Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Animus hub is threadbare at start, nonetheless that’s swish

The initial Animus Hub from Assassin’s Creed – the initiative formerly known as Assassin’s Creed Infinity – is quite minimal and rather easy to overlook at first glance, but that’s entirely okay.

Integrated within Assassin’s Creed Shadows – it actually serves as the game’s main menu – the Animus Hub enables you to browse through a sequence of Assassin’s Creed titles, arranged chronologically based on the timelines of their respective settings.

This selection includes Shadows, of course, along with the four titles that preceded it – specifically, the Ancient Egypt-set Assassin’s Creed Origins, the Ancient Greece-set Odyssey, the Viking saga Valhalla, and the Baghdad-set Mirage.

Selecting any of these entries allows you to see the character(s) from that game, with Shadows displaying both Naoe and Yasuke in their current gear from wherever you are in your playthrough. This is a thoughtful touch, as choosing Shadows will transport that character directly into the Animus loading corridor (the area where you can move around while the game prepares) before venturing off into Japan.

Support for other titles currently provides just a static image of their protagonist(s) alongside a button that launches the respective game. It is quite conventional, indeed, but the upside is that there is no unnecessary bloat where Shadows also attempts to incorporate various other games that could burden your hard drive.

Presently, there are two complimentary sets of rewards (which could be likened to battle passes) to alternate between, each containing 20 tiers. You advance through these by completing procedurally-generated missions inside Shadows, which resemble the tasks from earlier games – such as travel to a location, eliminate a target, etc. These are the sorts of activities that previously rewarded Oricalcum and other currencies that you could gather and trade for valuable items.

The innovation with Shadows (and future Assassin’s Creed installments that incorporate this feature) is that here you are rewarded by progress through the reward track system. In addition to receiving currency (Keys) to use for premium items, each track also provides unique in-game items (like armor sets) and unlocks several entries of text-based lore.

The Animus Hub acts as a central marketplace where you can exchange your Keys for daily and weekly rotating cosmetic items from the game’s premium store (I happened to check it out on a day when it featured Shadows’ flashy Kitsune pet, which looked like a worthwhile use of resources).

Ultimately, it also serves as a repository for your unlocked lore – these text entries you access, along with some Animus-based audio logs obtained during Shadows’ main campaign, which shed light on the broader context of what the Assassins and Templars were doing in and around Japan at that time.

It’s still early for the Animus Hub, as expected, but honestly, I wasn’t anticipating much more at this stage. Assassin’s Creed franchise leader Marc-Alexis Coté previously informed me back in 2022 that this hub wouldn’t provide any form of playable content when it initially launched – akin to previous series’ playable contemporary-day segments – and the end result feels quite much as I had anticipated.

Ultimately, this system is distinct for those who never had an interest in Assassin’s Creed’s modern-day storyline, but it exists for those who do care. The text logs I’m currently unlocking provide fascinating insights into the deeper lore.