


Frame rate seems to be capped at 30fps, but it’s consistent, and had no discernible effect on my gameplay. On the bright side, though, the game actually runs very smoothly in both docked and handheld modes. 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. 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. The tiny size is great for my SD card but sound effects are still muddied, and the music tracks sound flat. 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. 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.

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. 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. This may or may not be an issue for you as a Dark Souls player. 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. Textures aren’t quite as crisp as we’d come to expect from the ‘Remastered’ branding of the game. Dark Souls Remastered on Switch lacks the little details like the updated bonfires and the prettier item pickup orbs. Other eagle-eyed players who checked out the Network Test came to the same conclusion as well.

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.
