Assassin's Creed: Shadows is praised on handhelds - holds up 'pretty damn well' on Steam Deck

Assassin's Creed: Shadows is catching some flak for its performance levels on PC in reviews - and feedback online in general - but not everything is negative in this regard.

While a lot of the controversy is disappointment around how the game (which is released tomorrow) runs on beefy gaming PCs (often at weighty 4K settings), it seems that Assassin's Creed: Shadows fares much better on more modest hardware, namely gaming handhelds.

TechRadar was on the case here, spotting several YouTubers putting Shadows through its paces on the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, finding that it can generally hold a solid 30 FPS on low and medium details. Although as you'd expect, upscaling trickery has a hand in making the gameplay smoother.

As you can see in the above YouTube video, Santiago Santiago's testing on the Steam Deck shows Assassin's Creed: Shadows ticking along at just over 30 FPS (at 1280 x 800 resolution). The YouTuber concludes that the game "holds up pretty damn well" and is fine being classified as a Steam Deck 'verified' title.

TAA and XeSS apparently work well, although should you be thinking of using frame generation on the Steam Deck, well, that's a no-go as it messes with input lag too much.

One observation to be aware of, made in the comments of that clip, is that towns seem to look deserted, suggesting maybe an option may be toggled to remove the slowdowns that would otherwise occur in more crowded places. That's a point which needs some further investigation.

Another YouTuber, DeckWizard, demonstrates that the ASUS ROG Ally is capable of running Shadows at a steady 29-30 FPS (mostly keeping to the latter) using XeSS 2.0 (performance mode). You can check out that video in full below.

For gaming on handhelds, then, it looks like Assassin's Creed: Shadows is a definite winner, but the jury is still very much out on the kind of performance you'll get when really cranking the details on a full PC setup - or even playing at 1440p. Then again, some judicious tweaking of settings is likely to help in these scenarios, too, so this seems like a PC game where tinkering is going to be something of a must.

There has, of course, been a whole load of controversy around Shadows already, long before its release. That includes accusations of historical inaccuracy and a lack of respect in certain cultural aspects of the game, alongside physical copies of Shadows appearing in the wild last month, and the first reviews being leaked ahead of time, too.