Assassin’s Creed Shadows has unexpectedly become the year’s biggest Steam Deck standout so far.

Who can say what made Ubisoft change their minds on Steam Deck support for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the pretty good samurai stealther that previously stated an intention to go without. Perhaps a high-ranking executive, visiting family to invite them to a trip on his spare yacht, had his frozen heart melted by the sight of a Naoe-cosplaying granddaughter clutching a Steam Deck OLED in her clearly-too-small-for-it hands. Perhaps.

It works, is the main thing. And works well – remarkably well, actually, considering not just the previous denial and 11th hour U-turn, but the game’s high PC system requirements and at least partially mandatory ray tracing. This does come at the cost of a severely stripped-down quality settings menu, and you’ll still need to sign into a Ubisoft Connect account even if you own Shadows on Steam, but there’s no doubt that its Steam Deck Verified status is deserved.

Previous Assassin’s Creedeseses have been only earned a Playable badge, despite meeting Valve’s Verified criteria on performance, because the need for a simultaneous installation and login for Ubisoft’s own launcher would interfere with its smooth operation on Steam; Assassin’s Creed Mirage being the most recent example. Shadows, however, has a kind of Ubisoft Connect Lite built right in, so you can just launch from your main Steam Deck library as usual, sync your Steam and Ubisoft accounts in-game, and be on your merry stabbing way. Ideally there’d be no need for all this billions-of-launchers nonsense at all, but still, it’s an improvement. Alternatively, you can use Desktop Mode and Lutris to install Ubisoft Connect on your Steam Deck, add it as a non-Steam game, and launch from there.

Once up and running, you’ll find that the graphics options screen – the traditional first port of call in any game for the performance-concerned Deck owner – offers but a fraction of the settings you’d get on a Windows desktop. Ubisoft haven’t replied to my queries as to whether this is intentional, but it’s the same whether you’re playing on a Steam copy or a Connect copy, so I’m guessing it is.

Complaining about this seems petty, in a way, as honest work has obviously been put into making Shadows run on the Steam Deck against the odds. But I’m not too keen on setting precedents for developers to make separate and stripped down Steam Deck ‘versions’ of their games; even if the consistency of the Deck’s hardware makes it easier to plan console-style ‘fixed’ settings, Shadows itself demonstrates that a lot of granular, individual settings can often be raised from the lowest to highest without impacting performance. There’s no readily apparent benefit to taking that flexibility away.

That said, it’s ultimately better to have a decent-running game with few options than to have an unplayable game with loads. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the former. These are the settings I prefer using, which admittedly are basically just the defaults, save for the upscaler being specified as FSR rather than being left on Auto.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Steam Deck settings

• Raytraced global illumination: Diffuse Hideout Only
• Upscaler type: AMD FSR
• Minimum dynamic resolution: 25%
• Maximum dynamic resolution: 75%
• Sharpen strength: 0.25
• Frame generation: Off

These keep Shadows running, for the most part, at an impressively consistent 30fps. There are some momentary dips below, but no sustained drops or stuttering, even in busy settlements or – most surprising of all – the Hideout. This hub area is the only part of the game that won’t let you disable ray tracing entirely, but credit where it’s due: Ubisoft’s in-house, software-based RT effects aren’t anywhere near as demanding as conventional, hardware-based ray tracing. Again, you might get some tiny drops, but Shadows is as playable on the Steam Deck here as it is anywhere else on the map.

I also haven’t had any problems with undersized text or awkward controls, so it suits the Deck’s external hardware as well. Those controls are also partly why I’ve left frame generation off. See, you can enable FSR 3 frame gen for a dash of extra smoothness, with boosted framerates reaching 45fps at times. Unfortunately, it can also drop to around 33-34fps when the screen gets busy, nullifying the benefit, while swamping control responsivity under lashings of input lag. Most switches and toggles that can grant a 50% speed increase are worth flicking at least once, but personally I’d rather have a more consistent 30fps without that added sluggishness.

At least all the new tech in Shadows hasn’t seriously intensified its drain on the Steam Deck’s battery life. Playing on the Ubisoft Connect version, with screen brightness and speaker volume both at 50%, Shadows ran my original LCD Deck from full to flat in 1h 22m, just a single minute less than Mirage did. I suspect that could be improved, too, such as by dropping the display’s refresh rate to 40Hz – you won’t be needing more than thirty of these hertz anyway.

Sub-90 minutes is, of course, at the lower end of Deck longevity scale in any case. But it’s par for the course where giga-fidelity AAA games are concerned, and that’s one corner of PC gaming that’s proving less interested in Steam Deck compatibility with every passing year. Kudos to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, then, for making the effort.