- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Release Date: Sep 16, 2025
- Also On: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
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Sep 23, 2025Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Claws of Awaji is a decent but uneven expansion. The island looks great and the staff weapon adds some welcome variety to combat, with a handful of missions that feel true to the franchise’s roots. Still, too much of the content falls back on recycled mechanics and padded objectives, dragging down the pacing. The story does get closure, but the payoff feels more functional than memorable, leaving this DLC closer to optional add-on than essential chapter.
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Sep 17, 2025Claws of Awaji is a difficult recommendation, but I do recommend it. The DLC wraps up the three lingering narrative threads of the main game's story, while transforming the main gameplay loop into a more enjoyable cat-and-mouse formula where the hunter becomes the hunted. Yasuke continues to drag this experience down, and is now impacting the emotional payoff of Naoe's story, but at least Naoe's shinobi fantasy is still one of the best Assassin's Creed experiences to date.
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Sep 16, 2025The Claws of Awaji expansion offers plenty of new content for Assassin’s Creed Shadows and satisfyingly wraps up the cliffhanger in Naoe’s story that was hinted at the end of the base game. The expansion’s pacing with Yasuke is better, too, but it’s a shame that he didn’t get a new weapon while Naoe did. Still, Claws of Awaji is a worthy send off to two of the best Assassin’s Creed characters in recent memory.
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Sep 16, 2025Claws of Awaji offers a solid new location to explore, a fun new weapon for Naoe, and a good conclusion to the game’s story after having felt initially incomplete.
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Sep 16, 2025The Claws of Awaji is a DLC that reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of Assassin's Creed Shadows: some narrative elements are interesting, but the story ends without much excitement, nor does it sufficiently delve into the renewed conflict between Assassins and Templars. The introduction of a new weapon for Naoe livens up the combat a bit, but the gameplay remains more or less the same: ultimately, Awaji is an island that replicates the same exploration loop as the base game on a smaller scale, without adding anything new. Although it is free for all those who pre-ordered at the time, it is still a significant expansion at €25.
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Sep 16, 2025Ubisoft has brought the first, more realistic and dramatic DLC to the story of Nao and Yasuke in Claws of Awaji. You get a new small island with a short side story, a few nice missions and a new weapon. It's just a very basic content offer for the expansion and the whole thing sounds so much poorer in terms of story.
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Sep 19, 2025Complaints aside, I enjoyed my time with Claws of Awaji, even if it didn't exactly light my world on fire. Would I have specifically sought it out if I wasn't reviewing it? Probably not. But that's simply because I'm a little burnt out on open world adventures at this part of the year.
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Sep 16, 2025With average quest design, a lack of polish, and a forgettable story, Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Claws of Awaji shows how the series’ quantity-over-quality approach is continuing to fail. While the Bo weapon for Naoe and the excellent Nowaki questline stand out, they’re drowned by questionable design choices that undermine the experience, making the expansion worthwhile only for the most die-hard fans.
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Sep 16, 2025Assassin's Creed Shadows brought some much needed promise and energy that the series was lacking, and the Claws of Awaji expansion doesn’t really move that needle much in either direction. Its forgettable story and lack of new interesting side distractions don’t detract from how fun it is to ride through the tumultuous badlands of the region using brute force and subterfuge to take down yet another dark cabal of evil doers. But it doesn’t make the strong case for the necessity of any more epilogues, either.