-
As with my review of DOOM before it you’ll notice that to this point I haven’t brought up the Switch itself in regards to the game and that’s for good reason. Aside from some unique features it brings to the game in the form of some Amiibo support (which awaits you roughly mid-game in a prominent area), motion controls that you may enjoy or not care for, and the ability to take the game anywhere there’s not a lot to say. The reason for that is in this equation the Switch only seems to have pluses and no discernable minuses. The conversion of Skyrim is, for all practical purposes, a flawless one from the time I’ve spent in the game. The details are crisp, the performance has no signs of hiccups or slowdown, and despite being run on a tablet-sized device with much more modest memory capacity than larger consoles or PCs there seem to be no compromises in sight. The only edge would go to the PC version for its readily-available mod support that can help you alter the game in some substantial ways, but in the case of the Switch the ability to play it anywhere in style more than offsets that sacrifice and even arguably makes it a superior version to the other consoles. Despite its age Skyrim is just as rich and robust a game experience as it ever was, and the fact that it can be played on a portable device is a technical achievement worthy of some praise. Congratulations to the team at Nintendo for making versatile hardware capable of this feat and to Bethesda for having both the vision and expertise to pull this off and to set the bar so high for the other major publishers.
Justin Nation, Score:Hall-Of-Fame [9.7]