Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition - Switch 2 Review

I’m not going to mince words here: As a long-time fan of the Fallout series, I am not a fan of Fallout 4. Its issues are myriad, from its design to its execution, such that upon its release it prompted a question I find myself asking even to this day. Do Bethesda understand their own IP? Mercifully for you, however, that’s not what this review is about. Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition is a polished version of the game, replete with add-on content and a few extras that wouldn’t have been present in the original release. For a game of its size, complexity, and notoriety, the way it runs on the Switch 2 isn't half bad. In general, this is actually a fine port, though not entirely without problems. Because Bethesda… Bethesda never changes. Let’s get into it.

The Good

I can’t believe I’m about to say this about a Bethesda Softworks product, but Fallout 4 on the Switch 2 runs very well. Aside from the odd issue typical of literally any Bethesda game regardless of platform, which I’ll get into later, this was practically smooth as butter. If you’ve played Fallout 4 on a PC of even mid-range specifications, you’ll notice load times are just a tad longer than what you’re used to, but by console standards, they’re downright reasonable. Even on handheld, which has problems we’ll get into later, the experience is surprisingly smooth. I can’t actually recall a point where the came had any kind of slowdown or stuttering while docked or in handheld, so there’s been some serious optimisation put into this. 

The additional Creations content does, at least in my opinion, make the world feel decidedly less empty. Not every Creations gun is a staggering titan of overwhelming firepower typical of the base end-game weapons, so it’s nice to have a few more-powerful-than-normal guns to play with along the way. The way they’re staged also helps the Commonwealth, which is supposed to be far from a desolate wasteland, feel much more lived in and active. There’s certainly an irony, however, about things feeling much more “complete” because of the largely fan-made content being present in a game that’s now more than ten years old. Typing that last part made my back hurt.

The Switch also feels like a good home for a game like Fallout 4. The world lends itself well to short jaunts about the wasteland, so fitting stuff into, say, the length of a work commute is totally doable. Bed rotting for hours with a Joy-Con in each hand, neither of which has moved from your side for hours while you loot ruined buildings after burnt-out bunkers just to make your post-apocashack a little prettier – also an option.

TL;DR

• Technically polished and runs smoothly
• Fun and fitting for handheld jaunts
• New creators' content adds world depth

The Bad

As mentioned, the game runs surprisingly well and this does extend to when it’s in handheld mode but it comes at a cost. While docked, the game looks great but turns the console thermonuclear and transforms the dock itself into a mini-jet engine with how hard it works the fans. Indeed, if you pull it out of the dock while the game is still running, the console fans will go insane trying to cool themselves as the game brings the quality down a noticeable amount. Textures are severely reduced in quality; there’s a persistent kind of fog to help hide the draw distance, like it’s Silent Hill, and overall it just doesn’t look as nice. That doesn’t mean it looks terrible. It’s the compromise that needs to be made for the game to continue running as smoothly as it does while in handheld mode, which it accomplishes, and none of it is exactly game-breaking. Your gun will still look like you pulled it straight out of 2009, though.

I should affirm, though, that this is still a Bethesda game. Which is to say, several hours into my playthrough, just as I was thinking to myself, “Gee, this has actually been running really smoothly!” That was the moment I had my first death for the playthrough and the game crashed to the console dashboard. Granted, that was the only time that particular issue happened, but there were still the occasional markers that you were, indeed, playing a Bethesda game: Detached body parts that are still somehow rigged to the corpse they were removed from, so they morbidly flail about as the body ragdolls, falling through the world because I clipped against the geometry wrong, and, on one distressing occasion, having the audio glitched out so that Dogmeat’s injured whining played on a constant loop even well after healing him until I reloaded the game. Again, I’m only remembering these things because they all only happened once but, collectively, they did still happen. Ah, Bethesda, never change. Not that I believe you really could, anyway.

TL;DR

• Handheld has large drop in visual quality
• Occasional classic “Bethesda” bugs

Final Score: 8/10

We’re at a weird stage with Bethesda where we’re reviewing their titles not because it’s something new they’ve released but because we’re ranking them as competing versions of themselves. In that sense, Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition for the Switch 2 is a great port and a fine example of a polished Bethesda product. If you’ve always wanted to play Fallout 4 and are now at a busy time in your life where you might want to chunk up that playtime a bit, this might be the best version for you.

Thank you for checking out our Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition Switch review, thank you to Bethesda (via Powerup PR) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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