Assassin's Creed Shadows Limited Edition (Exclusive to Amazon.uk) (PS5)

The setting makes this game interesting straight out of the gates. With great scenery, cultural differences handled sympatheticly and a proper engine for this generation. This is a much better creed game than Valhalla. With the promise of future DLC it will be interesting to see if it tops Odyssey.The adventure is packed full of quests and there seems more variety this time around. The little animation touches and differences when you are playing either one of the two main characters is beautiful.I've had a lot of pleasure out of building up my hideout. This brings the joy of the AC Unity base enhancement back. Valhalla never really hit the mark for me with it's attempt.It's collection of weapons and armour are good and gives player choice but they sometimes feel a jumble. Once you find you look and fight style the rest quickly become trash or mon (in game currency). Talking of in game currency, there seems to be a confusion of helix points, mon and resources all admittedly serving different purposes but it gets a bit messy.It's a rock solid game with beautiful visuals and the variety to match. Can't wait to see what the DLCs bring.

As an old gamer with slower reflexes and less nimble fingers this game was mostly playable on Story level. The only issues were with some of the meditation and kata challenges where you need to press specific buttons on the controller against the clock. Some of the complex ones involving quickly pressing more than one button at a time were not possible for me, but this didn’t detract from the game overall which I’ve just completed. The combat was manageable, a bit difficult at times against bosses, some of which took two or three attempts.Overall I give the game 5/5. I’ve played over 200 hours in completing the game and enjoyed most of it. The game still needs a lot of bug fixes and parts of it need polishing where it doesn’t flow very well.I played Naoe for as much of the game as possible, I much prefer her game style rather than the lumbering tank Yasuke. A few parts of the game were a bit clunky where you’d reach a character but they would only talk to Yasuke, so you had to switch character, hold a 20 second conversation then switch character back to Naoe. This was particularly annoying when rescuing someone from a castle. Naoe killed all the soldiers in the castle and went to talk to an injured servant… but they would not talk to her! It wouldn’t even let me change character to Yasuke “in that context”, so Naoe had to leave the damn castle, jumping over the wall, change character outside to lumbering Yasuke, then find a different way back into the castle again. What a clunky pain.The game ended somewhat abruptly, leaving some open questions. Did the guy who took over as the new lord behave or was he too corrupt and evil? Where is Naoe’s mother? Most puzzlingly who was that guy who appeared now and then and offered suggestions as to where to go and who to see? He kept cropping up in the most unexpected places. He even appeared for a split second in a cut-scene at the Silver Queen’s mine. I thought he would turn out to be one of the evil manipulative characters of the game, but remained a mystery.The first part of the game was too linear for my liking, not open world at all, just a series of missions, many of which were related to Naoe’s younger life. Thankfully, the game did open up to open world and pick what missions you want to take and when.The one thing that surprised me most about the game was the huge number of bugs it was released with, despite two delays in release. Some have now been fixed, though I notice some remain even after the third patch.Ones that stick in my mind are:You get to the top of an eagle view point, but sometimes the triumphant music and the automatic full circle turn doesn’t kick in but it still suggests you press L2 and slowly look around. It only partly works and doesn’t flag the point as being reached. You have to climb back down the pinnacle and climb up again, to exactly where you were before, then it may trigger that it has actually been reached.There is a bug with the audio when you use fast travel, there is a split second of sound from a previous scene which plays momentarily.After returning to the guy with all 10 expensive ornaments, he tells you to come back again after you’ve collected them! If you try to talk to him a second time then it registers that you’ve already got them all and the task completes properly.I crashed the game a couple of times while sliding down a steep hill but getting stuck against a tree/rock stopping me sliding further. The sliding sound just continued and it was impossible to get out, so had to reboot the PS5. Another crash happened when I hid under a small bridge and got stuck inside and behind the scenery. Impossible to move out again, so had to reboot.I also crashed the game climbing a ladder inside a castle, normally if you are climbing on the wrong side of a ladder Naoe turns to the other side before reaching the top, but on one occasion she didn’t and got her head stuck in the floor above. Impossible to move in any direction and reboot needed.The multiple assassination bug appears to be fixed now, where you assassinate a sick, coughing person then they got up off the ground alive again. One guy I had to kill three times before he stayed dead.One nasty bug is when comparing the value of your items in the inventory, e.g. the various katas in your possession. They usually show the wrong values against each weapon unless you move over them more than once, which seems to refresh the numbers and their colour.The hideout resources seems to have been badly thought out. By the end of the game I’d amassed enough resources to build 10 complete hideouts. The hideout was completely built far too easily and quickly. The developers also missed a trick here, I fully expected to defend an attack on the hideout at some point but it never happened.I recruited all the allies to the hideout, but they seemed to serve no purpose. I never used their help on any mission, not even sure how to do so. They spent all their time talking and drinking tea at the hideout.Switching Naoe’s weapons was clunky at times. If she did a double assassination it automatically switched to the tanto sword, but switching it back to a kata during the ensuing combat proved very difficult, presses on the “right” button were mostly ignored unless you ran away from combat, found a quiet corner, then pressed the button. Not ideal in the middle of combat.The auto targetting of the throwing knives was poor. If the guy you wanted to hit was next to a flame or fire it insisted on wasting the throw at that, no matter how much you wrestled with the controls to aim at the guy’s head.Some of your best laid plans are for nought. You can really go out of your way to sneak around and behind on a high level enemy, up on a roof or rock ledge, where you can throw a sneaky knife into their head to weaken them before combat… only for a few seconds cut-scene to kick in where Naoe suddenly shouts at the enemy and confronts them head on. So much for the sneak attack.There were too many different characters to remember during the game, sometimes a character would be talking about some Daimo, lord or other and I’d long forgotten who they were. OK I’ll just go and kill them then? On more than one occasion I’d sneaked up behind a character ready to assassinate them only for the “talk” caption to appear… oops, apparently they are an ally/friend.If you roam through the forests to reach a destination, where there are no visible paths anywhere, nor on the map, you can hit an invisible wall. Naoe just runs on the spot and you have to turn back and try to find another way, frustrating if you’ve just spent several minutes going in that direction and clambering up slippy hills with not a path to be seen anywhere.Some of the missions are too tightly choreographed, dictating where you can and can’t go. One in a castle was very frustrating where you had to pick off three assassins disguised as servants and I kept hitting the Animus “end of the world” barrier in virtually every direction going around the castle trying to get to the next assassin. The same problem existed with the mission where you had to play as Yasuke and reach the Templar boss who was recruiting ronin into the templars ranks. It took many attempts just to find a route past/through the ravine it would actually allow me to take, and it was far from obvious.The Animus was underplayed in this game, it served very little purpose, if any, and seemed to be there only for continuity with previous games. Can’t say I missed it.Complaints aside, I paid full price for this game on release and I’m very happy with my purchase. Please keep making more Assassins Creed games! The big plus for me is that it is playable by an old slow gamer with less nimble fingers. Far too many games nowadays are just unplayable and not even worth buying, they are aimed only at young nimble gamers and have no or negligible features for players with even minor disabilities (like old age!) There is nothing so infuriating as having to abandon a game part way in because you can’t get past a particular boss or complete some nimble fingered mini-game.

Pre-ordered this when I first heard about it being developed in June last year. Release was delayed a couple of times but that's not unusual these days. It didn't take too long to install out of the box unlike some games I've had recently that depend on downloading most of the data. Immersive storyline, beautiful graphics - and the changing seasons are a nice touch. I appreciate little things like not being able to sprint through snow and skidding on ice. The last AC game of this level was Valhalla (I've played them all). This has only one map/world, no animals to fight off or kill to upgrade weapons/armour, and it is frustrating when trying to climb things previously scalable in previous games but in this one you just slide down and are forced to go all the way around a mountain trial to get to a view point. There is also not an option of auto-travelling despite there being a trail in front to follow. Not sure why this isn't there as some areas are remote and take ages to get to. However, the diversity between characters - one is slow but strong and uses brute force whilst the other is quick, athletic, stealthy, but not the best when surrounded - so you can choose between them depending on the task/mission. Armour and weapons are beautifuly designed and they've clearly done their research for the samurai era. It'll definitely get a lot of play time and if you enjoyed valhalla I'm certain you'll enjoy this too.