The deluge of Wii U ports for Switch continues and the recent arrival of Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition offers up a great opportunity to improve a game that was somewhat disappointing – in performance, at least – on the older system. The good news then: developer Omega Force’s efforts on Switch satisfy on several key fronts, and it’s easily the most feature-complete version of the game. However we’re still one patch away from perfection, since this new release is marred by some highly questionable tech decisions – most curious of all being that Switch’s mobile mode downsamples from 1080p, with a disastrous impact to performance.
But let’s rewind and look at the game more generally. Hyrule Warriors is another in a long line of ‘musou’ titles inspired by Dynasty Warriors – action fighting games defined by the concept of pitting the player character against a legion of cannon-fodder opponents. The PlayStation 2 series entries all ran at a beautiful 60 frames per second, but with the migration of the concept onto Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Koei experimented with dropping frame-rate to 30fps on certain games, while others still targeted the full 60. It’s a level of experimentation that has seen performance generally move in the wrong direction for the ‘Warriors’ games, culminating in the unfortunate release of Dynasty Warrior 9, one of the worst performing titles of the current-gen era.
Released towards the end of 2014, Hyrule Warriors on Wii U was another game that fell short in the performance stakes, struggling to maintain its target 30 frames per second, and actually running more slowly than the (admittedly less complex) New 3DS version. Switch was a chance to put things right, and to give the developer its due here, playing when docked offers huge frame-rate and resolution advantages. Wii U’s native 720p gives way to full 1080p on Switch, while the tepid sub-30fps performance level is now unlocked, scaling from anywhere between 35fps and 60fps. It’s not ideal, but even if it is wavering under that target 60Hz refresh, the upgrade over Wii U is clear. Put in context with a like-for-like combat scene, we noted a 19fps advantage in favour of Switch.
Source: Eurogamer Hyrule Warriors' decent Switch port is marred by weird tech decisions