For ten years the most requested setting in the series was feudal Japan. When it finally arrived, it came with two heroes, two delays and a publisher having the worst year of its life. This is about the game itself, and the game is better than the noise around it.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint, November 1, 2026
A quick note before we start, because this site has history here. We already ran the big piece about the culture war that swallowed this game before launch, the one about games accused of being too woke, and I stand by every word of it. That piece was about the discourse. This one is not. This one is about the actual game Ubisoft shipped on March 20, 2025: how it plays, how it scored, how it sold, and whether it still deserves your time now that the dust, the patches and one expansion have settled. Different article, different job.
With that said: I liked Shadows. Not in the polite way. In the “I kept saying one more target until 2 AM” way.
The Setting We Asked For Since Forever
Every Assassin’s Creed fan has a list of dream settings, and Japan sat at the top of basically all of them from about 2013 onwards. Ubisoft made us wait through London, Paris, Egypt, Greece, England and Baghdad before finally cashing the cheque, and the wait created a problem nobody talks about: by 2025, feudal Japan in games was crowded. Ghost of Tsushima had already done the samurai fantasy beautifully in 2020, and Rise of the Ronin arrived in 2024. Shadows was not walking into an empty room. It was walking into a room where two very good games were already sitting.
What Ubisoft Quebec built is a Japan of the late 1570s and early 1580s, in the final years of Oda Nobunaga, across the provinces of central Japan: Kyoto’s streets, the mountains of Iga, tea fields, castles, ports. It is, shot for shot, one of the prettiest worlds this series has ever produced, and the season system is the reason. Time passes and the map changes with it. Spring floods the fields, summer storms roll in and genuinely change how a mission feels, autumn turns the hills red, and winter freezes the ponds solid, which matters, because a pond you could hide in during July is a sheet of ice you slide across in January. The world is not a poster. It is a machine with weather in it.
Two Protagonists, Two Completely Different Games
The dual protagonist system is the heart of Shadows, and Ubisoft did not cheat it. Naoe and Yasuke are not two skins on the same character. They are two genres sharing one save file.
Naoe, a shinobi from Iga and the daughter of Fujibayashi Nagato, is the Assassin’s Creed game I grew up missing. She is fast, fragile and built entirely around stealth systems this series had quietly abandoned: crawling prone through grass and shallow water, breathing through a reed while submerged, snuffing out lanterns and working in true darkness, a grappling hook that turns rooftops into highways. Playing Naoe on expert difficulty, with guaranteed assassinations off, is the most “classic AC” this franchise has felt since the Ezio years, and I do not say that lightly.
Yasuke is the opposite bet. He is based on the real Yasuke, the African retainer who served Oda Nobunaga, and in game terms he is a battering ram with a character arc. He cannot parkour properly, he has no eagle, his version of the Leap of Faith is a running joke where he lands like dropped furniture, and none of it matters because walking through a gate as Yasuke and simply deleting an entire enemy camp with a kanabo is its own kind of joy. Where Naoe asks you to think, Yasuke asks you to commit.
Between missions, Shadows also gives the pair something no Assassin’s Creed game had done properly before: a hideout you actually build. Not a menu, a place, a plot of land in Izumi Settsu where you place the forge, the stables, the kakurega network buildings and the decorations yourself, and where your recruited allies actually live and wander around. It sounds like garnish. It is not. It is the quiet heart of the game, the one spot where Naoe’s story about losing a home and building a new one becomes something you do with your hands instead of watching in a cutscene, and I spent more time arranging that little village than I will ever admit in public.
The structure around them is the old target board: a masked cabal called the Shinbakufu, twelve names to work through in mostly the order you choose, with the two heroes’ personal stories braided between the hits. The honest criticism, then and now, is pacing. The opening hours are flashback heavy, Yasuke joins the playable roster later than he should, and some targets are far more interesting than others. The best stretches of Shadows are excellent. The filler between them is real filler. Both things are true, and every honest review said some version of that.
The Launch: Two Delays and a Publisher on Fire
Context matters for this one. Shadows was supposed to launch on November 15, 2024. Ubisoft delayed it to February 14, 2025, saying the game needed polish, then delayed it again to March 20, 2025. Behind those dates, the company was in open crisis: Star Wars Outlaws had underperformed the year before, the stock had cratered, and one week after Shadows launched, Ubisoft announced the deal that carved Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six into a new subsidiary backed by a Tencent investment of about 1.16 billion euros. Shadows did not just need to be good. It needed to hold the building up.
So, did it? Here is what the documented numbers say, because “players” and “sales” are different sports and Ubisoft played both.
Ubisoft announced one million players on launch day, then two million players within two days, specifically noting that this beat the launch pace of both Origins and Odyssey. A week in, it was three million players. The company’s fiscal reporting added the money version: Shadows delivered the second highest day one sales revenue in the history of the franchise, behind only Valhalla, which launched into a locked down world in 2020, and it passed Odyssey in consumer spending. On PC, where it was the first series entry to launch day one on Steam since 2019, it set the franchise record on the platform with a peak of 64,825 concurrent players, and data reported by VGC put PC at about 27 percent of total activations. Ubisoft also said it was the company’s best ever day one on the PlayStation Store. By the half year report covering September 2025, Ubisoft was describing Shadows as overperforming against its expectations.
Critics landed where players mostly did. The game sits in the low 80s on Metacritic, IGN scored it 8 out of 10, and the consensus was remarkably consistent: a gorgeous world, the best stealth the series had done in years through Naoe, a likeable pair of leads, and a middle section that sags under the weight of its own checklist. I read a lot of those reviews again before writing this, and the striking thing is how well they have aged. Nobody oversold it. Nobody buried it. It is an 8, and it plays like an 8 that knows exactly what it is.
The Year After: An Expansion, a Port and a Final Patch
Ubisoft kept working on it, which is more than can be said for some of its recent launches. The Claws of Awaji expansion arrived on September 16, 2025, built by Ubisoft Bordeaux, sending both heroes to Awaji Island to close the cliffhanger the main story left hanging over Naoe’s family. It added a new weapon for Naoe, the bo staff, reviewed respectably at a 71 on Metacritic, and was free for anyone who had preordered. IGN gave it a 6 and called it forgettable in places, and the Steam launch of the expansion was briefly mired in an activation bug that tanked its user reviews for reasons that had nothing to do with the content. My take: Awaji is a decent ten hour epilogue that trims the base game’s fat, and it is worth playing if the ending left you hanging. It is not a reason to buy the game on its own.
A Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on December 2, 2025, which tells its own story about how hard Ubisoft wanted this game everywhere. Player sentiment kept warming as the updates landed: on Steam, where the launch reception had been mixed in the way Steam receptions get when a game arrives carrying a year of arguments on its back, the user rating climbed over time into Very Positive territory, with about 81 percent of reviewers recommending it by the time GamingBolt took the temperature. The people who bought it, played it and finished it landed in roughly the same place as the critics. An 8 of a game, honestly labeled, honestly received. Updates added New Game Plus and kept tuning the parkour and stealth, and in June 2026 Ubisoft shipped what its own news post called the final update for Shadows. The book is closed now. What we have is the finished game.
My Verdict, With the Receipts In
So here is where I land, a year and a half out. Shadows is the best of the big RPG era games for people who actually like stealth, and the second best of that era overall, behind Odyssey for pure joy and ahead of Valhalla for focus. It did not reinvent anything. It did something rarer for this series in the last decade: it respected the fantasy it promised. You wanted to be a shinobi in feudal Japan. Naoe’s half of this game is exactly that, built with care, inside one of the most beautiful open worlds Ubisoft has ever shipped.
Commercially, it was a hit that arrived at a company too broken to be saved by one hit, and those are different statements. The player milestones, the day one revenue ranking and Ubisoft’s own word, overperforming, all say the audience showed up. The restructuring happened anyway, because one game cannot outrun a decade of decisions. If you skipped Shadows because the internet was screaming, you skipped a good game for bad reasons, and the finished, patched, expanded version sitting there now is the best way it has ever existed.
And the funny part? The next game in this series is the strangest one Ubisoft has ever announced, a dark little thing called Hexe that could not be more different from this one. Japan was the dream the fans ordered. Whatever Hexe is, nobody ordered it. I cannot wait.
Sources
Player milestones and launch records: Ubisoft announcements via the official Assassin’s Creed channels, March 2025 (one million players on launch day, two million in two days, three million in the first week), and IGN’s reporting by Wesley Yin-Poole, March 27, 2025.
Sales revenue context: Ubisoft fiscal year 2024 to 2025 reporting (second highest day one sales revenue in franchise history, ahead of Odyssey in consumer spending) and Ubisoft’s half year 2025 to 2026 report describing Shadows as overperforming, via its investor publications and Wikipedia’s summary of the same reports.
PC performance and Steam records: VGC reporting on launch data (about 27 percent of activations on PC, best ever day one on the PlayStation Store) and Steam concurrent player records (64,825 peak, a series record), March 2025.
Critical reception: Metacritic (low 80s for the base game, 71 for Claws of Awaji) and IGN’s reviews of Assassin’s Creed Shadows (8 out of 10) and Claws of Awaji (6 out of 10). Steam user reception trend: GamingBolt’s coverage of the game’s Steam rating climbing to Very Positive.
Delays and company context: Ubisoft’s delay announcements (September 2024 and January 2025) and the March 2025 announcement of the Tencent backed subsidiary for Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six, reported by The Verge.
Post launch support: Ubisoft news on Claws of Awaji (September 16, 2025, developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux), the Nintendo Switch 2 release (December 2, 2025) and the final Shadows update (June 16, 2026).