It was a long time in the making and it only took eight months for the Nintendo Switch version to arrive after Yooka-Laylee launched for PC, PS4 and Xbox One back in the spring, but as the old saying goes “better late than never”.
Team17 and Platonic Games announced that you can get Yooka-Laylee right now as a digital title for Nintendo’s hybrid console. A launch trailer for the game was rolled out, featuring the 3D platformer, which you can check out below.
It covers all the basic platforming, adventuring, and optimizations made specifically for the Switch, namely being able to pick up and play the game at any point via the portable mode.
Additionally, the Switch version allows players to engage in the multiplayer mode using a single set of Joy-Cons.
If you were curious about how well Yooka-Laylee performs on the Switch versus the PS4 and Xbox One version, डिजिटल फाउंड्री did a performance breakdown, which you can check out below.
The biggest differences is that the Switch version has lower shadow map resolution, ambient occlusion has been removed, along with reflections, lower texture resolution, the removal of specular highlighting on water, and a lack of depth of field.
Playtonic also reduced some of the geometry being rendered per frame, along with lowering the resolution so that the game runs at 900p in TV mode and 600p in the portable mode.
So essentially, Playtonic had to spend the eight months down-scaling some of the assets to get the game to work right on the Switch.
According to Digital Foundry the game’s frame-rate is stable at 30fps. No 60fps gaming on the Switch.
Nevertheless, they point out that the game still does 30fps at 1080p on the PS4, so you’ll get slightly lower resolution and a stable frame-rate with some minor graphical downgrades to compensate for the game’s portable mode.
if you’re still interested in Yooka-Laylee you can pick up a copy from the Nintendo eShop, assuming you don’t mind that Team17 had Playtonic censor the game after complaints about JonTron made its way across NeoGaf.
