Resident Evil 7 “almost” makes us forget that we are on a Nintendo console
Resident Evil 7 is a first-person action-adventure game set a few years after the previous episode. In this seventh opus, we play Ethan Winters who goes looking for his wife Mia, after a distress call from Louisiana. Very quickly, our protagonist comes across the Bakers family seriously affected by a mysterious virus. Our hero will have to face each member of this family one by one to hope to save his beloved, and to save himself.
While we were only supposed to do a simple overview of the software, with the sole aim of seeing how it runs on Nintendo Switch 2, we were surprised to once again come to the end of this Resident Evil 7. In addition to displaying perfectly good graphics for a portable console, the software also allows itself a 60 FPS of the most stable. That said, the opposite would have surprised us. However, we were treated to a few framerate drops when we left the house and landed in the garden, but nothing dramatic.
If we manage to ignore the less pretty graphics than on a PC version, the 60 FPS and the comfort of being able to play it everywhere make us almost forget that we are on Switch 2. Except when the battery catches up with us and drops quickly after an hour and a half of play.
Unfortunately, for those wanting to play with the Joy-Con in mouse mode, this is not possible, whether on RE 7 Or Village. However, it is possible to activate the movement detection of the controller while aiming, in order to make the weapon move at the same time as our controller, or our console.
Which is the complete opposite of Resident Evil Village…
A few years after the events with the Bakers family, Ethan and Mia meet again and form a family again with the birth of little Rose. However, the peace is only short-lived, when Chris Redfield comes to kill Mia in cold blood before the eyes of Ethan, who is in turn kidnapped with his daughter, in the first five minutes of the game. Our protagonist finds himself on the other side of the ocean, in Europe, in a snowy village completely prey to monsters. This time he is not only looking for his wife, but also his daughter who has a key role in this whole story.
If Resident Evil 7 made us forget that we were playing on Nintendo support, it’s the opposite for this Resident Evil Village. For good reason, the latter was released in 2021 simultaneously on the eighth and ninth generations of consoles, making it a more recent and more resource-intensive opus. In fact, RE Village is graphically passable and similar to a low quality version on a PC.
This is noticeable from the first minutes during the cinematic shots of the characters’ hair and beards, bringing out magnificent graphic artifacts linked to compression. Moreover, we detected a lot of aliasing as well as texture poppingin addition to a slight blur in portable mode. All these defects are amplified when we are docked, despite a higher resolution.
The main problem with the title comes from its fluidity and its frame drops at 30 frames per second in more open areas. Too bad for him, the game mainly takes place in this scenario, apart from the Dimitrescu castle or the Beneviento house. We feel this problem more during the first encounter with the Lycans, where Ethan must survive until the holy bell rings. However, this does not prevent us from smashing the brains of these werewolves with due respect.
Let us especially note a controlled optimization on these two titles on the part of Capcom, thanks to quality ports on a console which, remember, is above all a portable machine. This can also thank the latest upscaling technologies such as DLSS. Let us also emphasize that both games arrived natively on Nintendo Switch 2 in their gold versionincluding all of the DLC released for each software. They are priced at €39.99 for Resident Evil 7and €49.99 for Resident Evil Village. Prices can be steep given the age of the two software, so we can only advise you to wait for a price drop.