Outer Worlds on Switch: A monumental, messy conversion on weak hardware
Eight months after its launch on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, The Outer Worlds remains an easy recommendation for a Fallout-caliber single-player adventure (and it's still part of an Xbox Game Pass subscription). But let's say you haven't grabbed the game yet, either because you don't own those consoles or because you're waiting for its premiere on PC storefronts like Steam (coming no earlier than this October). Or maybe you just want a portable version.
In that case, is Friday's launch of a Nintendo Switch port (Amazon, Nintendo eShop) right for you? In our incomplete testing of the Switch version, the answer to that question is fuzzy-about as fuzzy as the port's resolution and presentation.
Content, frames, and motion controls
Having just awoken from an incredibly long cryo-sleep, Outer Worlds players on Switch may wonder if the lengthy rest affected how blurry their hands look. That's not the reason. (All images were captured using Nintendo Switch's built-in capture tool.)
In good news, the entire game appears to have been ported with zero cuts to content or apparent changes to level layouts. The opening planet is a good test of the larger game's sales pitch. You'll eventually hop from one planet to the next, each with giant fields to traverse, monsters to fight, and citizen-filled towns to contend with. And right from the jump, the game remains the same mechanically. You'll see a ship's wreckage in the distance, run a ways to reach it, and find it littered with loot, dead bodies, and dangerous monsters. Then you'll reach a town full of chatty NPCs, and if you decide to take Obsidian Entertainment up on the devs' promise of playing however you like and attack the townspeople, the locals will react by running around and fighting back.
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