Reviews

I want to preface this by saying that I love Hollow Knight. It's probably my favorite game of all time, and I have done virtually everything it has to offer. With that said, I can't actually suggest it to the majority of people unless they were really wanting to try it anyway. I find SS fun in the same way I can find a Marvel movie fun, but I wouldn’t tell people to watch Marvel movies. I have so many hours on it bc I take my time and I'm trying to 100%. But anyway, let’s start. 

In Silksong, you take more damage because lore-wise, Hornet was apparently very frail before she got all her powerups and training. However, this is not offset by more damage like most glass cannon setups. Normal enemies take 4-6 hits to kill, and needle upgrades and health upgrades are incredibly sparse. You’re just genuinely weaker in every ways. Every enemy flies, and does so at a very awkward height where they're too high to hit with your needle but too low so if you jump up, you jump into them. Arenas are a lot smaller so you can't pogo on them well. 

EVERYTHING costs rosaries and a lot of tools/powerups are bought in shops rather than found in exploration. I was incredibly choosy with what I bought and I only lost maybe 300 rosaries total to dying in my playthrough, but I was still constantly poor. I had to spend 80% of Act 2 without any tools because you start going through shards quick. You can get more shards easily without grinding, but guess what you have to do? Buy them with rosaries! The Architect's crest, which lets you build more tools on the fly, feels super useless since it costs silk AND shards, and the game does not give you nearly enough shards for this crest to be useful. There's no chests full of goodies after boss fights and rosary/shard deposits are few and far between. 

The service where you can string rosaries together feels useless. Every time I was at a point where I was actually at a risk of losing a lot, I was usually very far away from a shop or far from a fast travel that could get me to a shop to string the beads. I guess you're supposed to string them every time you pass a shop, but whenever I was near one, I usually wanted to SPEND my rosaries because it's a SHOP where you BUY things. Feels like stringing would be more useful if stringing stations were at select benches instead, rather than shops. 

Agility. Oh man, this is going to be controversial but I don't feel agile in this game. If anything I felt more agile in Hollow Knight. I had a dash with i-frames in that game, I had a dive, I had upgrades that could extend my nail to make pogoing easier. I was smaller and I had big, wide, tall arenas where I can do all sorts of stuff in the air. None of those things are in Silksong. The glide is useless in 99.9% of the fights, the running is virtually useless in fights, and whenever I try to be cool and do some acrobatic maneuvers in the air, I just backflip into the enemy or the enemy dashes away from me. I have been having infinitely more success just poking with the needle and staying on the ground in literally every single fight than trying to take advantage of the so-called "better agility" Silksong advertises itself with. While this is definitely a skill issue on my part, I’d argue the game doesn’t teach you well enough at how to become skilled. and imo, the clawline should be given to you MUCH earlier. 

As for deliveries, even with the updates I can get more rosaries in less time if I just stay and slap enemies in Choral Chamber rooms, and I don't have to worry about trying not to get hit. 

The challenge rooms don’t feel well-integrated into the world. Why are there so many random rooms that suddenly lock and a bunch of bugs ambush you? If it was just in Hunter’s March it would make more sense (since it has ANTS), and it would give the area a unique feature. But the fact there everywhere just makes it feel like the game shouting “look look! Combat! Here’s your Hard Enemies!” Also, your ghost still spawns trapped inside the rooms unless you die towards the edge. 

The silk system feels sub-optimal. The game throws out spool upgrades like candy but there’s very few ways to get silk faster, and they always give like the tiniest bit. And imo the natural silk regeneration buffs need to be given earlier on. I was stuck in Mount Fay for a while because I kept dying, and every time I died I would have to farm silk from an enemy for clawline before I could start climbing again, because while your silk does naturally regenerate, it takes a second to do so, and that second when I couldn't get clawline out fast enough kept making me miss jumps during the platforming segments. 

This isn't related to the gameplay, but the bosses and NPCS feel so...flat in Silksong lore-wise. Most of the bosses are just kinda "what if this big random flying bug was blocking your way for no reason?" and most of the npcs are just "what if this pilgrim just wanted to blabber at you or sell you something." Hollow Knight's worldbuilding, bosses, and npcs, felt tight and well-developed. There were less NPCs, but they were better connected with each other. Sly the shopkeeper knew the npcs that taught you new nail arts, iselda the shopkeeper knew the mapmaker. The Last Stag was your friend. You save Zote and “fight” him, then Bretta starts crushing on him and he gets his actual boss fight. Quirrel was the student of a Dreamer, and Hornet was the daughter of a dreamer. All the characters were familiar with this close-knit kingdom. But in Silksong, nobody seems to be familiar with anybody except for a few npcs that make you search for their oneliner buddy, after which nothing else happens except maybe a new shop is opened. In Hollow Knight, NPCs traveled through the world in a way that made sense and interacted with you a lot. Meanwhile in Silksong, you run into Grindle the master thief a couple of times, but then he just kinda randomly goes back into his hideout in the middle of nowhere on the Blasted Steps and doesn't talk about it, and he even acts like he’s never met you before. Even without comparing it to Hollow Knight, the world and its characters feel less dynamic. I think a big part of this is because many SS NPCS are introduced to you a lot later, in HK you met most of them pretty close to the beginning of the game so you had many more dialogues with them throughout. 

Silksong feels like the opposite of Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight is kind of slow during beginning but starts picking up after that, while silksong is very enjoyable in the beginning but starts becoming frustrating once you hit Greymoor. Nothing in Silksong feels rewarding. Every time I completed a hard boss, instead of thinking, “wow, that was fun! And I became better at the game too!" I think, "ok, another boss checked off. I really bummed through that one, huh...and no reward again." 

All in all, SS is a robust game for a very specific niche, but I would not recommendable it to most people, including most Hollow Knight fans. 

Side note, the HK fanbase has become annoying as all hell and can't handle any criticism towards their game. They incorrectly mention "developer's vision" when players really just want a more forgiving economy and slightly less health damage. I don't know how to explain to them that developers sacrifice a little bit of their "vision" ANY time they develop a game for the public. Games are constantly changing through development, and developers ALWAYS include changes that they think would better benefit their intended playerbase. Games are NEVER published as the exact "developer's vision" or exactly what the developers want. The assumption that Team Cherry never made any change they didn't "want" to their games is absurd.

TLDR; ToF excels at few and is bad at many. *I do not believe that powercreep was what killed the game,* since it started dying even before powercreep, and other games have bad powercreep and are still popular (like HSR). What is killing it is lack of polish and devs that don’t understand how small issues can break your game if they’re compounded. The warp server changes little and the issues that casual players feel the most are still there. Bc of this, ToF will continue to be unable to hook in new players.

So, I played at release, ~200 hours over a few months. But stopped playing bc of lack of polish. Imagine my surprise when they announced a soft reboot/global warp server, and none of these issues were fixed. This game died from a thousand papercuts when it first came out, and it’ll happen again. 

First, both systems are unoptimized. No dedicated keybinds for many of the buttons on pc, and all of the tutorials say “tap.” But the mobile port looks very bad. 

ENG voice acting is awful, and I heard it doesn’t improve. It’s clear the VAs aren’t shown what’s happening on screen. Sometimes delivery *is* good emotionally, but it doesn’t *match* what’s happening in the scene (most apparent with fight scenes). I don’t think they give the lines of the other char they’re supposed to be talking to, either, bc some back and forth dialogue just sounds super stiff/repetitive. One char is just text-to-speech. While I could tell ppl to use the CN/JP voice acting, the small text sometimes overlaps w/ each other so it’s unreadable, and gets cut off if it’s too long, so if you care about the story then ENG va is kinda required. 

Now I actually think the worldbuilding is strong compared to other gachas. But not how it’s presented, and that’s the snake eating its own tail. Bc the story is presented so poorly, ppl stopped caring about it, and bc existing players don’t care about the story anymore, Hotta doesn’t bother trying to make the story better. Thus, new players who actually DO care about story are turned off from the game. Rinse and repeat, and the story will never improve. Same thing with the ENG voice acting. 

Early character design was bad. It did that mecha sci-fi thing where chars just have mishmashed pieces of plastic on them and weird metal abs. Going from genshin—which basically *mastered* gacha char color palettes, accessories, and silhouette harmony—to ToF was painful. They’ve improved, but keep in mind that the early chars will be eyesores. There’s also legitimately zero dark-skinned chars. Even Genshin has a few. 

Char integration in the story is bad. Now that gacha is gone, maybe they’re trying to go for a Warframe-like story system, where side quests are where you learn about playable chars’ lore, and their involvement in the main story is kept to a minimum. This is fine, but it sticks out like a sore thumb for ToF’s genre (anime rpg). It’s just so hard to feel connected to any of the chars. Ex: the first playable char you meet in the main story (NOT counting Shirli bc she wasn’t playable at game release) was King, and his introduction doesn’t do him justice. He’s the announcer for a fight ring, and his only purpose is to explain the rules and who your opponents are. After this 1 minute of talking he never appears again. Instead of only making him the announcer, they should have also made him your final opponent, giving a story twist and making him look cooler. 

UI is still bad. You have to navigate through like three menus just to fish, the menu with all your options still looks bad even with the redesign. The buttons are in groups, except the group labels are tiny and tucked in all the way to the right of the menu. These labels don’t pop out and your eyes have to actively be searching for them. Settings is still disorganized and no borders/containers dividing each setting. After months I still didn’t understand how most of the menus worked/what they did. Maps for some areas are unreadable bc they don’t show elevation well. It’s worse when places overlap, so you end up tracking a quest and it’ll be miles above you with no obvious route to get to it. Map doesn’t show how things are connected elevation-wise, or where you can teleport to get to the place you wanna go to. 

Side modes are half-baked. There’s a housing and pet system, except you can’t customize the furniture in your house, nor can you interact with your pet beyond putting food in its bowl. It can’t follow you, can’t roam around the house, and will leave if you forget to feed it. Which, since you can’t do much with it, you will probably forget it exists. There’s also a “custom island” system in the gacha server, sort of like Genshin’s housing. Except once again, you can’t actually build any custom buildings/furniture. It’s more of a town idle game where you build a chosen set of uncustomizable shops in certain spots, and you can get resources from them at intervals. The warp server then removed this island gamemode. 

Sound design is fair except everything sounds slightly muffled/far away from the mic. Bc so many enemies have shields, you hear the same plastic-hitting sound for a while, getting bored. Relatedly, combat stales towards midgame, since so many enemies have shields and just tank your hits. Doing this over and over gets boring, and the visual effects/rewards weren’t enough to keep me hooked. There’s actually a fair amount of depth to combat; there’s a lot of combos each char can thread together. The issue is the content isn’t hard enough to justify doing anything beyond button-mashing, and I don’t really know if the endgame modes have enough depth to make you learn combos instead of simply getting/upgrading better chars. Genshin was similar—it feigned combat depth by putting timers on everything and made you “learn combos” that would kill enemies faster. In reality, it just made you hug the enemy, press the same buttons but faster, and tested how much rng you were willing to put up with. 

Gacha: I might be dumb but the new server still has gacha—it’s just streamlined. You farm rift shards which let you pull for a char/weapon, and the one you get is random. The banners aren’t timed, but rift shards can still be *BOUGHT* with real money. This is literally gacha, and the only gacha they completely removed was for matrixes (genshin artifacts). 

Finally, they removed the daily feature where you could hide a device on the map for resources and other players could steal it. Not a big deal, but it was cute. 

Positives: ToF mastered *scale.* Every environment truly feels vast, like you *are* exploring an unknown world, but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and not too empty it’s underwhelming. This is a very hard thing to get right, and even though Genshin/WuWa/BotW does this very well, there are many times in these games where areas feel smaller than they should be (like Genshin relies a lot on the same lighting tricks to give the *illusion* of far-ness). But I have never experienced this in ToF, and everything feels *vast,* without your char feeling small/invisible. When you start approaching Mirroria, you can’t help but stop and marvel at how you *are* actually stepping into a giant, floating city that feels size-accurate to when you’re also in the city itself. I don’t doubt other regions look equally as amazing. 

Worldbuilding. I actually think the worldbuilding is the best out of any gacha. It has a lot of outer space nonsense, but doesn’t have so many roaming parts that it becomes hard to follow (like HSR). It deals with a post-apocalyptic world, but the world does not look bleak or dreary. It’s similar to BotW in that it’s bright and beautiful, which actually makes you want to explore rather than creep around in a dark, broken environment. There’s a sense of emptiness to it, like after the disaster, nature reclaimed what were once civilizations. Ppl still live worrying about radiation and lack of resources, but everyone did their best to makeshift and go on with their lives. There’s a sense of hope and renewal that most similar games don’t have. 

Assassin's Creed Shadows is simply the best entry since Origins – and for me, it even surpasses Origins in some aspects. The story captivated me completely, the characters became virtual friends, and the gameplay is exceptional. Switching from Naoe's precise stealth infiltration to Yasuke's brutal brute force is a rare freedom, brilliantly executed. Ubisoft listened to fans, respected history, polished the writing, and delivered a finished game with no major bugs and top-tier optimisation. The historical reconstruction is a genuine, engaging lesson – you learn without realising it. The technical achievement is breathtaking: graphics, dynamic weather, lighting, animations, cherry blossom petals floating in the air, fireflies in the marshes – every detail feels refined. The soundtrack, composed by Japanese composers, is memorable. I laughed, I cried, I shouted with joy after beating a particularly tough boss. Replayability is huge (side quests, challenges, lore collectibles). Only minor flaws: a few rare visual bugs, enemy AI occasionally a bit naive in stealth mode, and a crafting system that could be deeper. But none of this spoils the experience. If you enjoy stealth action, historical narratives, or simply great adventure games, go for it. It's a 10/10 masterpiece, my new favourite, and I'll be playing it again and again. Full French review: https://rogueh24.fr/test-du-jeu-assassins-creed-shadows/