The grappling hook is not usable while you are in combat. That's very unfortunate because using it to escape seems like a logical use case, but that's literally not possible until you are no longer in combat.

youtu.be/yOoJ-l1LCZY?...

Parkour is unfortunately as janky as Valhalla. This clip is from early on in the demo where I was trying if Naoe can climb things Yasuke can't and I genuinely found it hard to tell if it doesn't work because it's janky or if it doesn't work because it's not supposed to.

youtu.be/RjKt4O0XfNs

There are enemies that have too much health to be assassinated but you can still knock them out.

youtu.be/RQP9t4n55bY

The special Katana assassination is pretty fun. It does not alert enemies, you can be gone by the time anyone realises what just happened.

youtu.be/5_FURBSgWm8

You can deescalate when guards get suspicious of you. This is a nice addition but it's strange that Shadows has no other social stealth mechanics that would make this feature more interesting, like notoriety or crowd blending.

youtu.be/DBMnBgVYZRo

Combat is really fun. It feels relatively grounded, lethal and fast. Naoe's Tanto especially was my favourite.

youtu.be/pTtAeXUD_F0

Unfortunately I'm disappointed with the grappling hook. It's very hard to predict if it'll work or not, it's basically a less reliable version of the one in AC Syndicate.

youtu.be/GXaMhLhb6-4

youtu.be/G4w7D424JFk

This is a new hiding spot type. It's functionally the same as these small sheds from AC4 and I really like the animation

And this is only the outward facing changes, too. If they're already making external changes like this, what they did internally is already 10x worse.