Last month, developer Techland revealed that its open world survival horror game – Dying Light – would be coming to Nintendo Switch. Bearing in mind its sheer scale and scope, plus the fact that the game targeted 30fps on the much more powerful PS4 and Xbox One, we had to wonder… could this conversion possibly work? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Dying Light has obvious compromises but the game is content-complete, performance is decent, image quality is better than expected and played in handheld form especially, it’s a treat.
To a certain extent, this port bucks the trend – many Switch conversions from the current-gen consoles run at 30fps from source material that ran at 2x frame-rate (an easy way to save on CPU and GPU resources). Meanwhile, resolution often comes crashing down, to the point where upscaling artefacts and blur can cause problems. Then there’s the whole concept of an open world with granular detail – a test for Switch’s memory, CPU and bandwidth, but an environment that simply has to be delivered with quality on a game like this.
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