AC Shadows was the first AC game that had garnered enough interest in me to check out since I dropped the first game about half way through when it came out back on the 360 almost 20 years ago now. While playing it off the Uplay+ subscription service to beat it within the month, I did mostly enjoy my time with it but could understand how many may have developed open world fatigue from repetitive tasks over the previous entries and felt the ending was bland set up to be sell a real ending as DLC later on. Truly a 7/10 of a game which I think should be respectable but just not for $70 and I think if I didn't play it for $20 I'd probably feel more slighted about it.
Throughout my experience with Shadows a lot of my friends were telling me to just drop it or forget it and play Ghosts of Tsushima now that it had launched on PC. Personally I just don't like the idea of paying for the Sony PC Ports for more than $30 because while the art is timeless they are treated as products and by the time they launch they are old and quickly go on sale and you can find the physical PS5 editions for under $20. I made the exception for The Last of Us Part 2 because after years of internet discourse, I'd really wanted to play it to form my own opinion of the game. I recently was able to find a key for Ghosts of Tsushima from one of the authorized key sale sites for under $30 and picked it up.
After about 5 hours, I think it's an interesting give and take between the two titles. I personally scale games on a binary from toy to art and Ghost of Tsushima is much further on the art side than Shadows. While I think Shadows does a good job with it's characters and the detail of it's beautiful world, there's a level of cinematography and art direction even with the lower fidelity that transcends Ghosts even just that bit ahead of Shadows. For Shadows credit, I think it's just a more mechanically developed game and the higher fidelity adds to it's experience. It could just because I'm very early in Ghosts but I also feel the various weapons in Shadows, the wider array of move sets and varied challenges made playing shadows more mechanically satisfying to play.