Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition - Switch 2 Review

There’s a small game you might have heard of coming to Nintendo Switch 2… Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, if it rings a bell? Enough of that; of course, 2022’s Game of the Year, developed by the legends that are FromSoftware, is now coming to a Nintendo console, complete with the DLC Shadow of the Erdtree. I still remember when it was originally announced… the Souls guys are making another Souls-like… But it’s open world?! That sounds incredible! How will it work? Will it still be incredibly difficult? So many questions at the time. I think they have since been answered for all, but now we have some new questions to answer. Does it work on a Nintendo console that has historically had some pretty shoddy AAA ports? Will it work well in handheld mode? Well, here I’ll try to answer those questions too!

The Good

I mean… It's Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition for goodness sake. Not since 1995’s Chrono Trigger has there been a more exciting ‘dream team’ of developers that bridges games and adjacent media forms. When developing Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition FromSoftware enlisted the help of an author called George RR Martin, who you MAY have heard of from writing some kind of fantasy book series… And yes, it absolutely shows in the gameplay. The gameworld of the Lands Between is not only gigantic, but it houses one of the finest pieces of world-building ever conceived in video games. The Lands Between and its various areas are dripping with interaction, encounters, treasure, NPCs and general craziness. Everywhere you turn something is happening; most of the time that thing that is happening is you being attacked by some ungodly demon-like creature. The sheer breadth of enemies in the bestiary is staggering; pretty much any enemy class you can think of features in Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition (yes, even lobsters), and they all want to destroy you with devastating effect. Couple that with the gothic, rich Lord of the Rings-like environments; it makes for some of the most memorable gameplay experiences of recent times.

Being a FromSoftware title, Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is full of RPG elements. You can choose your base character (from armoured knight down to some bloke wearing nothing but a loincloth over his Gollums), and then you can customise the bejesus out of it. You power up by use of runes as the main currency, and the more enemies you defeat, the more you can gain (they can also be found lying around in the world). You can choose to enhance health, strength, resistance and pretty much anything else. Coupled with the hundreds of weapons/armour/spells you can discover, it makes for a heady mix of freedom as to how you tackle the game. But, of course, there’s a catch – a catch that those pesky developers at FromSoftware invented themselves years ago… Die, and you lose your runes, unless you can make it back to the spot where you died to regain them (you have one chance). You will lose your runes A LOT, and every time it feels like a dagger to the heart (yay).

So, more on how Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition performs… Well, I’m pleased to say that in my many hours sunk into the game I had no crashes, hardly any juddering and only some ever-so-slight flickering graphics, but even the latter would be right on the distant horizon as things were loading in. It was barely noticeable. I was overall impressed with the performance, and whilst I haven’t played the original versions, I’ve read online that it compares favourably to them. I tried it in handheld mode too and, to be frank, Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition isn’t really a game intended for handheld mode. It was fine, but like a Christopher Nolan film, it’s something you really have to experience on the big screen.

TL;DR

• One of the most in-depth game worlds ever put together
• Endless customisation opportunities
• Runs pretty well on Nintendo Switch 2

The Bad

I’m going to find it hard to complain too much about 2022’s Game of the Year; however, there are certainly some elements of Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition that will put some people off. The most obvious one is the difficulty. I mean, if you start playing Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition expecting an easy ride, then where have you been for the last 15 years? FromSoftware goes out of their way to make your life as uncomfortable as possible, and they achieve that with immeasurable success. If you want a calm, fun, more accessible experience, then please stay well clear.

The story is also relatively light in Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, but again that has often been the case with FromSoftware. There’s an awesome opening cinematic, but due to the freedom of choosing where to go and most of the storytelling only happening on certain main-path beats, when I was five hours in trying to fend off rats and skeletons in a random cave that I found, I had almost forgotten what the gravelly-sounding man in the opening monologue (that accompanies the opening cinematic) had said. Something about rings, trees and baddies? I had a blast, but I felt like a bit of an unconscientious objector when it came to the story.

TL;DR

• Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is brutal, perhaps too brutal for some
• The story feels a bit lost in all of the chaos

Final Score: 9/10

This was always going to be a tricky review, and it was mostly going to be about how it ports across to the Switch 2. I had no complaints about the performance and of course Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition itself was voted Game of the Year for a reason. To that end, if you haven’t played the original and you like adventure games that you can sink hours of your time into, Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is one of those games that you MUST play in your lifetime. Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition has to be seen to be believed, and at times it took my breath away.

Thank you for checking out our Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition Switch review, thank you to Bandai Namco for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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