Crash Bandicoot 4: It was time arrives on Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 5, PC and Switch tomorrow, giving us some of the most refined versions of last year’s excellent platform game alongside one that fights hard, but gets the job done. Digital Foundry compared the PS5 and Switch versions side by side, and the differences are, not surprisingly, very dramatic.
I reviewed Crash Bandicoot 4 on PlayStation 4, where it worked normally. I remember the strange slowness during particularly busy levels, but never enough to condemn the game for eternity. I’ve been playing the PlayStation 5 version for a few days and it’s almost perfect. It is locked at 60 frames per second consistent in 4K, and I haven’t seen it waver yet. As a fan of faster monitors, I would love to see a 1440p mode running at 120 frames per second, but I don’t love speed here. I like it to load a little faster. I was looking forward to the PS5 version for the challenge cards, but for some reason they did it so I have to make my way through the main story before the cards help me finish collecting all the collectible items and counter rewards -clock.
Is anyone surprised that a video game works better on a more powerful system? No? How about a video game running worse on a less powerful system?
The Switch version of Crash Bandicoot 4 it doesn’t work at 4K60, obviously. It doesn’t even reach 1080p in docked mode, keeping 720p quite stable at 30 frames per second, which of course means it has a much more cinematic appearance (coughing). Undocked, the resolution drops to 540p, which looks very dramatic, but it doesn’t matter much when you’re looking at a smaller portable screen.
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It’s still a beautiful game on the Switch. It is nowhere near as beautiful as on the PS5 or even on the PS4. One reason for this is the lighting effects. The Switch version renders dynamic lights only when they are close or completely eliminates them. 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 Unreal Engine 4 to run smoothly on Nintendo hardware, the Switch version also makes less use of particles and loses landscape details. Textures, water rendering and shadows are all reduced for the Switch.
The biggest downgrade for the Switch version, which I can’t help seeing now that I’ve watched the Digital Foundry vid, is the lack of motion blur by object. More powerful systems use post-processing motion blur to soften the animation, giving the game a more CGI-like cartoon feel. The Switch does not use these effects, so the animation looks a little more irregular. It’s something I never would have noticed if I hadn’t seen the comparison side by side, and now it’s making my eyes 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 was time. That said, here’s the Digital Foundry video.
It’s cool to see all the little things that change when scaling a game engine from a glorified Android tablet to a next-generation high-powered console, even if it completely destroys a version of Crash Bandicoot 4 for me.
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