Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ parkour system is what we’ve been waiting for since the first game

If you’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed from day one onwards, you may recall just how enamored the community was with its parkour systems. These developed rather nicely up until Unity, only for subsequent RPG-like releases to downplay parkour as a whole. That’s all changing in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, happily enough.

As someone who fell off the AC ride around the time of Unity‘s release, the fact that the franchise would de-emphasize arguably its most important gameplay system to the degree of Origins and Odyssey caught me off-guard. Ubisoft does appear to agree to some extent, because Assassin’s Creed Shadows is adding complexity and manual movement control back into the mix. Ubisoft has recently published a blog discussing Shadows‘ parkour systems in great depth, and boy howdy will long-time fans of the franchise enjoy it.

Parkour is better than ever in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

In the broadest sense possible, Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ parkour mechanics are seemingly going to be deeper and more engaging than ever before. To begin with, we’ve got a frankly surprising list of moves to choose from:

• Parkour Up
• Parkour Down
• Recovery Roll
• Hard Drops
• Climb-Downs
• Sprint Dodge / Dive Roll
• Automated Passover / Vaulting
• Knee Slide
• Frontal Dive
• Wall-Run
• Grapple Hook
• Stance Dodges
• Ejects
• High Structure Safety
• Prone

The majority of these are rather self-explanatory, but the most important bit by far is that they all flow together and can be triggered at any point if necessary. Obviously, Yasuke is going to be a tad slower and less agile than Naoe, but they’re both very capable runners who can seamlessly transition from one stance into another. It’s just that Yasuke might straight-up barrel through certain objects, whereas Naoe might be able to hop on over or under them.

One of my biggest problems with the recent Assassin’s Creed titles has been that the dodge function had absolutely no use out of combat. Odyssey‘s Kassandra could, for example, relatively gracefully clamber onto stuff if needed, but her dodging was about as graceful as something James Sunderland would do in Silent Hill 2. Assassin’s Creed Shadows solves this issue by making dodges fast, seamless, and snappy. Better yet, they tie into parkour mechanics by opening up, particularly acrobatic leaps and slides.

“In our game, holding down the parkour up button like it’s a gas pedal is not the optimal way to do parkour,” said the game’s associate director Simon Lemay-Comtois. “Discerning which button does what is necessary to maximize a great parkour flow and keep your momentum.” This is particularly important because the traditional “Parkour Up” option will be a loud, high-profile activity that folks won’t enjoy seeing.

So, whereas you could’ve easily just used Parkour Up in ACs prior and slept your way through most parkour sections, Shadows will be far more involved in that respect. Or it should be, at least. All of these functions seem downright excellent on paper, but nothing beats hands-on time when it comes to video games.

In Assassin’s Creed, specifically, movement either clicks or it does not. Ubisoft seems to have figured out the prior games’ biggest problems with parkour well enough, now we just need to see if the new system meshes together the way it should. Be sure to give the official Ubi blog a read, though: there are demonstration videos, and you’re going to want to check those out.