Assassin's Creed Shadows Mac 1.0.35

Shinobi and Samurai in Dual-Monitor Feudal Japan

Editors clocking out for the night and anyone who wants a huge open-world Japan between two monitors. You control Naoe the shinobi and Yasuke the samurai through changing seasons, building a hideout and pulling in allies with real, unique abilities. The environment reacts to what you do, so stealth and brute force both leave a mark.

Built for Apple Silicon with Metal 3 Ray Tracing

Yes, and it was built for it. Apple worked with Ubisoft so the engine leans hard on Metal 3 and Apple silicon. On an M3 or M4 Mac you get hardware-accelerated ray tracing and HDR; on my M4 Mac mini it's tested on macOS Tahoe and holds up. This isn't a port — it's an ARM build from the start.

What Do You Need to Launch It?

macOS Sequoia, an Apple Silicon chip, 16 GB of RAM and a hefty 130 GB of free storage. You also need a Ubisoft account to get past the title screen. No account, no game.

How Do Controls Feel?

Naoe moves fast and light, Yasuke hits like a freight train. The seasonal shifts change how you move and fight, and the hideout gives you a place to test ally abilities and figure out who fits your style. It's a game that rewards switching between the two leads constantly.

Full-Screen Immersion Meets macOS Game Mode

This isn't the kind of game you alt-tab out of to check Slack — it demands the full screen and a couple of hours. But macOS Sequoia handles it well under the hood. Game Mode kicks in automatically, prioritizing CPU and GPU for the app and cutting Bluetooth latency on a paired DualSense or Xbox controller. If you're screen recording for a reaction video or just clipping a fight that went sideways in the best way, the built-in Game Recording feature (new in Sequoia) lets you grab the last 30 seconds without a separate capture card.

What about space? 130 GB is no joke. Before you even open the disk image, consider offloading your Final Cut libraries and Logic projects to an external SSD. The game won't launch from an external drive officially, but I've seen people redirect their Steam or Mac App Store download location to a fast Thunderbolt enclosure with decent results — just don't expect buttery load times on a spinning disk.

For comms, Discord's native Apple Silicon build runs alongside without tanking the framerate. Party chat through the Mac's built-in mics works fine, but if you're streaming with OBS, close the browser preview and drop the encoder preset to "ultrafast" on Apple VT hardware encoder. The game already pushes the GPU hard; OBS needs its own breathing room.

Stop Playing One Character and Ignoring the Toolkit

Everyone walks into feudal Japan thinking they're playing Ghost of Tsushima again. You're not. The first hour humbles you fast.

Sticking to one character. Naoe and Yasuke aren't skins — they're two halves of a complete toolkit. New players tend to pick a favorite and brute-force every mission. The game punishes that. A fortress with heavy samurai patrols is hell for Yasuke if you don't thin the ranks first with Naoe's grappling hook and rooftop takedowns. Conversely, Naoe melts in open combat against armored generals. Switch before the mission dictates it for you.

Ignoring the hideout entirely. It feels like side content, but it's your engine room. Allies recruited to the hideout unlock passive buffs, new gear, and combat abilities you won't find in the open world. I watched a friend struggle through the mid-game with base-level kunai because he never talked to the blacksmith he recruited three hours earlier. Build the forge. Upgrade the training grounds. The game won't nag you — it just quietly lets you suffer.

Treating scouts as optional. That network of scouts you unlock? Use them before every major infiltration. They mark patrol routes, locate alternate entry points, and sometimes reveal a side objective that changes the story. Skipping the scout step means walking into ambushes blind.

Muscle-memory from other Ubisoft games. The seasonal weather system isn't cosmetic. Winter snow muffles footsteps — great for Naoe, terrible for Yasuke's heavy armor on frozen lakes. Spring rain softens the ground and hides sound. A mission you failed in summer might be trivial in autumn when the foliage provides cover. Check the season before you commit to an approach.

From Rosetta Ports to Native AC Mirage and Beyond

Open-world action on Mac used to mean squinting at a Rosetta-translated port from 2017. That's changed, and Shadows sits alongside a few heavy hitters worth comparing.

Assassin's Creed Mirage. The previous Mac-native AC title is a tighter, smaller game — Baghdad feels intimate compared to feudal Japan. Mirage runs on the same engine base but lacks hardware ray tracing support, so lighting and reflections are flatter. Where Mirage is a focused 20-hour stealth game, Shadows sprawls across 60-plus hours with two protagonists and base-building. Pick Mirage if you want a leaner, more traditional AC experience that won't eat half your SSD.

Lies of P. Totally different genre — a Soulslike — but it's another Metal 3-native Mac title that shows what the hardware can do. Lies of P runs at higher framerates because its environments are smaller and more controlled, but it doesn't push open-world draw distances or dynamic weather. If Shadows is about freedom and exploration, Lies of P is about precision and punishment. Both look stunning on an M4 display, but Shadows is the one you fire up to wander, not to die thirty times in a puppet workshop.

Resident Evil Village (Mac). Capcom's port was the early poster child for Apple silicon gaming. It's still one of the best-looking Mac titles, with ray tracing and HDR on M3/M4 chips. Village is a linear, tightly paced horror game — every room is authored, every encounter scripted. Shadows is the opposite: you make your own stories on a mountainside village raid that goes sideways because a thunderstorm rolled in and the season changed mid-mission. If you want a directed thrill, Village. If you want a world to live in, Shadows.

Rendering Wraps at 9:37 PM, Then Iga Province at 1080p

9:37 PM. Final Cut just finished rendering a three-minute corporate reel. I quit everything, launch Shadows, and let the Ubisoft account sign-in tick over while I grab coffee. The Mac mini is connected to a 4K display at 1080p resolution, low preset, capped at 30 fps. It's not flashy, but it's stable.

I load into the hideout first. The blacksmith has a new tanto blueprint ready — I craft it, slot a poison mod, and assign a newly recruited ronin to the training yard. That ally unlocks a passive that increases Naoe's assassination speed. Three clicks and I'm stronger, no combat required. I glance at the season: late autumn, red maples, dry ground. Good for silent movement.

The map shows a castle town in Iga with a high-value target. I send two scouts ahead. Their report comes back: the daimyo is in the central keep, but a side entrance through the port's fish market is lightly guarded. The front gate is a death sentence — too many samurai. I mark the market entrance and switch to Naoe.

I fast-travel to a viewpoint outside the town walls. The weather shifts — light rain starts, which softens my footsteps. I grapple up the outer wall, pick off two archers silently, and drop into the market. The fish stalls provide cover as I weave toward the keep. A patrol turns the corner; I duck into a doorway, wait three seconds, and move. The AI is sharper than previous AC games — guards notice disturbed objects and missing allies — so I resist the urge to sprint.

Inside the keep, the target is surrounded. I swap to Yasuke. The door bursts open, armor crashes through the room, and the daimyo goes down in four heavy swings. Chaos erupts. I switch back to Naoe mid-fight, smoke-bomb the courtyard, and climb out through the rafters. Exactly the kind of messy, improvised extraction that makes the dual-character system sing.

I ride back to the hideout as snow starts to fall. The season changes. Next session, everything will be different — and that's exactly why I'll open it again tomorrow.

• macOS 15 Sequoia or later
• Apple Silicon Mac
• 16 GB RAM
• 130 GB available storage
• Ubisoft account required to launch