‚Star Wars Outlaws‘ on Switch 2 shows us how power doesn’t matter nearly as much as a developer who puts in the time.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is not the most powerful game console, not by a long shot. Instead, it is powerful enough to give developers the breathing room to port modern games to it. Where the original Switch forced developers to pare back visuals, Star Wars Outlaws, which launched on Nintendo’s handheld on Sept. 4, signals what players should come to expect with Switch 2 ports. It still has the best parts of what made the game beautiful in 2024. On handheld, it may finally be worth slogging through the Ubisoft open-world formula.
I’m still floored by how well Cyberpunk 2077 runs on Switch 2, and Star Wars Outlaw is a very well-optimized port. The game maintained a stable 30 fps frame rate throughout the hours I spent playing the game over the past week. I never experienced a hitch or a dip. Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine, which boasts excellent ray-traced lighting effects, is still in full effect on the Switch 2 version of Star Wars Outlaws. The neon lights of the game’s many cantinas bloom off the polished bar tables while outside lights beam in through broken slits of saloon windows. There are so many great effects to enhance the gritty tone of the game, such as the faux dirt bespeckling the screen—as if you were filming each scene in a dustbowl.A Galaxy far, far away in handheld form
No, it doesn’t look as good as the game running on a full desktop PC with a high-end gaming CPU and a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. There are subtle fluctuations and an odd, blurry aura around Outlaws’ protagonist Kay’s hair. The anti-aliasing, which reduces jagged edges in scenery, is less smooth than the game running on a high-end PC. I also experienced multiple instances of flickering shadows. That, I would attribute to issues caused by the game relying on DLSS, Nvidia’s version of AI upscaling that renders the game at a lower resolution and uses AI to make it appear at a higher resolution.
All these issues are minor compared to the spectacle of the game running so damn well, both in 1080p in handheld mode and at 1440p when docked and connected to a TV. In handheld mode, I could see a few more jagged outlines and more flickering, which is likely due to the game rendering at a much lower 540p resolution before being upscaled. The draw distance is also scaled back slightly, and you’ll see more textures and shrubbery “pop in” as you roll across these open environments. In either case, I was amazed at the number of effects still present in the game, especially when the wind shuddered the grass in long waves in the game’s open-world sections.
