2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and its 2021 sequel, Resident Evil Village, have arrived on Switch 2. I was curious how these big, graphically impressive horror games would run on Nintendo’s hybrid machine. Well, the good news is that these are two of the best Switch 2 ports yet, and a damn fine way to play or replay either game.
Both of these Resident Evil sequels starring Ethan Winters, a man with hands that Capcom hates, received Switch “ports” back in the day. But these weren’t native ports of the survival horror sequels. Instead, they were powered by the cloud and were only available via streaming. Bleh. They were fine enough with a decent internet connection, but finally, Capcom has righted that wrong and natively ported both RE7 and Village to a Nintendo platform, and the end results are impressive, even if one port is a bit better than the other.
Let’s start with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. This soft reboot of the Resident Evil franchise went first-person, ditched most of the old characters and storyline, and was a grittier, scarier game than many of the then-recent entries in the series. It was a big risk, but it paid off. And now this game is fully playable, offline and natively, on Switch 2. Of the two horror ports, this is the better one.
Performance, image quality, and stability in Resident Evil 7 are all damn near flawless. Textures and edges are sharp while lighting is impressively moody and realistic. And all of this runs at 60FPS in both docked and portable mode. I wasn’t counting frames with a tool, but my eye only caught a handful of tiny drops that I bet most folks won’t even notice.
RE7 on Switch 2 is one of those ports that makes me just sort of forget what platform I’m playing on, and it just works perfectly. In that regard, it is an even better AAA port than Star Wars Outlaws or Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which are great, but do feel compromised compared to the PS5 versions of those same games. I guess it helps that RE7 is a nearly decade-old PS4-era linear horror game and not a massive current-gen open-world epic.
Meanwhile, Resident Evil Village turns in a nearly-as-good experience on Switch 2. Visually, Village looks even better than RE7, with more detailed textures and even better-looking lighting. But Village is also a bigger game set in larger environments, and this combo proves a bit too much at times for the Switch 2. The moment I stepped into the titular village in this Resident Evil sequel, I started noticing consistent frame drops. As werewolf monsters poured in during a large fight early on, I noticed these drops more frequently. This happened both handheld and docked.
To be clear, it never got unplayable, but it did feel far less stable than what I saw in Resident Evil 7′s port. I also feel like the game ran a bit worse when playing in third-person mode, but that’s fine with me because I would never play Village in third-person. This game was so clearly designed to be a first-person experience, and playing it any other way seems silly. Still, the performance issues in Village almost make me wonder if Capcom could offer up a toggle to turn down some of the game’s effects and lighting in order to hit 60FPS more consistently.
It’s actually quite odd to me that neither port includes any sort of performance- or quality-mode-like settings or toggles. In the case of RE7, that’s fine, as that is a near-perfect experience. But in Village, well, I’d love a 40FPS option on 120hz TVs or a performance toggle or something. Perhaps a future patch will smooth out some of these FPS drops. If not, Village is still a great port that only seems less than stellar when compared directly to RE7 on Switch 2. (Village also runs 100x better than how it played on iPhone.)
Both games are totally worth playing on Switch 2 and finally make up for those disappointing cloud versions Switch 1 owners were given. I have high hopes for future Resident Evil ports and the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem on Switch 2.
