assassin’s Creed game that Assassin’s Creed fans have been asking for since at least 2011.

But Assassin’s Creed Shadows undeniably comes at a critical moment for Ubisoft. Even beyond the unflattering headlines from the past few years — which include allegations of institutional misconduct, departures of high-level staff, and reports of a potential buyout — the publisher hasn’t exactly had a banner console generation. While Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was an obvious high-water mark, it’s been mostly downhill from there.

Far Cry 6 and Assassin’s Creed Mirage are the most recent entries in two of Ubisoft’s flagship series, and the company touted both as sales successes, yet both rank on Metacritic among the lowest-rated mainline games in their series (second-lowest and third-lowest, respectively), suggesting stagnation for two of the company’s tentpoles. Following years of delays, Skull and Bones failed to make a splash. The live-service shooter XDefiant was shut down before it had a chance to prove itself, following in the footsteps of Ubisoft’s similarly short-lived Hyper Scape. The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake was delayed multiple times before getting rebooted internally. The other Prince of Persia game, last year’s The Lost Crown, was genuinely transcendent but missed sales targets by such a margin that Ubisoft scattered its development team to the winds elsewhere inside the company. And most recently, Star Wars Outlaws launched to such tepid critical and commercial reception that Ubisoft itself cited the misfire as a reason for delaying Shadows.

Based on the few hours I’ve played, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a really, really solid game. That’s not the question. The question is if Shadows is solid enough to prop up Ubisoft when it needs it most. Based on the game I saw — a competent entry in a long-running series that nevertheless does little to reinvent the wheel or bring new players into the fold — I’m not entirely convinced it is. But at least Assassin’s Creed fans will get what they’ve been longing for.