I don't have much time in the game, but the time I do have has been very fun. A lightweight story, good exploration, and awesome combat so far.

This review however is to let people know that Ubisoft Connect really is a frustrating experience for this game on the Steamdeck. I cannot figure out offline mode as setting my Steamdeck to offline after logging into Ubisoft Connect once in-game isn't enough apparently. Every time I boot the game up on Steamdeck offline, it asks for a login. I enter my credentials and says they are incorrect. Moment I go online though, the credentials screen is skipped at startup since they are accepted.

The game also doesn't use steam cloud saves at all, so when I boot it up on my PC after a session on my Steamdeck, I cannot see my latest save. You need to launch the game on your Steamdeck and manually upload the updated save first. This process ALSO logs you out of Ubisoft connect on PC, so you have to login again before you can play. Very frustrating, especially since I was willing to get this despite Ubisoft being required. I didn't expect the DRM to be this insufferable though.

Tldr: If you are only going to play on your PC it's a great time. If you only play on your steamdeck and have constant internet connection it's a great time. Otherwise, playing on both is insanely annoying and adds an additional 5-10 minutes of fiddling with logins and manually uploading saves that it becomes undesirable to play it.

Good game, with minor problems.

Combat is mostly good, but early on normal enemies take a bit too long to kill, but after you've upgraded your weapon a bit it gets better though. The parry is nice, and it feels great, when you land it, but the later bosses spam lots of moves you can't parry.

There are a bunch of QoL additions, that should make getting 100% not too hard, but for some reason, the devs stopped right before the finish line. You can buy treasure maps to show stuff you've missed on the map, but it doesn't show everything. Why? You can take pictures while exploring, so you can maybe actually see what kind of power you need, to get an item, but how many pictures you can take is limited, and you need to find upgrades to take more.

Platforming is nice and there are a bunch of challenges, that can be pretty difficult, which I mostly enjoyed. For some of the challenges, it feels like you have to die a bunch of times, because you can't actually see where you need to go or what you have to do, because of off-screen objects or something.

I don't know why, but there are two fast travel methods in the game. For most of the game, you can only teleport to specific points on the maps, which almost always sucks in any game. At the end, you get the ability to just directly between the save points, and I don't know why you couldn't just do that since the beginning.

Finally, there are a ton of small animations, that were just super annoying and just waste time. Every time you interact with a save point, it takes 5s until you can quit the menu and continue moving. Buying or upgrading items takes like 15s each. When you pick up an item, you have to look at it, meaning you lose another 5s or so. By themselves it's not much, but there are so many items you can find, buy, upgrade, whatever. You'll of course constantly go up to a save point, to heal, switch gear or fast travel, it's just too much.

The game is kinda expensive, but when you see the credits and how many people worked on this (directly or indirectly) it wouldn't have been surprising to see an even higher price tag. Still, I'd recommend to wait for a sale, not that it's gonna take long, since it's an Ubisoft game.

The actual Game of the Year, that won't get the credit it deserves because Ubisoft are a garbage company