When Ubisoft first confirmed that it would be bringing Assassin's Creed Shadows to the Nintendo Switch 2, I'll happily admit that I was impressed and surprised. I played the game fairly obsessively earlier this year on my PS5 Pro, and was stunned by how it made the most of the hardware to look genuinely superb.
Nintendo's console is drastically less powerful than Sony's highest-powered device, though, so I assumed that major cutbacks would be needed to make it run. Still, after playing around with the game for the past week, I am indeed fairly impressed with how it's been handled.
Shadows features a chunky open world, and its gameplay in exploration and combat is entirely 1:1 on Switch 2 compared to consoles – you don't miss out on anything. In fact, logging into my Ubisoft account let me pick up my completed save thanks to cross-progression, which is really handy.
I was thinking I could test the game by playing its Claws of Awaji free expansion, but Ubisoft has confirmed that this will only come to Switch 2 in early 2026 as part of an update, so parity between versions isn't quite there on the content front.
That 30fps change does make the game feel less fluid, of course, but that isn't to say it feels bad to play. It takes some getting used to, but it felt relatively stable in my limited testing. The menus did sometimes feel quite laggy, though, and the same went for fast-travelling.
Also, the upscaling techniques being used are more visible than you might be used to. Pan the camera between the sky and a busy hillside of trees in the distance, for example, and you'll see the software visibly catching up, with some lighting changing in front of your eyes once the vista is in view.
That makes the game notably a little janky at times, and I can't pretend it's the best version of Shadows. Still, plenty of original Switch ports were technically the worst versions of the games in question, but they still found bigger audiences by making it onto the platform at all.
One interesting detail is that, just as it did on the other consoles, the main menu in Shadows features a portal that lists other recent games, including Odyssey and Valhalla. That doesn't necessarily mean those two are going to be ported to Switch 2, but it certainly makes that seem more likely than before.
They run on the same game engine, after all, albeit an older version with fewer visual features, so perhaps they could even perform more smoothly on Switch 2 if Ubisoft does port them. That said, since Shadows clocks in at a chunky 65GB download, having them all on your Switch 2 at once might need a microSD Express card to make things more sensible anyway.
Ultimately, anyone asking which platform to play Shadows on will now get a more complicated response than before. There's no doubt that the 60fps mode with global illumination on PS5 Pro remains the best experience, without any real asterisk, but plenty of people might end up with only the Switch 2 as their option.
In that case, I think it seems like a perfectly fine place to play through what is a really great game. There's no doubt that Shadows will be an interesting early technical statement from the Switch 2, and I look forward to seeing what more intensive assessments of its performance tell us about how the hardware is handling such a big game.
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