While I’ve been a fan of first-person shooting titles, I’ll admit that more often than not they tend to follow a very simple and set formula. Identify bad guys, kill bad guys, get better weapons for killing bad guys more efficiently, and enjoy the carnage. The thing is, for the most part that tends to work out just fine when the action is intense and engaging, but it is nice to see some variety as well. No matter what else you walk away from Chernobylite thinking, it absolutely deserves credit for daring to be a bit different. The problem is that it doesn’t seem like the Switch is the ideal platform for enjoying the best it has to offer.

With its very wild sci-fi edge, and an undeniably grim and pretty oppressive setting, it gets off to a very different start than you may be expecting. Rather than keeping the focus on headshots and mowing through enemies, this is designed to be a slower and typically more stealthy affair, though it isn’t unusual for your efforts to remain undetected falling apart, and then needing to improvise and use some deadly force. While carefully moving around and ambushing enemies is possible, and can work if you’re patient, my tendencies would typically only work for so long, then requiring a tense firefight. The thing is, most typically your missions aren’t to simply kill everyone in sight, they’re more focused on acquiring resources and simply some food to keep everyone alive. So there are typically situations in each mission where you’ll need to debate your approach, sticking to only what you need to do, and not allowing yourself to get distracted into doing more.

The problem is that you’ll have multiple obstacles getting in the way of making this a good time, at least on the Switch. Unfortunately, the first and foremost problem is simply overall stability and performance. Game crashes are never much fun, and I ran into more than I typically would on the system, even in more demanding games. Even when you’re stable, there’s no question that the creepy areas you’ll be working in are markedly less immersive and impressive on the Switch’s hardware which struggles a bit to keep up. While the fog and haze problems are thankfully not to the classic N64 Turok levels, they’re still not great and they make enjoying the game on Switch more of an issue, even if portability is convenient. 

In the end, this is one of those tough situations where you can sense that there’s something interesting and different here to enjoy, but it’s clear that the hardware is plainly getting in the way of digging it as much as you could. No matter how impressive the hardware may be when handled properly, or how convenient it is to be able to take your games along with you to play portably, there’s a point where it’s clear the experience has been compromised in a way that makes it preferable to try it out on another platform. This appears to be one of those cases.