Dark Souls Remastered hitting the Switch a few months after it released on other platforms might not prove to be an essential purchase for fans of the franchise, if only for the fact that it isn’t technically the best version of the game available. What it does offer that is completely unique to every other version of Dark Souls out there is that this can be played portably, which may be enough of a selling point for Souls-lovers who want to get their frustrating fix on-the-go.

The idea of a portable Dark Souls sounds like it should be a winner, but somehow it’s not. Dark Souls Remastered is hitting the Nintendo Switch this week, and after spending a few days with the final build of the game, it’s left me disappointed.Dark Souls Remastered was originally for the Switch at the start of the year, and it was slated for a summer release. However, it ended up getting, and we went months without hearing anything new about the Switch port until Bandai Namco finally announced its new October release date. From what I’ve played, though, it looks like it could’ve used a bit more time in the oven.There are quite a few changes and compromises to expect before you go jumping into From Software’s magnum opus. First is the graphical quality and resolution, especially when compared to its console counterparts. I the PS4 version of the game earlier this year, and I praised it for being the definitive version of the game for console players. Art of conquest races.

4K support and consistent 60fps? Perfection.Needless to say, the Switch itself is at a bit of a disadvantage on the hardware side. The game runs at 720p in handheld mode, and 1080p when docked. I spent most of my time with the game in handheld mode, and yes, the graphical hit is definitely noticeable.

Still, Dark Souls is a beautiful game, and I found myself impressed by the very fact that developing studio Virtuous managed to cram this massive game onto the Switch.However, upon further inspection, I noticed that the Switch version of the game doesn’t actually feature all the little graphical improvements and details that we saw on the PS4 and Xbox One. Other who checked out the Network Test came to the same conclusion as well. Dark Souls Remastered on Switch lacks the little details like the updated bonfires and the prettier item pickup orbs.

Textures aren’t quite as crisp as we’d come to expect from the ‘Remastered’ branding of the game. And in all honesty, Dark Souls Remastered on Switch looks like a port of the Prepare to Die Edition, except with the quality of life improvements like UI adjustments and better online servers.This may or may not be an issue for you as a Dark Souls player. There are people in the community who are perfectly fine with the PtD graphics, and some will even argue that the old-school bonfire looks better than the Remastered one. If you get the game on Switch, you’ll still be able to enjoy the gameplay tweaks like being able to remap your buttons (but not the confirm/cancel buttons for some reason), adjusting your HUD and UI, and other little things like popping multiple soul items at once. Personally, I would’ve preferred to see the Remastered graphical improvements as well, but this isn’t a deal-breaker by any stretch of the imagination.

What is more concerning, though, is just how awful the game sounds on Switch. This is an issue that I’d first noticed while playing through the Network Test as well, and a common complaint that players had was how weird and compressed the audio was.

Sound effects felt muddy and crunchy, with no range to speak of.To my surprise, Dark Souls Remastered on Switch had a download and install size of only 4GB, which gave me the sneaking suspicion that perhaps the audio issues were still persistent even in the final build. And they are.

The tiny size is great for my SD card but sound effects are still muddied, and the music tracks sound flat. It’s not too bad when you’re playing the game with TV or monitor speakers, but it becomes very noticeable and very jarring when you have headphones on. It’s definitely a huge disappointment because the game has effectively been spoiled from an audio and sound perspective, and this is important for a game like Dark Souls, where sound cues are so crucial and music plays such a large part in setting the tone.On the bright side, though, the game actually runs very smoothly in both docked and handheld modes. Frame rate seems to be capped at 30fps, but it’s consistent, and had no discernible effect on my gameplay.

During my Switch playthrough, I managed to clear Anor Londo with a new pyro build, and it was certainly nice being able to see what I was actually doing in the infamous areas like New Londo and Blighttown.Playing through the game with the tiny Joy-Cons is, of course, every bit as uncomfortable as I’d imagined it to be, and considering that Dark Souls isn’t exactly the type of game that lends itself well to the on-the-go, short burst experience, I found myself thinking wistfully of the version of the game that was installed on my PS4 instead. Still, these are fairly minor concessions to make for the player who absolutely wants to play Dark Souls Remastered in a portable format.If, however, the portability aspect isn’t crucial for you, there’s absolutely no reason to pick up Dark Souls Remastered on Switch. With the scaled back graphics and the awful audio, the Switch version is, sadly, simply a hollowed out version of one of the best action RPGs in the last decade. Play it on PS4 or Xbox One instead.

Here we go again, and for the last time. Dark Souls has been an integral part of the gaming hive mind for a few years now, becoming a go-to comparison for many games of a similar genre going forwards. Now, Dark Souls: Remastered has come to Nintendo Switch, and I’ve found myself once more walking through the ruined land of Lordran.The story follows the Chosen Undead, controlled by the player, on their quest to fulfil their destiny and learn the fate of the undead.

What transpires is your typical dark fantasy narrative complete with massive beasts, ancient demons, forbidden magic, and fallen knights. However, and, a lot of this tale is told through item descriptions, disparate dialogue, and architectural detail.This means that the player can be as involved with the narrative of Dark Souls as they wish to be. It does mean that players that don’t engage with it can miss some of the grandeur of certain boss encounters who can be built up by the mythos that surrounds them. It takes a lot of work and research to uncover everything that the world of Lordran wishes to tell, with some of the most tremendously esoteric side quests in gaming, but the story is arguably worth the effort.Lordran itself is the true star of this game. The player is thrown into a huge sprawling, interconnected world, with little direction or signposting.

The only clues you have to the direction of progress have to be gleaned from dialogue or by simply exploring. Amongst the winding climbing through gothic buildings and wading through poisonous swamps, the player can find shortcuts to ease subsequent forays and bonfires, the bastions of the game.The reasons why the bonfires are so important is because they are the only reprieve you will get in a game that prides itself on relentless difficulty, even if that difficulty is sometimes based on janky controls.

The game will see you dying a lot, and will return you to the last bonfire that you rested at, giving wonderful moments of tension in which you have long since moved away from a bonfire and are holding onto a terrifying amount of Souls you do not wish to lose.Souls are your currency, tools for upgrades, and also the substance that you use for levelling up, so it would make sense as to why you wouldn’t want to lose them. They are dropped by enemies or found in consumable chunks, and will be lost if you do not manage to collect them after a death.

This makes each run a tense experience as you try to avoid the copious amounts of ways you can die on your way to recollecting the Souls you dropped.While on your quest, you’ll take on a bevy of your typical Dungeons and Dragons menagerie of enemies; from living skeletons, to huge axe-wielding demons, and the shambling undead. The combat of Dark Souls is well known by now; a methodical dance of guarding, rolling and attacking.

More so than most games, there is a definitely purposeful air to the combat, with a slow and considered approach needed to take down all foes, but especially the bosses.These form one of the most recognisable aspects of the game, are where a lot of the greatest moments of Dark Souls occur. Mammoth challenges to overcome, and regularly larger than the player and much more intimidating, these form the true test of your skills with the game. However, with careful play and either tight defence or dodging (or both, I guess), you can defeat these terrible beasts.This all sounds wonderful, but Dark Souls: Remastered is a clunky game, and that is utterly indisputable at this point. The drop in framerate for the Switch version of the remaster versus the other versions is actually painfully noticeable. Furthermore, the Joy-Cons are not the best control method for this game, resulting in a lot more mistakes on my part that I haven’t made on previous playthroughs.

This last point is a personal gripe, sure, but if a seasoned player has issues playing, there’s little else that can be a reason for it.Furthermore, this port sadly shows in full how poor this remaster actually is from an aesthetic standpoint. Some of this can be put down to it being on the Switch, as we already knew that there was going to be a drop in graphical fidelity and framerate from its counterparts. However, what this has done is show how little effort was put into this remaster. The excessive increase to the bloom effect has simply shone a light on how shoddy some of the areas look, and how insignificant the visual refinements actually were.Musically, I stand by what I said during my previous review, this game is phenomenal. The marked separation between the silence of exploration and the epic sweeping orchestral scores that support the bosses is sublime.

However, in this version of the game, I experienced a lot of audio desynchronisation, which I don’t recall in other versions. This doesn’t sound like much, but in a game that relies on audiovisual feedback during combat, this is incredibly distracting at best or fatal for the player at worst.It’s somewhat sad that the last version we have got of the original Dark Souls is by far the worst version of the game. All of the smaller refinements and the portability of this version pale before the fact that this one edition exposes just how clunky and shoddy this ‘upgrade’ is, even to the point of somewhat retroactively diminishing my view of the (admittedly far superior) PS4 version.

It still looks and feels great at points, but this just doesn’t look or feel as good as it could.I understand and admit that this level of criticism would not be exacted upon the game if it weren’t for two playthroughs of Lordran being this year, but this just means that I’ve played a far superior version to this one. If you have never played Dark Souls before, this version is completely worthwhile, but I could not recommend more that veterans of the game steer very clear of this as it is barely a step above the original game and in some ways is far worse.Dark Souls: Remastered is out for Nintendo Switch on October 19th, and is already available on Playstation 4, XBox One and PC. Do you think you will pick up this version of the game?

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