Assassin's Creed Shadows: Claws of Awaji

Assassin’s Creed Shadow: Claws of Awaji feels like an excellent refinement of the base game with a small but dense new island, more focused story, and most of the fat from the base game trimmed out.

It may not be one of the best expansions the series has seen, but Assassin's Creed Shadows: Claws of Awaji still has some neat ideas that make it worth playing.

In Short: An excellent extension to an already large and polished game, with welcome new gameplay additions and a whole new island to explore.

Claws of Awaji provides a more satisfying conclusion to Naoe’s narrative than players got in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, though it clearly suggests that Shadows was really her story all along. Awaji is a beautifully designed playground, filled with content. The new enemies and bosses are an appropriate challenge for the high-level players that the DLC demands. It’s a bit disappointing that Yasuke gets no new weapons and that the basic mission design remains relatively unchanged. It’s also a shame that Awaji Island and its enemies are gated from all but endgame players. However, for anyone frust...

Can you ever have too much of a good thing? Ubisoft certainly don’t think so. After providing players with over one hundred hours of Shinobi-lurking-in-the-shadows action in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, they’ve returned with another 15-hours or so of DLC Samurai shenanigans. This time, Yasuke and Naoe head to the island of Awaji – an entirely separate environment, comparable in size to a region in the main game – to kill a whole load more people in as gloriously gory over-the-top manner as possible.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is hardly going to be remembered as the finest entry in the series or the best open-world game set in Feudal Japan, but the good the game does definitely outweighs the bad, making for an enjoyable experience whose real fault lies in the series' now trademark content bloat and the by-the-book open-world ARPG experience rather than in the bad execution of any of its features.

The Claws of Awaji DLC doesn't add anything exciting to Assassin's Creed Shadows, but it's still fun to explore a new region and stab people.

Only accessible after you've completed the main story of Assassin's Creed Shadows, Claws of Awaji is a post-game expansion that'll take you somewhere between five and ten hours to complete, depending on how thoroughly you explore the island setting.

Claws of Awaji is more of the base AC Shadows game. A beautiful world whose open storytelling style does far more to hurt than help, while the new weapon and one of the boss fights are a nice positive, the rest spends too much time being bland or getting in it's own way.