Tag: Nintendo Switch 2

  • Editorial: Dread Delusion offers console players a weird and wonderful mini-RPG with Morrowind vibes.

    Editorial: Dread Delusion offers console players a weird and wonderful mini-RPG with Morrowind vibes.

    Dread Delusion is both a compact nostalgia-trip for time-constrained older gamers, and a means for younger gamers to get a taste of early, first-person, fully-3D RPGs like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

    Despite its obvious retro inspirations, it’s smartly designed and “fun enough” by modern standards but what is does best is evoke classic vibes and encourage exploration. Like Morrowind, Dread Delusion’s best attribute is not the gameplay but the distinctly otherworldly setting, the intriguing lore, and the striking aesthetics. It has a unique atmosphere that elevates the experience, even if the storytelling is simple and the gameplay loop straddles the line between charmingly dated and perfunctory.

    Not high praise for those who exclusively play “AAA” games and value cinematic storytelling or ultra-polished gameplay, but Dread Delusion knows what it wants to be and does so with confidence. It has a compact structure, varied but streamlined mechanics, and frugal dialogue trees that ensure it avoids making the mistake so many modern games do – wasting the player’s time and dragging out the experience to the point even the best qualities are rendered repetitive and tiresome.

    Dread Delusion doesn’t offer huge depth in the moment-to-moment gameplay, so you only spend only a minute customising your prisoner-protagonist before being introduced to the primary quest by way of an Inquisitor agent, trapped within an iron maiden-style cage, bleeding between raspy breaths. You’re then tossed out onto the floating Oneiric Isles to begin your adventure with minimal fanfare. It feels brisk, a little messy, but the opening sequence is devoid of exposition dumps or the overlong cutscenes so common these days I’ve had to change my TVs power-saving settings.

    A massive fort looms above of you. Inquisition machines clank and groan around you. Jagged islands of rock, strung together by precarious bridges, float above a ruined and charred planet below. Tree-sized mushrooms and bizarre fungal shrubs – typically in shades of vibrant green, blue, and pink – stand in stark contrast against the reddish-purple sky with its pulsing “neuron star” connected to others by glowing threads of energy. The excellent music kicks in and it all felt incredibly weird and wondrous in a way I’ve not experienced in a big budget sci-fi or fantasy games for ages.

    When you factor in the lack screen-filling tutorials and condescending secondary character to sprout advice, the opening sequence also places the onus firmly on the player to push forward, explore, and experiment if they want to know more.

    Of course, Dread Delusion offers up a lengthy quest involving the hunt for a Navy-captain-turned-sky-pirate Vela Callose that will take you across the Isles and to the ruined world below. You’ll learn about the “God Wars” and the rise of Apostolic Union, the ancient Emberian civilisation and the devastating “World Rend” event, and you’ll meet the factions contesting the Oneiric Isles – but there’s so much more depth for those who explore, talk to every NPC, and read the stylish book extracts scattered around.

    The gameplay that ties everything together is fun, familiar, and streamlined – like a “best of” rewatch your favourite series where you have to foresight to skip the inessential episodes. You have light and heavy attacks paired with block and parries, all governed by stamina and strength. Offensive and defensive cypher spells require mana and high lore. You can charm NPCs in dialogue, pick locks and disarm traps, or manipulate magical objects to open alternate paths and secrets. There’s even a stealth system with bonus damage for thief-types that enjoy spending half their playtime crouching with a bow.

    Armour, clothing, and weapon variants are limited but offer impactful upgrades that consume increasingly rare materials. Rings and accessories are unique and buff specific attributes or skills. Alchemy allows you to brew useful and situational potions. You can purchase and upgrade housing in each island kingdom, unlocking temporary skill boosts, crafting stations, and gardens with alchemical ingredients. You eventually unlock an airship of your own to access new areas.

    Dread Delusion offers a little bit of every RPG staple for you to dabble in as you explore, just never with enough depth to derail your momentum and the narrative pacing.

    Despite these streamlined mechanics, Dread Delusion still prioritises role-playing and provides quest solutions that can shift your standing with different factions and affect the outcome of regions. Your dialogue choices have the most impact, but you can also avoid harming faction relations by simply sneaking through an area or unlocking alternate paths to bypass combat. The levelling system – in which you “embrace delusions” to increase attributes – consumes “glimmers of delusions” that are awarded on quest completion or found in secret areas. There’s rarely a good reason to choose a violent outcome if you don’t want to.

    There’s a fair argument that the minute-to-minute gameplay feels a little underdeveloped, but the impact on the experience is limited by Dread Delusion’s relative brevity for an RPG – maybe 20 or so hours to explore everywhere and do everything on your first playthrough. The focus remains on constant forward momentum and exploration while you resolve quests the way you want to. Dread Delusion never feels like it’s wasting your time getting bogged down by grindy gameplay systems or cinematic aspirations that impact the pacing.

    Going back to the Morrowind comparison, the Oneiric Isles are simply a joy to explore as every new region means new sights to see, new biomes and creatures, new people and quests, and more lore to discover. For console players, it offers a rare mini-RPG with incredible vibes and, as a bonus, runs well on every platform including the Nintendo Switch 2.

    Dread Delusion was played on a Nintendo Switch 2 using a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PS5.

  • Editorial: Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on Nintendo Switch 2 crams a massive CPRG onto tiny hardware to varying degrees of success.

    Editorial: Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on Nintendo Switch 2 crams a massive CPRG onto tiny hardware to varying degrees of success.

    As a fan of classic CRPGs who grew up playing Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights, I can’t help but love Owlcat’s isometric CRPGs. Just how much I love them, however, depends on the amount of free time I have. Their prior CRPGs based in the Pathfinder universe – Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous – have their flaws, but their epic scope and ambition made them easy to forgive once I was hooked. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader continues that time-devouring trend, albeit this time within a distinctly gothic, grimdark, sci-fi universe.

    For that reason, the prospect of a Nintendo Switch 2 version, which I could pick up and put down whenever I had the time, was incredibly tempting – despite having sunk 60 hours exploring the Koronus Expanse in the Xbox Series port already. Like all good CRPGs, there is scope for replayability by rolling a different character class, experiencing the impact of tackling missions in a different order, adventuring with a different group of companions, making different major decisions at the end of each act, and role-playing a more ruthless or evil character (not that I ever do).

    Having now sunk another two-dozen hours into Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on the Nintendo Switch 2, the results are predictably hit-and-miss given the size of this game and some hardware limitations. Portability always requires sacrifice – especially when dealing with a small screen in a menu- and text-heavy game. On the upside, the outcome is mostly positive if affordable and optimised portable play is your goal. If, however, you intend to make use of the Switch 2’s hybrid nature and occasionally play it on a 4K TV, the results are less impressive.

    Starting with the good, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on the Nintendo Switch 2 is feature-complete with no gameplay compromises (and it’s cheap). It is every bit as massive and engaging as the PC version or the other current-gen console ports (and the DLC expansions are arriving soon). The platform has no shortage of lengthy Nintendo first-party adventures and third-party JRPGs, but this is a rare western-styled CRPG for fans of the genre (the other options being literal classics, like Beamdog’s and Aspyr’s remastered D&D IP: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights). Isometric exploration, tactical turn-based based battles, dialogue choices with abundant skills checks, more exposition than anyone needs, and major choices that alter the later acts – it’s all accounted for.

    It took a post-launch patch or two, but Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on the Nintendo Switch 2 runs as well, if not better than the PC version on the Steam Deck and original ROG Ally (my only other points of handheld comparison). On the handheld screen, enabling TAA produces a slightly softer but less noisy image, while the framerate sticks to the 30fps target outside of a few rapidly panning cutscenes with alpha effects. Coupled with a UI and controller scheme developed and refined for the current-gen consoles, it feels more than responsive enough for general exploration and the turn-based combat. Even the load times are respectable, albeit a little longer than on the other consoles.

    The are, however, three issues of note – one subjective and two with gameplay implications. When docking the Nintendo Switch 2 and connecting to a 4K TV, you are getting a better experience than the Steam Deck or ROG Ally is capable of. However, the image is notably blurrier than when playing on even the budget Xbox Series S (especially when dynamic resolution scaling kicks in), and it appears to lack some post-processing effects that leave environments looking too bright and lacking depth. Of course, visual quality is subjective and the ability to easily suspend, resume, or continue your game away from the TV is a major perk.

    More problematic are the awkwardly overlapping menus, tooltip boxes, and tiny text when playing in handheld mode. Navigating exposition-heavy dialogue menus, cycling between environmental text descriptions, and comparing items in the inventory is a core part of any CRPG and incredibly frustrating on a small display. One potential solution is using a Joy-Con 2 as a mouse, but the implementation is an all or nothing approach. The gamepad UI is replaced by icons around the screen and almost every aspect of the game is controlled by the mouse, slowing down the pace by making actions like simple camera control frustrating.

    Ultimately, you’ll need to consider how plan to play Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on the Nintendo Switch 2. If you play mostly in portable mode, it is an impressive version that looks and performs better than all but the most high-powered handheld PCs. The text size and limited screen space is an issue, but the rest of the port is solid and it looks good on a small screen. If, on the other hand, you alternate between portable and docked play (or if your Nintendo Switch 2 lives under the TV most of the time), Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader looks rough in comparison to other current-gen console ports, and the mouse controls need more refining. All that said, if the Nintendo Switch 2 is your only console, CRPG fans should jump on the opportunity regardless.

    Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PS5.