Assassin’s Creed Shadows review: Ninja and Samurai go to war

It’s not often that an A-List game like Assassin’s Creed Shadows arrives on the Mac at the same time as the PC version. And, in fact, Shadows is the first game in the long-running Assassin’s Creed series that has ever been released on the Mac at all (although there have been a couple of mobile games released on the iPad in the past). That makes the release of Shadows a bit of a landmark for Mac gaming, and it’s also a great introduction to the series as Shadows looks like one of the best Assassin’s Creed games of recent years and will be joining our line up of the best games for Mac users.

Shadows makes a break with previous games in the series, moving to Japan for the first time, during a civil war in 1579 as the warlord Oda Nobunaga attempts to conquer and forcibly unite the country’s warring factions. It also allows you to play as two separate characters, each with their own different skills and fighting styles. Naoe is a young girl who is trained as a shinobi (ninja), and specialises in stealth and agility, using weapons such as shuriken (throwing stars) and smoke bombs to mask her movements.

In contrast, there’s also the heavy-hitting Yasuke, an African-born samurai – and an actual historical figure – who is able to block and parry his foes’ attacks and then dice them into blood-spattered pieces with his sword. Thankfully, the game does allow you to tone down the settings for blood and dismemberment, but Shadows is very much an 18-rated game, and not suitable for children.

Initially, Naoe and Yasuke are on opposite sides in the war, but their paths soon cross and they find themselves working together to end the conflict. You switch between the two characters as the game progresses, and their different skills and abilities provide plenty of variety as you take on different quests and attempt to eliminate your opponents. The game does take a little while to get going, as it effectively has two introductions – one for each character – that set the scene for the main conflict in the game, and allow you to get some practice with the different fighting styles of Naoe and Yasuke.

Things soon pick up, though, and Shadows provides plenty of quests and combat to keep you busy. It does have a gloss of role-playing elements, with skill trees that allow you to enhance your fighting abilities, and dialogue choices that provide a degree of freedom and decision-making. But, for the most part, it’s really all about the wall-to-wall combat, with lots of sneaking and parkour-style running and jumping to add variety.

In fact, the game even provides a ‘canon’ mode that lets you skip most of the dialogue and just slice-and-dice your way through the action by eliminating anyone unfortunate enough to stand in your way. There are four difficulty settings available – which will be helpful for Mac users who haven’t played any of the Assassin’s Creed games before – as well as the ability to adjust the way that stealth works within the game, making it harder or easier to sneak past guards and other enemies.

But what most impressed me were the game’s 3D graphics. The graphics during the early cut-scenes were very impressive, with some of the most detailed and photo-realistic effects that I’ve ever seen on a Mac. That happens with many games, though, and when the cut-scenes finish you find that the actual in-game action tends to offer a lower level of visual detail. But, with Shadows, the game just continues smoothly at the end of these cut-scenes and maintains the excellent visual quality throughout the game.

There’s a price to pay here, though, as this level of graphical detail requires a pretty powerful Mac. The Mac App Store states that the game will run on any Mac with macOS 15 and Apple Silicon, including even a basic M1 processor. That may be true, but an M1 or M2 processor will struggle to provide smooth, responsive combat (and there have been complaints to that effect from people who have bought the game on the Mac App Store). The information provided to us by the developers at Ubisoft actually recommends either an M1 Max or M2 Pro as the minimum, and also warns that most MacBook Air models – which don’t offer Pro or Max processors – may not be able to run the game.

I did manage to get a playable 28fps on my MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro chip, when running the game at 1,800×1,169 resolution and using the game’s lowest graphics settings – and even on that setting the graphics still looked pretty darn good. And, on a new Mac mini with M4 Pro I was zooming along at 40fps at 2,048×858 resolution and Medium graphics settings.

The game does have its own built-in benchmarking tool that allows you to experiment with the various – and rather complex – graphics settings, but it’s a shame that there’s no free demo available so that owners of less powerful Mac models could see how well the game runs on their Mac. That’s especially true as the game is so expensive, costing $69.99/£59.99 just for the base game, with some expensive DLC also available. And, at the moment, the Mac version of the game only seems to be available on the Mac App Store, which means that people who have already bought Shadows on Steam or any other online store don’t automatically gain access to the Mac version.

Should You Buy Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

I’m not entirely convinced by the claims that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a true role-playing game, and RPG fans will probably prefer the greater freedom and depth of rivals such as the all-conquering Baldur’s Gate 3. But where Shadows does stand out is with the satisfying and varied combat styles offered by its twin protagonists. And, with its superb graphics, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is perhaps the first game released on the Mac that points towards the next generation of games with almost photo-realistic graphics.