One of the most celebrated FPS franchise giants has finally returned to the House of Mario. Going back more than two decades, Nintendo hardware has always had a unique relationship with the series. Doom for the Super NES, sluggish though it may be, was a technical showpiece for Nintendo’s 16-bit machine while the Game Boy Advance conversion felt like holding the future in your hands. There are echoes of this in Bethesda’s Switch port of the Doom 2016 reboot. This is mobile technology pushed kicking and screaming to its absolute limits.
Against all odds, developer Panic Button has succeeded in bringing the entirety of the Doom experience to Nintendo’s latest machine and it mostly works, though the brutal nature of many of the compromises may well be too much for series purists. In assessing this port, a little perspective is required. The fact it exists at all is somewhat miraculous, and we can’t go in expecting a pixel-for-pixel match with the PS4 and Xbox One versions.
Let’s start with the good news. This port is content complete, and every level from the original release is present and correct. There was concern that stages would need to be divided up to fit into memory but that’s not the case at all. Encounters play out just as they did on the more powerful console platforms, and every stage is presented as a complete experience. Every enemy, weapon and feature is present and accounted for and that’s an important thing to consider. After all, Doom 3 for the original Xbox, a comparable port in terms of accomplishment, featured levels which were reduced in size and complexity to work within the constraints of the system. That’s not the case here.
Of course, while the game may be content complete, it doesn’t take long for the cutbacks, compromises and sacrifices to make themselves known. Unsurprisingly, image quality has taken a massive hit. Contrary to pre-release expectations, Doom does not run at 720p on the Switch – though the resolution may scale to those heights in less complex scenes. As with the original, the Switch version makes use of an adaptive resolution and the typical results observed during gameplay tend to hover around the 600p mark when docked.
It’s difficult to get an exact figure due to the super-aggressive temporal anti-aliasing but we’ve commonly observed results in the 1088×612 range while connected to an HDTV. In select scenes, the resolution does jump up, but typically only when nothing is happening. Beyond that, the depth of field buffer and alpha effects all appear to be rendered at quarter resolution, which can give a 360p-like presentation in some respects. This is topped off with Doom’s excellent temporal aliasing, only in this case, the resolution is so low that the TAA ultimately results in a very blurry-looking game. The presentation holds up on the Switch’s six-inch tablet-style screen – though resolution drops to around 576p here – but blow it up on your HDTV and it starts to break down into a soupy mess.