Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s time arrives tomorrow on Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 5, PC and Switch, giving us some of the most erased versions of last year’s excellent platformer, along with one that struggles a lot but does its job. Digital Foundry compared the PS5 and Switch versions side by side, and the differences are not at all surprising, quite dramatic.
I revised Crash Bandicoot 4 on PlayStation 4, where it worked especially well. I remember the strange moment of slowing down during the particularly crowded levels, but never enough for me to condemn the game for eternity. I’ve been playing the PlayStation 5 version for a few days and it’s almost perfect. It’s locked at 60 frames per second at 4K, and I still haven’t seen it falter. As a fan of faster monitors, I would love to see a 1440p mode that works at 120 frames per second, but I don’t get fast love here. I like that it charges a little faster. I was looking forward to the PS5 version for the challenge books, but for some reason, they managed to get to the main story before the books helped me finish collecting all the time collectors and rewards.
Has anyone been surprised that a video game runs better on a more powerful system? Not? How about a video game that works worse on a less powerful system?
Switch version a Crash Bandicoot 4 not running at 4K60, obviously. It doesn’t even reach 1080p in docked mode, maintaining a fairly stable 720p at 30 frames per second, which means, of course, that it looks much more cinematic (cough). Unlocked, the resolution drops to 540p, which sounds very dramatic, but it doesn’t matter much when you look at a smaller portable screen.
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It’s still a good-looking game on the Switch. It’s not nearly as handsome as the PS5 or even the PS4. One of the reasons is the lighting effect. The Switch version either renders dynamic lights only when they are at close range or eliminates them altogether. Digital FoundryThe video shows some great examples of this, such as the absence of lightning at an early stage of the Switch.
In order for the Unreal Engine 4 game to run smoothly on Nintendo hardware, the Switch version uses less particles and loses landscape detail. Textures, water rendering and shadows are all reduced for the Switch.
The biggest downgrade for the Switch version, which I can’t see now that I’ve watched Digital Foundry vacuum, is the lack of movement per object. More powerful systems use post-processing motion blur to smooth the animation, giving the game a more CGI cartoon feel. The switch does not use these effects, so the animation shows a little more. It’s something I would never have noticed if I hadn’t seen the comparison, and now it makes my eye twitch every time I notice it.
As long as you don’t watch the Digital Foundry video, you’ll be fine with any version of Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s time. That being said, here it is Digital Foundry video.
It’s nice to see all the little things that change when you scale a game engine from a glorified Android tablet to a next-generation high-power console, even if it completely destroys a version of Crash Bandicoot 4 for me.
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