Accessibility Review: Assassin’s Creed Shadows – PS5
The most accessible Assassin’s Creed yet and the best in many years
In just a couple of days, on March 20, Ubisoft will release Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the latest entry in this legendary action series spanning hundreds of years of history. We received the game for review over a week ago and have been playing it since, preparing this article for when the embargo lifts today.
Before going blind, I played every Assassin’s Creed title, starting with the first one. A lot of time has passed since then – I became totally blind, and my hopes of traveling the world again as a righteous assassin were smothered in their cradle by the lack of well-implemented accessibility features for blind players.
Story & Gameplay
In recent years, however, the gaming industry has made long strides toward inclusivity. Ubisoft has been one of the developers pushing forward in this endeavor, and with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I was finally able to journey to Japan, strap on the Hidden Blade, and strike once again unseen – but this time, without seeing, from the shadows. The story and dual protagonists in Assassin’s Creed Shadows follow the intertwined stories of Naoe, an adept shinobi Assassin from Iga Province, and Yasuke, the powerful African samurai of historical legend. Set during the turbulent late Sengoku period, their remarkable journey will shape the future of Japan.
We decide whether to play as a shinobi or a samurai, as the game encourages us to master complementary playstyles. Each protagonist has their own progression, stats, skills, and gear.
As the quick-witted and agile Naoe we can use noise, light, and shadows to evade detection. Enemies respond dynamically to changing environments, so tools like kunai, shuriken, and smoke bombs are essential. With a grappling hook and parkour skills, infiltrating enemy bases feels seamless, and the Hidden Blade remains the ultimate and favorite tool of silent execution.
Meanwhile, Yasuke, the charismatic samurai, offers a more direct combat approach. His brutal precision and power make every strike feel impactful, whether using a katana, kanabo, bow, naginata, or other weapons. With the right mastery of attack, block, and parry mechanics, he can stand against any foe.
Both characters are enjoyable to play, and switching between them throughout the story adds variety and depth to the experience.
Accessibility
If you’re looking for a review focusing on graphics, I politely suggest checking out coverage from other journalists. I will not do a deep dive into visuals or other things, but I can tell you that Alina likes the way the game looks on the PS5 Pro.
This article is all about accessibility and my experience as a totally blind player.
Ubisoft has done a great job implementing accessibility features into Assassin’s Creed Shadows. While there are a few hits and misses, this is by far the most accessible Assassin’s Creed game to date. The latest entry introduces a robust set of accessibility options across visual, audio, navigation, controls, and gameplay elements.
- Visual accessibility: players with blindness or color vision deficiencies can adjust key gameplay elements using preset color modifications. Screen narration provides audio feedback for most menu items, HUD modules, and time-sensitive elements.
- HUD customization: players can toggle interface elements on or off individually or all at once, adjust opacity, resize text and icons, and add backgrounds for better readability. Screen shake can be disabled to reduce motion sickness.
- Improved subtitles & captions: enhanced color customization, speaker indicators, and emotional context make dialogue easier to understand. Gameplay captions identify key environmental sounds and point to their sources.
- Audio accessibility: cinematics now feature audio descriptions, offering detailed narration of on-screen action. New audio cues and an audio glossary introduce sounds that assist with navigation and pathfinding. Separate audio sliders allow players to fine-tune volume levels.
- Navigation & gameplay guided mode: simplifies exploration, streamlining mechanics so players don’t get lost or overwhelmed.
- Tutorials & conversation log: a dedicated tutorial section in the Codex allows players to revisit instructions, while menu tutorials highlight new features. A conversation log tracks all in-game dialogue for easy review.
- Flexible controls: full button remapping, customizable input interactions, and support for multiple input devices, including controllers, keyboard/mouse, and hybrid setups.
- Combat & difficulty customization: separate difficulty settings for stealth and combat allow players to tailor their experience. Melee Attack Mode simplifies combat by reducing complex inputs to a single button press.
- QTE & aim assistance options: Quick Time Events (QTEs) can be adjusted or skipped entirely. Aim Assistance offers four levels, from no assistance to full aim lock.
- Auto-movement & navigation assist: double-tapping the X button enables automatic forward movement. Combined with narrated navigation assistance, this allows blind players to move toward the next checkpoint with ease.
Despite the impressive accessibility efforts, some issues still need to be addressed:
- Missing narration for objectives: in some instances, the distance to the objective isn’t narrated by text-to-speech, even though sighted players can see it on the map. This may be a bug or a missing feature that needs to be addressed.
- Key events lacking narration: some important details, such as the year in which events take place, are not read aloud all the time.
- Audio description for non-English dialogue: while cinematics have fantastic audio descriptions (likely provided by Descriptive Video Works) and written by the amazing Jennissary. characters speaking in languages like Portuguese should have voice-over translation for full comprehension.
If you are totally blind like me, it will take some time to familiarize yourself with the different options and mechanics, but overall, I believe you’ll enjoy the game. The small issues I encountered can likely be fixed through updates, and I hope Ubisoft prioritizes resolving them.
I love the fact that the screen reader is enabled by default when you boot up the game and that it uses the default voice on our PlayStation console. This is huge and we can even change the speech rate at our convenience. The haptics are awesome and they allow us to really feel like we are on the battlefield chopping heads, riding a horse, storming a castle and striking from the shadows.
From my time with the game I can see climbing towers as a huge problem for totally blind players because the waypoint is just on top from what I can figure, so an option to automatically climb a tower when you are at its base could be very helpful for us or at least Checkpoints or sound cues that give us step-by-step navigation.
Of course, I continue to urge accessibility professionals to use sound cues for objectives and also to include an option to turn the camera towards the current objective by pressing or holding a button. AC Shadows has a golden path that we can enable with the left D-pad, but the camera doesn’t turn towards that in my experience, which is disappointing.
I believe that even better for all developers would be to follow the example set by Gaming Industry veteran studio Rockstar Games when it comes to including an option to skip to the next checkpoint if you fail at the mission again and again. That’s universal design done right!
Final thoughts
Although I make slow progress and haven’t finished the main story yet, I have reported some issues to the accessibility team, I am extremely impressed by the great accessibility work in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
At the end of this review, I want to emphasize that I’ve had a great time with the game. I like the story, the characters, the world, and the satisfying, bloody combat – but most of all, I appreciate the accessibility features. This is by far the best Assassin’s Creed game in many, many years and I’m sure players around the world will love it.
If I manage to finish the game on my own or if Ubisoft releases updates fixing some of the issues, I will update this review.
Regardless, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a great game that makes significant strides in accessibility, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking to immerse themselves in a new adventure in old Japan.
I want to take a moment to sincerely thank Ubisoft for their dedication and hard work, as well as for their ongoing communication with the accessibility and disability communities about the features we can expect in their games. This level of transparency shows that they truly care, and with Assassin’s Creed Shadows shaping up to be the most accessible entry in the series yet, we couldn’t be more excited for this game and for the future.
Review copy provided by Ubisoft.
Victor Dima
