Assassin’s Creed Shadows forgets to make learning history fun

While it’s not quite as good as Ubisoft’s roast of the world’s most pathetic man, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is still a fun time. Clearing out castles as a neck-slitting shinobi is bloody brilliant now that this series, just 300 games in, has finally figured out how to let you smoothly climb down a building. What a nice change from throwing you in a random direction and alerting every guard within fifty miles.

Shadows has also beautifully recreated 16th century Japan at an astonishing level of detail. And then, because this is Ubisoft, it’s put glowing floating orbs in all the important places. Scan one of those orbs and it’ll unlock a page in your codex which tells you more about the history of said place. Nice idea! But goodness me, look at the utter state of this:

That massive slab of bone-dry text is almost as long as the terms and conditions I pretended to read when I booted up the game, and even that had more frequent paragraph breaks in it. My eyes can’t help skimming through this dull word avalanche while my thumbs beg me to abandon this screen and get back to the stabbing funtimes.

That’s a real shame, because your knowledge of feudal Japan is going to drastically affect how much you appreciate what Ubisoft have achieved here. I myself watched one episode of Shogun and then my Disney Plus subscription expired. Call me naive, but I honestly didn’t think this would be a problem. Because previous Creeds have been more than happy to be parkour-murder playgrounds that also double as mini history lessons. That’s how I know that Leonardo Da Vinci once invented a gun that helped an assassin kill the pope.

OK, so maybe a little creative liberty has been taken. But these games used to nicely split the difference by having preposterous alt-history missions, and then a codex that essentially told you the truth. When you meet Charles Dickens in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, you team up with him to try and solve paranormal mysteries Scooby Doo-style. But if you open up his codex entry, all that nonsense is replaced with a great factual summary of the actual man’s life:

Fun facts! Good gags! Frikkin’ frequent paragraph breaks! These codex entries are written in-character by Shaun Hastings, the cynical assassin played by Danny Wallace from Assassin’s Creed 2 onwards. His voice is sorely missed in Shadows, a game that takes itself way too seriously and often lacks much character at all. Sincerity is nice and I don’t need everyone to be a tedious Marvel-wannabe quipping machine, but was it really necessary to completely throw the giggling baby out with the comedy bathwater?

I’d settle for the game bothering to clue me into who its major historical cameos actually are. Shadows is a huge game with a massive cast, and yet bizarrely you won’t find pages about any of the characters in your codex, fictional or otherwise. Who is Hattori Hanzō, and why doesn’t the game care to explain why I should be so impressed when he shows up? I’m left with some vague name recognition and a much stronger sense that I’m missing out.

Apologies to all the weebs reading this who just spat bubble tea all over their screens when I admitted to being a Hanzō noob. Fortunately, I was able to remedy my ignorance by finding out loads about him from Echoes of History, Ubisoft’s official Assassin’s Creed podcast. Each episode deep dives into the historical settings of the games and is full of great trivia. So why isn’t there more of this in Shadows?

Even being able to listen to this podcast in-game would be a good addition, as Shadows loves a long commute through pretty but repetitive forests. Perhaps you’re clutching your pearls and shrieking ‘not the precious immersion!’ at the idea of me enjoying a podcast on horseback in the year 1579. But we’re actually in the animus in the flawless year 2025, remember?

Besides, I’m not getting immersed anyway, because I’m struggling to digest the codex entries about the places I’m riding to, and don’t know the historical significance of the people I’m meeting when I get there. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is still a good stealth sandbox. I just hope this series’ underrated side hustle as silly but infectiously enthusiastic history teacher hasn’t become ancient history too.