Assassin’s Creed’s new Animus Hub – the project formerly known as Assassin’s Creed Infinity – is threadbare and relatively ignorable at launch, but that’s fine.
Incorporated into Assassin’s Creed Shadows – it is essentially the game’s start menu – the Animus Hub lets you scroll through a list of Assassin’s Creed games, ordered chronologically by the date of their setting.
This list includes Shadows, obviously, and the four games before that – so, the Ancient Egypt-set Assassin’s Creed Origins, the Ancient Greece-set Odyssey, the Viking adventure Valhalla and the Baghdad-set Mirage.
Selecting any of these lets you see the hero(s) of said game, with Shadows showing you both Naoe and Yasuke in their current gear from wherever you’re at in your playthrough. This is a nice touch, and selecting Shadows will then take that character straight into the Animus loading corridor (that bit where you can run around while the game gets ready) and off into Japan.
Support for the other games, for now, provides just a static image of their protagonist(s) and a button to hit that then launches that game. It’s pretty basic, really, but the upside is that there’s no weird shenanigans here where Shadows also tries to install a bunch of other games, to the detriment of your hard drive.
For now, there are two free sets of rewards (I suppose you could call them battle passes) that you can swap between, each of which has 20 levels. You make progress with these by undertaking quick procedurally-generated missions within Shadows, of the exact same kind that existed in previous games – go here, kill this person, etc. It’s the kind of thing that previously rewarded Oricalcum and other currencies you could save up and trade for otherwise premium items.
The difference with Shadows (and future Assassin’s Creed games that support this too) is that instead you’re rewarded by progress through that reward track structure. As well as getting currency (Keys) to use for premium items, each track also offers bespoke in-game items (a fancy armour set each) and unlocks half a dozen entries of text-based lore.
The Animus Hub is home to a central exchange where you can swap your Keys for daily and weekly rotating cosmetic items from the game’s premium store (I managed to check it on the day it had Shadows’ flashy-looking Kitsune pet, which seemed a worthy use of resources).
Finally, it is also home to a repository for your unlocked lore – those text-based entries you unlock, as well as some Animus-based audio logs you unlock within Shadows’ main campaign, which detail some of the wider context to what the Assassins and Templars were up to in and around Japan at the time.
It’s early days for the Animus Hub, clearly, but right now I wasn’t expecting much more. Assassin’s Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté previously told me back in 2022 that the hub would not offer any form of playable content when it first arrived – such as anything similar to the series’ playable modern day sections of the past – and the result is pretty much what I’d expected.
Ultimately, this stuff is separate for those who never cared for Assassin’s Creed’s modern day storyline, but exists for those who do. The text logs I’m unlocking currently, detailing a near-future operation by the Assassins in Marrakech, clearly tease a bigger conflict to come. But there is so much to see and do in Japan (and a few small bits of Animus-based weirdness within the main game still) that it would be an odd distraction to find much more in the Animus Hub at present.
That said, I’m intrigued to see how and when the Animus Hub expands further – something Ubisoft has so far kept very quiet about. After a few weeks with Shadows, I have one of the Animus Hub’s two reward tracks now half complete. Will another arrive in a few months, when the first Shadows expansion arrives, or will some other schedule be laid out? Time will tell. But for anyone readying themselves to get started in Japan – that should be your focus. As Eurogamer’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows review states, there’s a lot to go see and do. For an even more detailed explainer on Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Animus Hub, check out Eurogamer’s guide.
