The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Nintendo Switch Edition Reviews
Motion controls add a breath of fresh air to a familiar game, with astounding results. A must-have for anyone with a Switch and a love of open world games.
When you’re done with the main quest, you can still go out and explore the map. You never know what you might find. Or, you can even choose to live like an NPC, walking around town for days on end, doing nothing but sleeping, drinking, and then work on a farm or things NPCs do. You can buy a house, fill the shelves with books, adopt a kid, be a good dad. Or you can be a tyrant, killing everyone on town. But who would do that, really? He-he. Excuse me while I load a save.
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.
Any additional time you can spend sneaking in dungeon crawls while at work, carrying out Dark Brotherhood assassinations at family dinners, and crafting new equipment when you probably should be sleeping is the best addition to enhance the experience. I'm overjoyed that Bethesda has been able to bring Skyrim to the Switch without any compromises to the quality of the original game. After playing Skyrim on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, I can easily say that the Switch provides the best experience possible. Bethesda is more than welcome to bring all their games over to Switch now, especially if each game is brought over with the same winning effort of Skyrim.
Being able to take this huge adventure with you everywhere you go is fantastic, and, if you thought that Skyrim took over your life before, now it actually can.
Despite the fact that it's probably being developed for refrigerators at this point, Skyrim is a great choice to port to the Switch. Very little had to actually be compromised, and unless you have a thing for high-res texture packs on PC, you aren't missing out on much.
When I ask myself what I'm willing give up to play this on a portable, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on Nintendo Switch allows me to answer "I don't have to give up much of anything."