I didn't expect this game to blow me away on PS5 Pro, but it looks unreal

At a certain point, a big enough delay for a major gaming release can set the cat amongst the pigeons a little, and when Ubisoft pushed Assassin's Creed Shadows from late 2024 into 2025, its second prominent delay, it didn't make people all that confident about the game. Still, every game deserves the benefit of the doubt, and Shadows has really impressed me over the couple of weeks I've been able to play it on my PS5 Pro.

In particular, I can't stop getting bowled over by the game's recreation of 16th-century Japan, which is extremely luscious and detailed. If you'd asked me what game would have me drooling over the PS5 Pro's power in the first half of 2025, Shadows wouldn't really have featured in my thinking, but it's definitely the most graphically impressive new game I've tried on the hardware.

Shadows gives you a few options to choose from graphically on the most powerful console going, including a full-fat 30FPS Quality mode with "extended" ray tracing, and a smoother 60FPS Performance mode that dials things back for higher frame rates. As I often do, though, I've opted for a middle option, the 40FPS Balanced mode, which only really shines on a variable refresh rate (VRR) display.

My LG C2 OLED isn't the newest, but it's still one of the best OLED TVs going thanks to its inclusion of VRR and other HDMI 2.1 features – and the game looks impressively smooth in motion using that middle setting. The best part is that this mode still uses that enhanced ray tracing, so every time I walk my character past a puddle in the road I can get distracted by the perfect reflections in it.

Assassin's Creed Shadows: Story Trailer - YouTube

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I knew that I'd probably get lovely detail on characters and buildings, but I didn't expect Shadows to feature so much lush, wooded countryside, or to offer up so many vistas with huge draw distances. It's a massive game, like Valhalla and Odyssey before it (rather than the more digestible Mirage), and much of that sprawl is rural – and gorgeous for it.

Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II before it, I'm finding some of the most impressive stuff is just my PS5 Pro rendering huge forests, with dappled lighting, animals frolicking and streams babbling away. Yeah, the strongholds full of enemies are good, but it's this natural world that really bowls me over.

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If you scroll through the screenshots I've embedded above, which I took with the game's photo mode, you'll see that another major feather in its cap is how variable its conditions are. There's a seasonal system that rotates the world slowly through different times of the year, from hot summers to snowy winters, and you can play through missions at your own pace as this progresses.

This means that your cut-scenes and missions could look meaningfully different compared to other players', tackled in waist-high snow instead of tall grass, for instance. It also makes for lighting conditions that can change hugely, with the in-game weather and time of day layering even more complexity. Nights are extremely dark, and the shadows of the game's title are key for hiding from prying eyes – the final screenshot in the gallery above shows just how atmospheric its candle-lit lanterns can be in the right circumstances.

Gameplay-wise, there's not much huge revolution here, with the same well-trodden path of stealth and action gameplay offering a huge laundry list of tasks to complete. Still, I'm hoovering it up, and enjoying the fairly straightforward story on offer, too, while its dual-protagonist system is another returning strength from some past titles.

All in all, I can't believe how much I'm enjoying Shadows – and I'm extremely curious to see just how long the game really is. If it can hold my attention through its whole journey, it'll have done very well but, either way, its visual prowess will live long in the memory. It's the biggest pleasant surprise I've had on my PS5 Pro so far.