Assassin's Creed Shadows was way more than I expected. It turned out to be a really good game, and I spent a lot of time on it. I also ended up coming back to it for Claws of Aw…

Assassin's Creed Shadows was way more than I expected. It turned out to be a really good game, and I spent a lot of time on it. I also ended up coming back to it for Claws of Awaji. I liked seeing the series go back to two playable characters. This time you've got Naoe and Yasuke, and they're very different from each other. Naoe is the shinobi, with more of that quiet approach, climbing, sneaking in, and getting close without being seen. Yasuke is the samurai, and his strength and weapons give the combat a very different feel. That difference matters. You aren't just changing what your character looks like while doing everything exactly the same way. They give you different ways to approach the game, and that's something I really liked about the dual-character idea in Syndicate too. Shadows takes place in late-sixteenth-century Japan, during the Sengoku period. You have the conflict around Oda Nobunaga and the larger struggle over the country, with Naoe and Yasuke coming into it from very different backgrounds. Their stories eventually bring them together, but each of them has their own reasons for being involved. There's a lot there between the characters, the setting, the combat, and how differently you can approach things. This was one of those games that ended up giving me more than I expected from it. I want to spend some more time going through it properly, because a short description doesn't really cover the two characters or everything the game is doing. Overall, I thought it was extremely good.