All around a bad port

Alan Wake is now available on the Nintendo Switch. Although the game was remastered for current generation consoles, it is still a poor port.

When the decision to release Alan Wake on the Nintendo Switch was officially confirmed earlier, most fans had hoped that it would leave a decent port just like No Man’s Sky. It turns out, not only are the visuals severely cut back on the Nintendo Switch, but the game’s performance still manages to struggle to hit a target of 30 FPS.

When playing in docked mode, Alan Wake runs at 594p resolution on the Nintendo Switch. This is somewhat blurry and ugly when you play the game on the big monitor. The resolution drops to 396p when you switch to portable mode on the Nintendo Switch. The Xbox One version runs it at 900p at 30 frames per second. Alan Wake has a 30 FPS target for frame rate on the Nintendo Switch but doesn’t quite manage to hit it or come close to it.

The Nintendo Switch version can often average between 20 and 30 FPS, with a closer range of 20 to 30 FPS. This was despite the fact that the game ran at a resolution of 720p and 30 FPS on a console older than the Xbox 360.

Graphics have been drastically reduced, with heavy cuts to shadows, textures, draw distance and other visual elements. It is even worse than the Xbox 360 version, which is an unanswered question. The game was shipped in this unplayable state by the developers. They have made visual cuts and dropped the resolution. There are a lot of compromises here which are certainly not promising since we have seen some fairly demanding games running on the Nintendo Switch including Doom and No Man’s Sky.

Alan Wake is now available on the Nintendo Switch. However, it is better to avoid this version.