Assassin's Creed Shadows is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 and we're really looking forward to checking it out. Shadows is a cutting-edge current generation game, perhaps not well suited to the Switch 2's relatively modest specifications, raising inevitable questions about the viability of the port. However, Ubisoft's prior effort, Star Wars Outlaws, on the Nintendo hybrid was a revelation. Can lightning strike twice? Like Outlaws, can Switch 2 deliver the ray tracing features common to the other current generation consoles?

It's fair to say that there's both good news and bad news here. Despite some somewhat questionable marketing media (a 720p video asset on the official Nintendo YouTube channel? Really?) the port is looking solid. However, based on what little footage we have to look at, there's little evidence that Switch 2's hardware-accelerated ray tracing features are being used.

Lighting looks significantly "flatter" than the RT modes found on more powerful consoles, especially noticeable in outdoor scenes, with less nuanced transitions between light and shadow. Classic rasterisation "glowing" is evidence, suggesting that the Switch 2 version is using the fallback global illumination technique used in the PS5 and Xbox Series X performance modes and in the singular Series S gameplay mode. Elsewhere, shadow quality and volumetrics look diminished, while per-object motion blur is not present. These kind of cutbacks are par for the course when porting a game to less performant hardware.

Only limited media is available right now, but what is seen in the existing trailer exhibits reasonable performance. The YouTube video is only a 30fps asset, but it does seem to consistently update at 30 frames per second based on laboriously moving through the video frame by frame. How that consistency extends to the full experience remains to be seen, bearing in mind that the Xbox Series S version of AC Shadows had issues sustaining a solid 30 frames per second.

Bearing in mind that Series S lacked RT in gameplay, it's perhaps not surprising to see Switch 2 follow suit, but bearing in mind the ambition of the game and the existing presentation on the junior Xbox Series console, it's perhaps not surprising. There is certainly grounds for optimism here for a solid port and we think it's great that Ubisoft isn't shying away from bringing current-gen exclusive titles to the new Nintendo console. In a world where the excellent Assassin's Creed Mirage runs on an iPhone, the publisher could've ported that instead, after all.

We'll be looking at Assassin's Creed Shadows on Switch 2 as soon as review code becomes available, hopefully ahead of the December 2nd release date.