It's no secret that Assassin's Creed has been stuck in a bit of a rut for a while. While the series' use of wildly different historical time periods helps add a lot of variety, it's struggled to marry its many disparate systems in a cohesive way. Assassin's Creed Valhalla makes this more obvious than ever with a wealth of issues, chief of which are a bloated open world and meandering story. That's exactly what makes Assassin's Creed Shadows such a pleasant surprise—it feels like a complete course correction.
While there are still some frustrating issues that continue to plague the series, it feels like Shadows might have stumbled onto a winning formula that could carry the series forward—a true fusion of the newer RPG games and the classic Assassin's Creed formula.
