I Left AC Shadows Off of My 2025 List…

For a game I spent so much time in, its absence in my mind was…confusing.

So, I made my 2025 list and somehow left off Assassin’s Creed Shadows. A game I put more than a hundred and thirty hours into. So this is a bit of an investigation as to why I didn’t think about it, as well as a review of a game I really genuinely liked.

I have played and completed every mainline Assassin’s Creed game since the franchise launched in 2007. The fact I had to look up the date and instantly winced in pain was fun. I was a freshman in high school when it came out. Fuuuuuuck me. So, in the spirit of fully fucking up my brain, here’s the list of titles I’ve played.

Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed 2

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed Revelations

Assassin’s Creed 3

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag

Assassin’s Creed Unity

(I got tired of typing Assassin’s Creed at exactly this moment)

Syndicate

Origins

Odyssey*

Valhalla

Mirage

Shadows

I have rolled credits on all of these games, save for the asterisked Odyssey; a game I really enjoyed up until I realized it wasn’t really an Assassin’s Creed game. I know that’s a hot take, I have my reasons, but perhaps better for an altogether different piece. Also die-hards will notice I missed Rogue. Rogue came out the same time as Unity and was a game for the previous generation of consoles. Being a college student at the time, I had to trade my Xbox 360 for my Xbox One, so I played Unity. I would say maybe someday I’ll go back to play it but…it’s been thirteen years so…

I remember, in my bedroom in 2010, just weeks prior to graduation, sitting and jotting down every little note and clue written on the walls by Subject 16 in the final moments of the original AC. I didn’t have a smart phone at the time. I spent the entire night trying to decipher the codes and puzzles. I bought 2 in the fall when I went off to college and I rushed through it before the release of Brotherhood in November. I have never missed a release since.

I think the first time my friends and I collectively thought, “this game would rule in Japan” happened in the same fall. It was the obvious choice. Samurai and Ninja in an Assassin’s Creed game? Uh…duh. Well, eighteen years later we finally got it. I remember watching the trailer and just giggling like a maniac. Focusing the Japanese AC game on Yasuke, a deeply mysterious figure in Japanese history, and Fujibayashi Naoe, the fictitious daughter of shinobi and ninjitsu pillar Fujibayashi Nagato immediately felt perfect. Power from Yasuke, stealth from Naoe. The divorce of playstyles felt good to me. Valhalla tried to marry the two and the result was a bit more messy than I wanted it to be. Naoe is the eponymous shadow the games title refers to, and the game thrives because of it.

There is a theme running through recent AC games I really don’t care for. Per my calculation, if you remove the small, experimental (very good) Mirage, it has been ten years since the player character in an AC game was actually a member of the Order of Assassins facing off against the Knights Templar, the last game to do so being Syndicate. Origins was ostensibly about the foundation of the Order of Assassins, initially named the Hidden Ones in 1st Century BCE. Odyssey jumps a few hundred years backwards to further illustrate the origins of the Order of the Ancients. Valhalla is about a Viking who happens to be following the orders of an incognito King Aelfred as he dismantles the Order of the Ancients so he can rebuild them as the Knights Templar.

Shadows sort of follows suit here, but the exact reasoning is a bit more mystifying to me. Fujibayashi Naoe is a shinobi. For all intents and purposes, an assassin. But she isn’t an Assassin. But her mother was. But Naoe didn’t know that. And you don’t really discover conclusively until the game is mostly over. The most likely explanation lies somewhere in the details of Japan’s deeply isolationist history. The island nation was only just getting involved in trade with other parts of the world. The Templars aren’t even in Japan properly by the end of this game. Yasuke’s origin with the Portuguese traders concludes with confirmation that the Templars were the organization responsible. It’s all a confluence of geopolitical events that don’t exaclty line up which, in a way, is a testament to the Ubisoft devs sticking as closely to historical accuracy as they could.

And yet, Ezio’s story is only a hundred years prior to this. We know he interacted with a Chinese Assassin. We also know he sent Ottoman Assassins to Lisbon in 1511. So the existence of a fledgling order of Assassins in Japan makes sense. I’m just curious why, instead of letting Shadows story be about the construction of this fledgling Order, the game instead leads right up to that moment and then ends. I want to become another Mentor. I want to build the Tiber Island Headquarters, but everywhere else. There is this consistent reluctance in the franchise to just let players be Assassins. It’s deeply puzzling and, at this point, kind of frustrating.

I struggled to put a finger on why this review may have slipped my mind in the process of wrapping all of my 2025 games into one list. I think this line of thought may lead to the best answer I have. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a great game, it’s just afraid to be an Assassin’s Creed game. Why? What is Ubisoft so afraid of? The first AC has you challenging Al Mualim (the original Mentor of the proper Assassins) in the game’s climactic finish. In the final moments of that fight (if I remember correctly) Al Mualim reveals the Piece of Eden he has, the Apple, is responsible for most western religions. Insinuating Jesus was a smooth talker who had the Apple in his possession. The second game has a video you piece together by finding hidden artifacts. When you complete the hunt you are shown a video of Adam and Eve stealing the Apple of Eden from the First Civilization. The pitch was immaculate. Ancient order of Templars wants to bring about an era of peace via control, the Assassins exist in opposition, contending the only true peace is through free will. Let the philosophical debates begin!

As a brief aside, there is also a moment in AC 2 where a member of the First Civilization, Minerva, barrels the camera and starts talking to Desmond through the Animus and it fucking rules. Ezio looking over his shoulder and flat asking her, “Who are you talking to?” is an all time high moment. Peak shit.

So where am I with Shadows then? Where do I stand on it? Well…I fucking loved it. The teams at Ubisoft really do create incredible spaces to inhabit. The fidelity and beauty captured in their recreation of Warring States Japan is an all time high benchmark here. Truly, each game just gets more beautiful. Shadows is also deeply content with making things take real time. Praying at shrines for the little bonuses they give you stands out to me first. It’s a small action that takes a full twenty second pause. Riding your horse between locations is also time consuming, a fact bolstered by Ubisoft’s choice to keep a lot of the Japanese countryside conventionally featureless. There isn’t a thousand things to do, tucked into the nooks and crannies of the forests of Iga or the mountainous rocks and shoals of Kii. Should you try to venture into one of these areas you will frequently find unnavigable terrain and, should you find a way to surmount the obvious deterrents, you are rewarded by little areas of relative zen (word choice unintentionally perfect). It’s all leaves and grass and trees and breeze.

It’s a fascinating choice in 2025 to make a game with so much nothing in it. It reminds me of 2023’s Starfield, a game I spent hundreds of hours playing. The argument against the vacuousness of Starfield was one steeped in the modern obsession of most open world games: for there to be something to do every hundred meters. It’s an argument I find very little value in. Ironically it is one of the more frequently used detractions aimed at Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games. Ubisoft, in general, is often credited as the progenitor of this overused model of open world design. So it feels amazing to play an Assassin’s Creed game content to make you wait. Content to make you take your time. There are dozens of winding paths I traveled in Shadows where I found myself turning on auto-follow and just using the right stick to gawk at the scenery.

But I want Assassin’s Creed to remember its identity a bit more. There was a playfulness, inherent to the first games, when it came to matters of historicity and the gaps afforded by time. Honestly, it’s why Yasuke was such a perfect choice. His story is apocryphal, largely. Veracity is nearly impossible to achieve. Playing in that gray space of “could this have happened” used to be the AC franchise’s forte. Machiavelli and DaVinci, in the same place, working with the Assassins was genuinely inspired. It gave context to DaVinci’s wild designs and machines. You got to test several of them. Black Flag letting you rub shoulders with Black Beard and Calico Jack and Charles Vane, magnificent. Crossing swords with embattled revolutionaries in AC3, as a Native American, perfect. AC Shadows still lets you interact with notable figures, but it feels less like an uncovered history, it feels like a history lesson. I’m aware of the oxymoronic nature of my gripe. I learned a LOT playing the Renaissance AC games. But Shadows lacks a bit of the playfulness with the gaps I loved so much about earlier entries. Perhaps a byproduct of trying ever harder to not offend anyone.

In the end, after all the hullabaloo, I did and still do love AC Shadows. It’s a gorgeous game, content with making you take the time to witness said beauty on display, be it on horseback or sprinting across clayforged roof tiles. The separation of combat and stealth between two characters allowed me to go back to the Rubik’s cube that is stealthily slinking through a castle and dispatching all of the guards without setting off alarms. Rinse and repeat. It may be formulaic and repetitive, but when it comes to stealth, I am lithe to sit in that pocket.

For some reason this game didn’t cross my mind while listing the games fo 2025. Maybe it’s because I wanted it to be more daring. Maybe it’s just because Assassin’s Creed is like a prescription. A medicine I always need. One that gives me the same calm feeling I have remembered for almost 20 years. One I found quickly in Shadows. It didn’t stand out because it was exactly what I needed, a return to form for stealth gameplay and a world worth getting distracted in. I anxiously wait to see what Hexe has to offer, but the shakeups at Ubisoft have my confidence wavering. Fingers crossed they find a way to land the ship, even if Clint Hocking isn’t still working on it.