The Switch 2’s Game Ports Have Reached Their High-Water Mark

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. The game suffered a bit more during cutscenes, where I spotted some instances of odd textures when we got too close to some characters. Regular gameplay proved much smoother.

Some commentators online seem to think that the game running this well is a small miracle. It’s not. It’s an effect of what happens when developers put effort into a port. Star Wars Outlaws was built first for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. The game cannot run well on a Steam Deck. It’s a title that will prove difficult to maintain stable frame rates on more powerful handheld PCs like the Asus ROG Ally X, even at 25W or 30W TDP, or thermal design power. The game relies on ray tracing by default, which means it will also lean on upscaling technology such as AMD’s FidelityFx Super Resolution 3. Even then, Outlaws was not built for small devices. It can’t maintain a stable frame rate.

The Switch 2 runs at a much lower TDP than high-end handheld PCs and even lower than the Steam Deck’s max 15W. And still, it looks damn good. Developers at Massive Entertainment, who created the first game, worked with Ubisoft Red Links for the port. The extra time and attention paid off. There are a few extra features included, such as touchscreen support in some Wordle-like puzzles. You won’t miss much playing in docked or in handheld mode, anyway.

Sorry, no physical edition

Nintendo has the pull to push publishers and developers to design games around the handheld hardware, even if it means losing out on 4K assets available for higher-end consoles. However, it comes at the cost of game preservation. There is no physical version of Outlaws like there is with Cyberpunk 2077. It’s either a game-key card or digital download for a mere 21GB (the PC version is closer to 60GB). Massive Entertainment may have an excuse for why there’s no physical version. Rob Bantin, the audio architect for the Snowdrop engine, wrote on Bluesky that the game relies on fast disk streaming for its open worlds, and the flash storage on Switch 2 game cards isn’t fast enough. “I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up, it might have been different,” Bantin said.

It’s a Ubisoft game in Star Wars clothing

The game is a looker. If that’s all that matters to you, it’s worth the trip to the outer rim to see the sights. Whether Star Wars Outlaws is the game for you should depend wholly on how well you can stomach the prototypical “Ubisoft formula” of open-world game design. The protagonist, Kay Vess, is a strangely naive scoundrel who seems to stumble from big-name job to big-name job like a drunk confused about how they ended up working for the galaxy’s largest and most dangerous crime syndicates. In usual Ubisoft fashion, players are forced to interact with all the game’s many, many systems slowly over time in what can only be described as extra-long tutorials.

One mission asks you to upgrade your speeder—the main way players zip around the open world. That mission requires players to travel to three separate points on a map, and then when you finally find the lone speeder mechanic who can install the most basic upgrade to your device, you then have to crawl around an Imperial base to get a lone part just to trudge back and finally fix up your bike. All the while, Kay “ummms” and “uhhhs” her way through conversations in a way that makes her seem like the most alien creature in a universe filled with blue-skinned Chiss, humanoid guinea pig-faced Chadra-Fan, and a literal talking fish in a jar that you break out of prison. It doesn’t help that the lip syncing often doesn’t match up to characters’ speech. Kay grows more confident over the course of the game, but in an effort to shoehorn players into the main gameplay loop, Outlaws loses a chance for players to grow alongside Kay in more than mere upgrades to her blaster or spaceship, the Trailblazer.

It’s the kind of game that will fill your journal with enough quests and missions to play for dozens or hundreds of hours, but I can only stomach so much of the game’s quest design. Star Wars Outlaws can feel overburdened with choice and still all too simple when each quest revolves around the same “go here, sneak into base, steal object, leave” quest design. They’re similar problems for Ubisoft’s other open-world series, from Far Cry to Assassin’s Creed. Cloaked in Star Wars’ high-tech, low-society aesthetic, Outlaws feels familiar in two ways that gel together but never truly stick.

On the Switch 2, where I can take Outlaws with me for short stints of sneaking and stealing, the game feels at home. It also marks a high-water mark for Switch 2 ports. Now with Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws running so well on the system, other developers have less of an excuse if we end up with titles that can’t hit playable framerates. This sets high expectations for upcoming ports of games like Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and Elden Ring. Borderlands 4, which is facing a small player rebellion over performance issues on both consoles and PC, is set to hit Switch 2 on Oct. 3. It will be up to developers to make sure their games play well on the handheld.