Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Shadows arrived with a solid 81 on Metacritic, nothing vaulting it into GOTY contention perhaps, but on par with most AC games, including last time’s Valhalla, which had an 80 and set franchise sales records.

But that’s critics, and who listens to game journalists anymore, am I right?

Well, so far, early reviews of Assassin’s Creed Shadows by users who have bought and are playing the game are positive. This is still early hours, but the scores so far are good and often even higher that critics’, for now:

AC Shadows

Sony

What’s missing are Metacritic user scores, but the platforms above actually require you to own the game, while Metacritic does not, and you can shoot out any number you want. The site makes you wait a few days before posting, but that has not stopped controversial games from being review bombed all the same, and those numbers are often well below other player scores on actual platforms. This is mainly true for “woke”-classified games, which Shadows has been accused of since its announcement. So expect those scores to be lower, almost without question.

The other caveat is yes, it’s still very early, and if you are leaping on getting a new Assassin’s Creed game at launch, you are probably more predisposed to like it at baseline, so the scores may skew somewhat higher initially. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, by comparison, settled at 4.11 on PS5 after 67,000 ratings. We’re at 2,000 for Shadows right now.

The real question is sales. Ubisoft would love this to be a Valhalla-level hit, though some alleged insider reporting says Ubisoft would even be satisfied with something more along the lines of Odyssey.

Shadows seems poised to be at least some level a success between critic scores, these early player reactions and playing it safe with the formula. It’s true that the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard started off similarly in terms of reviews, and ended up being a disappointment, but a chunk of that was that it mixed up the formula a lot, required a ton of previous Dragon Age knowledge and the last game was a full decade ago. Shadows does not have any of that working against it, plus it’s a location that fans have been dying to see for almost 20 years. We’ll keep an eye on how it’s doing, including what playercount data we can see as it launches here.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.