The next installment of Assassin's Creed is scheduled to be released at the end of March 2025, and we recently spent a few hours playing the prologue and one of the later missions in the game. Before getting deep into Assassin's Creed Shadows, it's worth talking about the new Animus Hub.

We didn't get to play any modern-day sections of Shadows during the preview session, but the Animus Hub intro strongly implies that there is something going on. It's set up as though you are entering the Animus for the first time, as it explains how memories work in a corporate, marketing-style presentation. Yet all is not as it seems. Parts of the video are briefly corrupted as a hacker tells you that you're being misled.

The Animus Hub focuses on the current generation of Assassin's Creed games, which include Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage and Shadows. All of the games are visible in the timeline, and it appears that you will be able to launch any of them from within the Animus Hub, assuming you own them on the same system. I'm not quite sure how this will work on the upcoming macOS version of Shadows, as the previous games haven't been released for that OS (Mirage was only ported to iOS).

Aside from serving as a game launcher, the Animus Hub also has a Projects section, which is where you can access the Shadows anomaly missions. These won't all be available at launch; they'll be released over time and will reward you with new gear, weapons, data files, and more.

Loading into Shadows, the game should feel immediately familiar to fans of the series. You will need a current-generation console to play (sorry, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One fans), but there haven't been any drastic changes to the interface. What's here feels like an evolution of what we saw in Mirage.

The quest system is one good example. As in Mirage, you aren't immediately given a quest marker to find your target. Instead, you reveal hints that point in a general direction, and you figure out where you need to go. It can feel more open-ended than just running to the next marker. That said, if you prefer the game to call out your objectives directly, that's also an option.

Scouts are a new feature in Shadows that serve as a middle ground between direct objectives and letting you figure it out on your own. Scouts can be deployed to an area to help locate objectives. They can also be used to collect resources and help you avoid the law if you gain too much notoriety.

The prologue in Shadows sets up the base elements of the story and serves as an introduction to the two main characters, Naoe and Yasuke. Both characters play differently and have distinct ways to complete missions. For example, Yasuke can use his strength to break down locked doors, while Naoe must find an alternative route when one is blocking her path.

Yasuke is something of a tank and should be well received by anyone looking for a more aggressive play style. He has more health than Naoe and does noticeably more damage. On the flip side, Yasuke is louder when moving through the world, and it is more difficult for him to hide.

Naoe feels more like a traditional assassin character, with her nimble movement and penchant for stealth. She is better for infiltration and parkour, so if you're scouting out a location, Naoe should be your first choice. Unless you're in a restricted area, you can swap between the two characters at any time. This can be useful if one of the two ends up being wanted and you don't want to wait for a season change or use any scouts. Just swap to the other character.

Having both play options is absolutely a plus, but I wonder how it will play out over the entire length of the game. From my limited time with the preview build, it appears that while you can select either Naoe or Yasuke before each mission, the actual mission parameters don't seem to change. In practice, this meant that I found myself running into situations as Naoe that felt like they may have been better balanced for Yasuke. On the one hand, you could always reload and swap characters, but if the point is choice, I hope there is a stealth option for everything.

My personal draw for the Assassin's Creed games has always been stealth, so let me be stealthy. That was perhaps my one real complaint about Valhalla: Certain sections required fighting. In that game, you were a Viking and meant to fight. Shadows is giving us a choice, and I want to use that choice to the fullest.

On the stealth side, lighting is something to be aware of when sneaking around in Shadows. You can destroy light sources to make it easier to hide or to distract a guard. You can use various in-game items as distractions to get a guard's attention before going in for the kill, but you can also use some of them to create new exploration paths.

Seasons and weather are a new feature in Shadows because they also impact how you play. For example, in the winter, many plants lose their leaves, so you have fewer places to hide. At the same time, NPCs will gather around heat sources, and strategically placed snowbanks can be used like a much colder version of a haystack.

In the warmer months, if it happens to be raining, guards will try to avoid the rain by preferring covered paths. This may give you more options to go in for the kill.

Like past Assassin's Creed games, there is plenty of story in Shadows, and there are two options that are worth calling out. There is a "canon" setting in the options that eliminates some of the response options in the cut scenes and a "follow" option for NPCs who are walking and talking. The Ubisoft demo rep told me that the cut scene response options generally end up in the same place, so if you just want to experience the story as the writers designed it, you can enable the canon setting to default to preselected answers. If you prefer to put your own spin on things, you can do that as well. The follow option is a convenience, so you don't have to worry about keeping track of a story NPC as they're walking through the world.

After wrapping up my time with the preview build of Assassin's Creed Shadows, I'm looking forward to seeing the final game. Shadows doesn't look to be a revolution in the franchise, but it appears to be building on what came before.