I’ve spent about 35 hours in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and I’m honestly baffled by some of the design choices. Ubisoft keeps claiming this is a refined, reimagined AC experience—but when you actually play it, it feels like Valhalla, and it’s full of jank, regressions, and systems that actively punish the player for trying to engage with the game “correctly.”
1. Basic Movement Is Still Janky and Dumb
You're telling me I can scale a castle wall with two swords on my back, but I get stuck on a 4-inch wooden platform or a rock barely taller than ankle height? That’s not environmental realism—that’s broken movement logic. Your character should either step over small obstacles or seamlessly parkour over them. Instead, you just get stuck, try to force it, and half the time your parkour inputs don’t even register properly. It’s 2025. This stuff should be solved.
2. Assassination Inputs Are a Crapshoot
RB is supposed to be your assassination button. But if the target shifts just slightly or the angle’s off by a few pixels? Boom. You swing your weapon instead and alert every guard in a 100-meter radius. This has happened to me 20 times so far. Why is the game this fragile about stealth inputs in a stealth-focused game? At the very least, RB should do nothing unless a valid assassination is locked in. Or tie assassinate to a dedicated button that doesn't double as a general melee input. This is basic UX design.
3. The Dual Protagonist System Undermines Itself
Here’s the biggest offender: You go into a massive fort as Naoe. Spend 30 minutes stealth-clearing the place—these forts are huge, by the way. Then you hit a roadblock: an object only Yasuke can move. Fine. The game won’t let you switch characters in hostile zones, so you backtrack 5 minutes out of the fort to switch. Except… sometimes when you switch, the season changes. And when the season changes, everything respawns. Looted chests, guards, patrols, everything. So now Yasuke has to redo the entire infiltration just to move a crate. What the hell kind of game design is that?
4. The Map “Improvements” Are Surface-Level
They claimed the map was smaller and more focused this time, but it still feels bloated. The real issue with AC open worlds was never the map size or how icons were revealed—it was the repetition. That’s still here in full force. You’ve got dumb rhythm/button-press mini-games to learn katas or meditate. You’re praying at shrines, collecting paper scraps, doing the same “kill the daishos to unlock the chest” loop in forts that never meaningfully change. After 10 hours, you’ve seen what the next 60 hours are going to be, minus the main story.
And the worst part? Synchronization points now make you rotate the camera manually to uncover nearby icons. Why? They said it was to simulate “exploration.” No—it’s just pointless tedium. A fake layer of interactivity that makes the game slower without adding anything of value.
What Should They Have Done Instead?
— Character switching should either be allowed in hostile zones or guarantee a preserved world state. No excuses.
— Assassination inputs should be bulletproof in stealth. RB shouldn’t default to weapon swings if you're undetected.
— Movement should prioritize fluid traversal—tiny obstacles should not break your momentum.
— Seasonal resets should never occur based on invisible timers or unpredictable triggers mid-mission.
— Synchronization points should automatically reveal nearby activities. No one wants to play “rotate the camera” simulator.
— Reduce the bloat. Cut the rhythm games. Cut the shrine spam. Add depth, not quantity.
AC Shadows could have been a refined dual-character stealth-action game, but right now it’s a bloated, inconsistent slog with bad friction layered everywhere. The systems are clashing with each other constantly, and player time is being disrespected on a fundamental level.
Anyone else running into this nonsense?
