Shadows’ character-switching is a remedy for anyone getting bored of the Assassin’s Creed gameplay loop that’s been baked into the series since Origins

Have you ever heard about chemical memory? It’s the phenomenon whereby RNA, or ribonucleic acid, can apparently transfer rudimentary memories between living things. A controversial experiment undertaken at UCLA found that taking RNA from one slug and injecting it into another resulted in the latter creature ‘remembering’ the experiences of the first. You can read about the experiment here.

That idea of associative memory, the concept that we can chemically pass down lived experiences, is the core gimmick of the Animus, Assassin’s Creed’s long-running narrative conceit that allows its protagonists to access the stories of long-dead main characters that inhabited a selection of lush open worlds in times of historical intrigue. Handy, that.

But there’s a sense of ‘chemical memory’ every time I play an AC game, too. A kind-of dreamy “I’ve been here before’ that is summoned every time I boot up a game, see that glitchy Ubisoft logo, and set out into whatever massive land mass I’ve got waiting for me this time. It’s not wholly a bad thing; as that third-person camera settles in and I start parkouring about Ancient Greece or something, I’m at home. I’ve been doing this for 17 years, now. My fingers are keyed into the world before my brain is. It’s an impressive feat, really.

But it has disadvantages, too. It can make the experience feel a bit rote. Even in the softly rebooted series (that’s Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage, and now Shadows, for those keeping count), there’s a sense that all this has been done before, and we’re just changing the set dressing a bit. Every game likes to rhythmically bump you from action, to stealth, to exploration, to a big story beat. Rinse, repeat. Yes, I enjoy this waltz, but wouldn’t it be nice to do something else for a change?

Enter Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It’s caught a lot of controversy for its two main characters; Yasuke (a black samurai and retainer to military visionary Oda Nobunaga), and Naoe (a young Shinobi of the Iga clan morphed into one of the cultish Assassins for the sake of the game’s narrative). A continued and relentless campaign of harassment has been levelled at Ubisoft for daring to focus on a woman and a person of colour – quelle surprise – but the implementation of these characters in the actual game is a breath of fresh air I didn’t know I needed.

It turns out splitting the moment-to-moment action into Assassin’s Creed games into dedicated stealth/exploration and combat/tactical play is a home run. It makes everything so much more player-directed. It makes the cadence more under your control, and whilst I honestly think it’s a little less immersive from a role-playing game angle, it helps the flow of the game no end.

Let’s break it down. Yasuke is a big guy. So big, that Oda Nobunaga’s first meeting with him more-or-less instantly leads to the Portuguese-speaking slave being taken under Oda’s wing. He’s still indentured to the Japanese warlord, but enjoys slightly more freedom than he did as property of the Catholics. He is trained in the way of the bushidō and put to work as one of Nobunaga’s key retainers; quelling rebellions, capturing territories, and leading thundering charges into rival clans’ strongholds.

He’s big, he can take a lot of punishment, and fighting with him feels like a dream. Whether you’re charging through screen doors and decapitating feckless goons with a naginata or literally crushing skulls with a mean-looking kanabō, Yasuke is the embodiment of the power fantasy Assassin’s Creed has been perfecting since you could Spartan Kick people off cliffs in Odyssey.

Combat still sort-of works like it did in previous games, but it’s all a bit tighter and crunchier now. Yasuke’s parries, counters and charged attacks connect with an impact that makes Jason Statham’s latest films look a bit tame. Eliminating the vast majority of an enemy’s health bar in one fell swoop before a very well-animated execution move separates their head from their body? It’s brutal, but hey – so was the late Sengoku period at large. Yasuke fits it like a glove.

Then there’s Naoe. She’s much smaller, she takes hits much harder, and it takes a bit more work to dispatch your foes with her. The upshot? She carries kunai, shuriken, and can dispatch enemies silently and quickly – a la Ezio Auditore, for example. You can undertake missions as either her or Yasuke, and Ubisoft isn’t just giving lip service to the whole two-character thing when it says it will completely and fundamentally alter your approach.

In the demo I played at Ubisoft’s offices, we were given an early slice of the game and encouraged to tackle the story beat as both characters. I won’t spoil the preamble here, but the climax played out in one of two ways; a balls-to-the-wall charge through a castle where you smash through walls, doors, and anyone fool enough to stand in your way, or a quiet infiltration over the castle walls as you scale the impressive building to stalk your quarry in the upper-most chambers. I bet you can guess who does what.

Yasuke can’t perform quiet takedowns. No, instead, he will do a ‘brutal takedown’ which includes (delightfully) him standing behind his target, bellowing something like ‘FACE ME’ and then lops off their head. The first time I tried to quietly execute a hapless guard, Yasuke was crouched in a bush, katana drawn, ready for the kill. How I laughed when he popped up, tapped the guard on the shoulder, yelled something silly, and took their head off. Cue a fight with another five men, with me laughing my ass off all the while. Yes, it became a big fight, but it’s nothing the unit of a lad couldn’t handle.

Playing the same mission with Naoe was so different. Her path took her on the outside of the castle, slipping in windows and dashing across rooftops under cover of darkness to complete the mission with as little collateral damage as possible. More modern Assassin’s Creed games have given you multiple ways to achieve your goal, but between these two, it feels far more distinct. And I wager it’ll make for great replay value.

And it’s all done so nicely, too. In combat, finishing moves are realised with these Kurasawa-style black and white and red flourishes when you run an enemy through. Tiny little cinematic moments crop up when you subjugate your enemies and decapitate them. There’s fluid – clearly very expensive – motion capture for impalement, a tiny flick of the wrist to repel arrows, strong yet subtle arm movements when you parry blades.

Ubisoft isn’t just blowing smoke up its own arse when it talks about the effort that’s gone into improving these systems, the results speak for themselves. I like it when the hats fall off to indicate you’ve broken an opponent’s armour. It’s silly, but as visual language it works. There are so many small things that make you think ‘yeah, this is a proper prestige game, this one’.

Ubisoft has a lot to prove with this game, but if the character switching manages to make everything feel this refreshing and empowering and entertaining for more than the three hours I got to play the game… well, colour me impressed. That chemical memory that kicks in and makes me vaguely wary when I boot up an Assassin’s Creed game was quieted very quickly in Shadows. I felt like I was learning to play the game again, and not just walking, zombified, dumb-struck by the scale and all the pretty locations. This is a good thing. Ubisoft gambled a lot with its dual-protagonist gambit, and at this stage at least, I can tell you that it’s paying off.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows comes to Xbox Series. PS5 and PC on its new release date of March 20, 2025, after catching a last-minute delay earlier this year.