Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
It’s no lie that the newest spiritual success to the Castlevania series, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, is a fantastic game. It successfully manages to bring that RPG system and backtracking gameplay back from the past and blends it with modern controls.
But I’m sad to say this to all of you: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night runs poorly on the Nintendo Switch and is a port that should’ve maybe cooked in the oven just a tad bit longer.
It’s locked at 30 frames per second, which is a noticeable difference compared to the other consoles and PC. The game gets laggy from time to time, especially when you’re attempting to transition from area to area.
Our reviews editor, Zhiqing, even encountered loading times of upwards to ten seconds only when she was traversing from screen to screen. Bloodstained just looks like an unpolished, janky, and rough port on the hybrid Nintendo console, and it’s a shame — because Ritual of the Night is a very good game.
Rime
Rime was such a visually appealing game for people who liked cartoon-esque adventure games like Zelda or Shadow of the Colossus. This single-player adventure game throws you onto a mysterious island where you solve puzzles, meet a bunch of animal friends, and discover hidden secrets.
It’s really charming and was quite fun to play on the PS4, but the Switch port that came out several months after didn’t do the game justice.
Due to the nature of the power of the Switch, Rime suffered from lifeless textures, frame rate dips, noticeable lag, and muddy textures and details. It just didn’t look or play as well as the other consoles and that’s just unfortunate.
Rime is such a beautiful game that tells an emotional tale but if you were excited to play this game on handheld mode on the Switch, you probably should rethink that. It looks way better and feels better if you play it on the other systems.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Ark: Survival Evolved lets players live out their perfect cave-man style of living. You start off with essentially nothing on your person besides a loincloth and then you have to explore the world with limited supplies. You also have to worry about your hunger, thirst, and other human things, or else you’ll end up dead.
The best part? You get to tame dinosaurs, and ride them! There’s a lot to do in Survival Evolved and when you play on a multiplayer server, this is where things go very wrong with the Switch port of this game.
Okay, so Survival Evolved has never looked good, even on the other consoles, but on the Switch, it falls prey to all of your typical issues: bad pop-in texture, long loading times, frame-rate drops, missing textures… you name it.
The worst part about this port is that it costs $50 on the Switch eShop which just feels like a high price to pay for a game with so many issues and tech annoyances.
WWE 2K18
You know, since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate offers thrilling eight-player matches, I would expect for a new wrestling game to have it, but you know what? WWE 2K18 actually did feature impressive and heart-pumping wrestling matches with up to eight brawlers, but the Switch port removes the mode entirely –just one of the few bad things that this Switch port brings with it.
WWE 2K18 looks like a PS2 game with slightly updated visuals –slightly. The game slows to a crawl during wrestler entrances. It freezes up when there’s too much action on the screen, and there are just a lot of little bugs that further diminishes the experience.
I would rather wrestle with my cousins in the living room than try playing a clean match of WWE 2K18 on the Switch. Unless you’re a die-hard WWE fan and want to play it on the go for the rest of your life, stay far away from this port. It was so bad in-fact that future iterations have been cancelled indefinitely.
Payday 2
Payday 2 is probably one of the better games on this list that actually work OK on the Nintendo Switch, especially playing while docked. However, this version of the cooperative first-person shooter is missing content like missions and cosmetic items, and also in-game voice chat, which is a must for a title such as this.
The other versions of Payday 2 have more missions and masks than the Switch port, and you’ll have a much smoother gameplay experience on PS4, XB1, and PC. There are choppy frame-rates in heavy firefights, backgrounds don’t have much detail, and there’s lag that makes shooting much harder and less precise.
The only reason to play this on the Switch would be if you don’t own anything else. Communication is such a big component if you plan on completing heists with your friends and it’s unfortunate that the Switch can’t give players that option with voice chat.
