Assassin’s Creed Shadows Ended Up Great–If You Played All The DLC
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ narrative has concluded with the release of Black Tides, the game’s final post-launch story expansion. The three-hour expansion serves as a tie-in to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and delivers significantly stronger storytelling than the base game.
According to reviewers, Black Tides represents a marked quality improvement for the Shadows narrative. The expansion excels in story mission design, character animations, pacing, and overall structure—elements that reviewers felt were lacking in the base game’s main campaign. Despite complaints about extremely annoying boss encounters, the expansion is described as surprisingly compelling.
The quality gap between Black Tides and the base game has prompted criticism that the expansion’s narrative should have been integrated into the core game experience. Rather than being relegated to post-launch DLC, the story and structure demonstrated in Black Tides suggest it could have served as a stronger foundation for Shadows’ entire narrative arc. Black Tides concludes a series of bite-sized post-launch expansions released throughout Shadows’ lifecycle.