Assassin’s Creed Shadows is, quite frankly, a miraculous game. There are few franchises that have survived multiple crossings to new console generations, but Assassin’s Creed has managed with enthusiasm and aplomb. Not only that, but the franchise remains compelling – and somehow, year on year, it manages to reinvent itself.
This year, that’s largely thanks to a beautiful, well-designed setting, and a cast of characters with tangible, complex goals and personalities that elevate the action. Naoe, whose tale begins the adventure, is an incredibly strong protagonist with a noble conviction and emotional backstory that gives weight to the adventure.
Yasuke, who is arguably a bit underserved by the narrative, still provides layers of warmth and care to counteract Naoe’s harsher resolve. Together, they underpin a tight and drama-charged plot that centres around revenge, against the backdrop of Japan in the 1500s.
Charting the path of Assassin’s Creed Shadows
In centring a young Japanese woman, and a Black man, in this particular story, Ubisoft creates a rich ground for telling a deep tale that touches on subject matter rarely depicted so well in games. Naoe, for her part, is a parable of assumption. As a young woman in a patriarchal society, her talents are often misjudged – and as she’s set on her path of revenge, assumptions allow her to obtain intel, to slip by unnoticed, and eventually, to seek revenge on the people who destroyed her family.
In high society tea ceremonies, Naoe bows and smiles, and plays the pretty, naive tourist. With the information she gathers, she dons a hood to slit the throats of her enemies. Unlike a dozen narratives we can name, Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t attempt to paint Naoe as anything other than what she is. She is not made traditionally masculine or hardboiled to suit a rigid plot. She is smaller, slimmer, and more emotional than her enemies. She lacks their raw power. But in leaning into that, Naoe is a formidable fighter, and one with admirable goals.
Read: WWE 2K25 review – The streak continues
Yasuke, meanwhile, is a Black man in a society unfamiliar with other cultures. His status as an outsider is what eventually leads him into the armies of Oda Nobunaga, as a curiosity. But he refuses to be a curiosity – and in meeting Naoe, he gains a new understanding about the nature of war, where his allegiances lie, and what his true power is. Like Naoe, the game takes a layered approach to his identity, with various questlines exploring his background, his initial mistreatment, and the challenging of assumptions within Japanese society.
As mentioned, Yasuke does get fairly outshined by Naoe, with much of the plot centred on her quest for revenge, but as a secondary protagonist, Yasuke does much to balance the story, and give an alternative perspective of the tumult of the historic events depicted in the game.
His presence also allows for a richness in combat, with both Naoe and Yasuke having distinct combat and exploration styles. As a personal preference, I mostly travelled with Naoe, as she has a slick and fast sword-slinging style, with a specialty in stealth combat and subterfuge. She’s also slightly faster and more nimble than Yasuke, allowing her to reach much higher places more easily.
Yasuke is best used in situations that call for a blockbuster fighter – one who can absorb plenty of damage, and can knock down enemies with big, sweeping hits. Yasuke is naturally slower than Naoe, but can ram his way through particular building structures, and unlike Naoe, he’s not susceptible to killer blows.
With both play styles available throughout the bulk of the adventure – there’s only rarely moments where you’ll have to play one character or the other – Naoe and Yasuke provide choice, and the option to experiment. If you’re struggling to get by with one character, you can switch up your approach, and see if a ground-based (or sky-based) approach suits better.
While we’ve had dual protagonists in Assassin’s Creed before, with Syndicate being a primary example of how well this can work, Shadows takes the all-important step of making Naoe and Yasuke feel genuinely different, in a way that keeps combat fresh, even dozens of hours into its dense revenge plot.
Violence and tranquility
The game’s developers have really nailed that need to keep the game fresh and compelling, even beyond combat, balancing the darkness of the game’s blood-soaked plot with encouragement to sit down and smell the roses, sometimes literally. While the game centres Naoe and Yasuke on their dual quests of revenge and atonement, the game doesn’t push you further and further into its shadows without relent.
Your overarching goal is to kill the members of various criminal organisations, including the powerful members of the Shinbakufu, but these deaths are earned over time, and not before you understand why. Between bloodthirsty missions, you’ll meet the people of the lands through which you travel, and understand exactly how they’ve been impacted by war. You’ll travel through a variety of shrines and temples in disarray, destroyed by war and greed.
In moments that are essential to your progress in combat, you’ll need to take time to pray at these shrines and temples, and to recover lost artefacts from them. You’ll need to sit down and observe the wildlife in areas around you, to see how they interact with the world.
Even as you conquer a circle of evil, bringing death in your wake, the game encourages you to understand and study life, and to wield your knowledge of this world to bring meaning to your kills. In fact, knowledge is essential for levelling up in the game. You can’t become significantly more powerful without unlocking certain knowledge tiers, earned by studying and being in the game’s world.
That pairing is what makes Assassin’s Creed Shadows such a layered game. At the end of the day, it’s a game about killing. But here, death and beauty are linked – and the act of killing is given a gravity that must be clearly understood. It’s not killing for the sake of killing, and while past games have tried the same tact in their depictions of death, the approach of Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels far more mature and interesting.
It focuses not only on death, but what killing means. How it impacts the soul. Whether revenge truly feels worthwhile, and whether a more temperate hand is needed. Naoe and Yasuke both contribute to this exploration, guided by their own philosophies, and their life experiences. Every time you land a killing blow, with either of them, you must think deeply about what it means for you, as a person, as a player.
The game’s storytelling becomes impactful for this reason, as guided by deft hands. While not everything in the game works as well as this – it feels high time to do away with the Animus framework, and it’s worth noting the game lacks visual polish in many areas – on the strength of its narrative, and the strengths of Naoe and Yasuke, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a phenomenal achievement.
It’s an Assassin’s Creed game that grapples very well with its own nature, expanding the franchise in a new direction, with a new setting that brims with beautiful sights, and layers upon layers of complexity. Even after two decades in the sun, Assassin’s Creed Shadows proves there’s still many rich stories to tell in its ever-growing universe – and many rich reasons to tell them.
Four-and-a-half stars: ★★★★½
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: 20 March 2025
A PS5 copy of Assassin’s Creed Shadows was provided by the publisher and played for review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a ten-point scale.
