➤ Bloodstained, the review for Nintendo Switch 🎮

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has finally come out on the market, and despite the problems in development, a certainly not extraordinary visual impact and some very small design slips, it has still given us an extraordinary return of Igarashi. The feeling of playing a again Castlevania of the highest level, as if it were a true heir of the never forgotten Symphony of the Night, it returns that sense of nostalgia and fulfillment that is precisely what the team has been trying since the announcement. A few days after the first release, the version for Nintendo Switch, which, unfortunately, is also the worst, with absolutely unjustified negative peaks. After the review of the PC version by our Simone Tagliaferri, the judgment on the port in question also arrives.

A brief summary

Let's do a brief summary regarding the game, before turning to the issues of the version in question. Bloodstained has a life of its own, inserted in a universe and a context that has nothing to do with the lore of Castlevania, if not for some very marked references regarding settings and enemies. The protagonist is such Miriam, a woman not totally human, part of the so-called Shardbinder: or individuals able to absorb some demonic elements, as well as to use them at will. Awakened after a long sleep, she is faced with a trail of death and destruction, which she soon discovers being carried out by her old partner. Gebel. He solemnly vows to save mankind from destruction, and this is how the main events of the campaign begin. The game is clearly the spiritual heir of those Castlevania who made the fortune of the genre and the author himself, trying to modernize the system with a component RPG extremely marked. The game is in fact full of weapons, armor, accessories and there is no lack of the possibility to create and eat assorted dishes of all kinds. To add meat to the fire there are five different types of demonic fragments acquirable, which allow you to activate active and passive skills ranging from classics incantations until the evocation of a multitude of familiars.

Each of these elements, be they rings, helmets, swords (or the inevitable whip) or even fragments, can be enhanced and fused together, transforming them into truly destructive abilities. The choice is vast, although this does not always reflect an adequate level of utility: many of the elements you will find (which also change the protagonist aesthetically), are in reality mere fillers. This does not mean that the team must be recognized for a considerable effort of creation, which goes hand in hand with work on environments and enemies of the highest level. Unfortunately, here the problem of the graphic engine comes into play, which returns a good three-dimensional sense within the 2D scrolling, but which suffers in the face of productions of the same kind and damn more successful, because they are often dedicated to a work of hand drawing that now allows extraordinary screen yields. To conclude the overview of the contents, one will think about it longevity around ten hours for a normal campaign process, which turn into at least fifteen (if you are quick and lucky) to discover 100% of the map. You can only play at the level of normal difficulty with the first pass, but there are two more. Over the months, a series of additional contents will arrive that could bring the playful offer to be really consistent, in the face of a current price that is not particularly friendly.

The Switch disaster

With a few days of unjustified but bearable delay, the Nintendo Switch version of Bloodstained arrives on the market. Last iteration realized, on which the works started even after the (later canceled) version PlayStation Vita, it is also the one that many backers of the project have chosen during the development phase, precisely because of its innate proximity to a console like the hybrid of Nintendo. Hidden until the end, it was immediately clear how this version lived with some more important problems than expected. A lesser aesthetic quality and greater visual grime of the code was to be expected, but what we have been faced with responds categorically to something very close to disaster. A year ago we reviewed another port (in that case even worse) for Switch, RiME. Bloodstained manages to fall into the calculation of playable titles, but it shows how the choice of the engine by the team was absolutely unhappy. The graphic downgrade is impressive, leading to a level of aliasing and lowering the resolution and details which is totally unjustified, considering the choice of lowering the frame rate to thirty frames per second. As if that were not enough, the latter are far from stable, on the contrary they constantly collapse until halving in some sections. An annoying one adds further problems input lag not present on the other version we tested, the PC one, which turns out to be a technical jewel from the point of view of fluidity and response to commands. Unfortunately we also have to report a couple of annoying crashes, which affected us even after upgrading to the latest version: a patch that, to be fair, has begun to solve a number of important limitations. In the last few hours the team has recognized the problems of this version and has reassured everyone that it will work to fix as much as possible the errors made, through further patches that will arrive at more or less regular intervals. What is unfortunate is that, at this point (and we always think so) it would have been better to postpone the Switch version for a few weeks, rather than just a few days, trying to come out on the market in a way as close as possible to the performance of the other versions.

Comment

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7.5

Readers (14)

7.4

Your vote

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the most viscerally intense a Castlevania lover could wish for. Whoever buys it will find all the legacy of an unforgotten series in front of it, except from the same house that owns the rights. Unfortunately, the Switch version suffers from a series of still important problems, albeit in the process of being resolved and that is why, if you do not want to wait, we strongly advise you to turn to the other versions (PC above all) to fully enjoy an extraordinary title.