Assassin’s Creed: Memories combines RPG, strategy, and card-collecting on iOS devices

By Michael Lee Published July 18, 2014

“History is your battlefield” says the Facebook page for Assassin’s Creed: Memories, a new entry in the Assassin’s Creed family. It’s a collaboration between Ubisoft, GREE, and mobile developer PlayNext in which players “traverse history to build a powerful guild, recruit famous allies, and defeat rival players.” The game will be a free-to-play adventure for iOS devices that blends RPG, strategy, and card battle elements.

Visiting time periods from previous AC titles while also venturing into new territory, Assassin’s Creed: Memories features both a single player mode and multiplayer combat that pits teams of up to 20 against one another. The game also has a heavy focus on customization and strategy, specifically in the way the each assassin is tailored to each player’s tastes.

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Eiji Araki, Vice President of Social Games at GREE says “The card battle genre is able to evolve and grow great heroes and this franchise has created some of the most epic characters in gaming today,” GREE Vice President of Social Games Eiji Araki said in the announcement.

GREE’s press release says the game is currently in soft launch in limited territories and will be available worldwide later this summer for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

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How to unlock and use fast travel in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

shadows

The Assassin's Creed games have always been open-world titles that set you loose in a variety of historical locations. Assassin's Creed Shadows is no different, save for the introduction of the long-requested Japanese setting and dual protagonists. While you're earning XP and getting deeper into the game's story, it will become less and less viable to travel by foot or horse between objectives. That's where fast travel comes into play, but the system works slightly differently in this entry than usual. Here's how fast travel works in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
How to use fast travel

The core of the fast travel system in Assassin's Creed Shadows should be familiar to anyone who has played the series before. You will unlock viewpoints at set locations by climbing up to high points and synchronizing to give yourself a fast travel point, but there is another map marker you can use to fast travel as well. A new building called Kakurega are featured in most major towns and villages in the game that need to be unlocked by purchasing them with Mon. Once you do, they provide you with another fast travel point.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows fixes my biggest problem with the series

The two protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows

The Assassin's Creed games have been on a steady path away from stealth ever since the series' first entry. I don't mean that stealth options were stripped out or haven't evolved, but it lagged behind the pace of a more direct approach. While Origins is seen as the major splintering point for the series into a full-blown action RPG, the series' identity crisis can be traced back much further. By the time we got Black Flag, stealth had become so inefficient and inessential that there was hardly a reason to bother with it at all outside of self-imposed challenges.

When the series did pivot into action RPGs, complete with weapon and armor scores, and made the protagonists more and more powerful, I fell off of the franchise. It not that I don't enjoy that style of game, rather that it wasn't what I came to Assassin's Creed for. With Assassin's Creed Shadows Ubisoft finally fixed that power creep problem without stripping those options out of the game. And that's thanks to its two character setup.
Jack of all trades, master of all
What caused me to fall out of favor with Assassin's Creed isn't that the series wanted to give players more options outside of a stealthy approach. Plenty of games proudly boast how they offer players the freedom to play sneaky or go in guns blazing. However, the issue with Assassin's Creed's for me was that one method invalidated the other.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows just got delayed by another month

One of the protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Ubisoft just delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows for a second time. While it was supposed to come out on February 14, the Japan-set action-adventure game will now be released on March 20.

Fully unveiled last May, the last six months of Assassin's Creed Shadows' development have been rocky. After Star Wars Outlaws had a buggy launch and flopped, Ubisoft delayed Shadows from November 2024 to February 2025. At the time, Ubisoft explained that this delay would allow the developers to "polish and refine the experience." Statements from a strategic update and X post released by Ubisoft today share similar sentiments.